Crackpots?

The General Teaching Council, which snatches a chunk of our wages once a year to produce a rubbish magazine and tell us how we should be leading our lives, is mostly in the news for getting teachers kicked out of the profession for getting drunk on a Saturday night or nicking pens from the stationery cupboard.

But apparently, while a few pints (of wine) at the weekend is a no-no, hard drugs are perfectly fine...

Teacher in nightclub crack arrest goes unpunished by GTC

A science teacher arrested for possessing crack cocaine has escaped without punishment from England’s General Teaching Council.
Michael Swann, who teaches at Maltby Community School in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, was found guilty of unacceptable professional conduct. But he avoided any further disciplinary action after he was praised by his headteacher for being a role model for pupils.
The judgment follows complaints from some teachers that the GTC - which is preparing to unveil a new code of conduct - has become too intrusive when dealing with teachers’ private lives. The number of tribunals involving out-of-school offences has soared in recent years.

Retrospective

Yesterday I was thinking back to when I first started writing as "Ranting Teacher". It started me thinking about some of the real characters I've taught over the years, and the clever - or downright bizarre - things that children have come out with. Now don't worry, I'm not about to do a "children say the funniest things" post, because most of the time they are situation comedies - you have to have been there at the time for it to retain a modicum of humour.

But it did remind me of something that happens to me every now and again. This year, being in a new school with rivers of mostly new faces coursing through the corridors, a weird sensation has occurred a few times. For a moment, I think I spot a face I recognise: a pleasant girl from my form group, or the witty boy from my Year 10 class, or a girl who made me a present after a school trip. But then the child turns around and I realise it's not them at all, and I also realise that it couldn't possibly be that pupil because they were in my old school not my new one. And I suddenly realise how much I miss certain pupils and other things of my last school.

Because the reason new schools can be so tough and dis-heartening is that you haven't yet built up sufficient relationships with the children that you teach. They still try to find your weaknesses and suss you out. But already some kinds of attachments are being formed. One of my classes, who drive me round the bend with their inability to concentrate and their random interruptions, are already asking me if I will be teaching them next year. Now I'm not that naive that I see this as flattery; instead I see it as a case of "better the devil you know", but what it has shown me is that they are starting to see me as a piece of the furniture, which is a positive thing unless they start etching in their initials and sticking chewed gum on me somewhere.

Six years of moaning online!

It's Easter Sunday. It's the 12th of April. And it's exactly six years since I posted my first whinge about teaching.

Back then, blogging was a word I was yet to hear, but I did have my own website which I painstakingly updated with shoddy html at irregular intervals. The website is still out there somewhere, although currently lurking and inaccessible while it has a spring clean. Since then, teacher blogs have sprung up all over the place - lots of them for the power of good: sharing useful ideas and analysing current education issues. This one, however, has been mostly about the moaning!

The second edition of my book Everything you need to know to survive teaching was published last month, which is a little more positive than this website, in that I do have a good old whinge about stuff, but there are also tips on how to try to minimise the annoyances and traumas of the job. In fact, I was having a flick through it myself the other day to remind myself of some strategies that get filed away somewhere in my mind, before metaphorical boxes of other stuff get dumped on top of them, obscuring them temporarily. It's like going on these courses which teach your grandmother to suck eggs, and realising that in the business of everyday survival you'd forgotten you even had a grandmother. Or what an egg looked like. Or something.

So there you are. Happy blogging birthday to me! When I started writing this, the Year 13s at my last school were in Year 7. The Year 11s have graduated from university, and/or had babies (in fact, one of them brought in her baby to show me a few months after her GCSEs), and/or have moved on and forgotten all about school. I have had a few interviews, got a new teaching job, and am still desperately looking round for something else to do instead. But until then, I'll keep ranting - it's so much cheaper than therapy.

