Back to the Old School 2

The Ranting Teacher Five Year Retrospective

I’ve been reminiscing over my past five years of teaching on this, the occasion of Ranting Teacher’s fifth birthday. I wasn’t a new-born teacher back then, but at any stage in a career, a lot can change in five years – so reckoned Stalin eighty years ago. Mind you, Stalin would have expected all this hard graft in exchange for a bottle of vodka or something, so it kind of puts my previous discussion of pay into perspective.

The next entry I wrote on my original website was called The Importance of Being Sporty. I was fed up at the glorification of sporting achievements, which seemed to take precedence over any other pupil achievements. Also, I didn’t like having to appear like I cared about the under-14s quoits-tossing team’s success in the tossers’ championships. Now, have my attitudes changed over the past five years? Have I mellowed out? Um, no. Instead I have mastered the thousand-yard stare: handy not only in assembly when sports results are announced, but in many other school situations too – the staff meeting, the Inset course, the non-compliance of a class when asked to stop talking… In addition, I think with the rise of the internet, blogging, instant messaging, texting and so on, comes the rise of the techno-geek. Now geeks’ voices are being heard loud and strong across the globe, and there seems to be less shame in being in the spelling bee instead of the B-team of belly-floppers.

And this time five years ago I was cursing lying children who think we are stupid enough to believe the rubbish that comes out of their mouths. Well that still happens. My reactions these days veer between resignation (not literally - that would be drastic - but the internal eye-roll) and internalised anger (in the form of a really bloody rude swearing session inside my own head).