Just think of the holidays

"Just think of the holidays," is a phrase I hear far too frequently when I'm sighing over my job. But now it is the Easter holiday period, and I find myself thinking of school - hard to avoid when I have boxes of books needing marking in most rooms of the house. This evening I have decided to be a rebel. Even though it's incredibly late (for me) on a Sunday night (Monday morning), I am forcing myself to stay up late, because it's what I always want to do during term time. Except all these great TV programmes that seem to be on late at night are in hiding and I've had to resort to rolling news reports to keep me going. Ah well, bed time then.

Gah.

Boozers 2

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about schoolkids drinking alcohol. This is just to draw your attention to an article published on the BBC's website yesterday: UK youths among worst for drink.

Interview X-Factor

Less than a year after my last job interview, I found myself dusting off my interview suit, breathing a sigh of relief that it still fitted, and tipping all the contents out of my interview briefcase to see if I could find my crib notes on such questions as "why do you want this job?" and "what are your strengths, weaknesses, and favourite flavour of jelly beans?".

Yes, I had an interview. And no, before you ask, I didn't get the job. The vagueness of the job description became clearer within the first half an hour of me arriving at the school: my three hours of application form filling-in, three hours of observed lesson preparation, and uncounted hours of online research were going to do me no good because I was up against an Internal Candidate.

Now I'm not naive enough to believe that by default an internal candidate will get the job. I've witnessed my previous colleagues go for promotions within our school and known full well that the governors and headteacher are looking for anybody slightly more competent than them. But when the internal candidate has been acting up in the role for over 12 months already, you know you might as well reverse the car straight back out of the parking space and go and watch daytime television instead of putting yourself through a day of stress and humiliation.

But that's not what I did. Because in some ways I have a belief in myself that I could actually do the job well. I don't know if it would be better than the competition - and this answers one of the questions posed to me by the sixth form representatives in the informal interview in the morning...

Sixth form reps: "What makes you think you can do this job better than the other candidates?"
Me: "Because they look a bit thick and the older bloke has definitely got a nervous twitch."
No, not really.
Me: "I think that's impossible to say because I don't know the other candidates."

And so I participated in the usual pattern of the interview day: I traipsed around the school with a couple of hand-picked confident middle class pupils, taking in the hidden pockets of rubbish and graffiti, and sat sipping coffee with the other candidates, and went through the tiresome "informal" stuff which is anything but. The internal candidate was a nervous wreck and was being pumped for information by an overly ambitious young whipper-snapper of a candidate, and I flicked through my collection of crib cards on latest initiatives and findings.

As this was a management position of small standing, I expected the morning to include some kind of "in-tray" exercise or a quick analysis of statistics, but instead it was the usual routine of interrogation by the headteacher, a deputy, and a number of sixth formers with naive questions. As our morning schedule drew to a close, my stomach began to grumble with hunger, and I wondered what kind of food the canteen served up.

But before lunchtime, in breezed the headteacher with the deputy and head of department, and began to address us all. "Strong candidates, blah blah, exciting and innovative lessons, blah blah..." So we were about to be weeded out before lunchtime. No chance to meet the governors, shake a few hands whilst maintaining eye contact, nor even make electioneering promises about lunchtime clubs and new initiatives. But to make it worse, this headteacher obviously had an urge not to be running a school but instead to be Simon Cowell, gloating with power and about to eliminate one or more of us. And it wasn't my imagination, I'm sure, that the headteacher had shot a look straight at the internal candidate but avoided any eye contact with me. So I felt prepared enough after the "strong candidates" bit to realise I was being sent home without any lunch or any chance to set out my stall in the formal interview.

However nothing quite prepares you for the awkwardness for everyone involved when you are told, in front of everyone else, that you are not worthy. Why it has to be done "X-Factor" style I really don't know. Far better, surely, to be told individually rather than in front of everyone else. It's like a slap across the face or being given a detention slip. I slowly and deliberately shuffled my papers into my briefcase, wondering if the other candidates could bear to look at me. I took my time. I decided that if I was to be humiliated in front of everyone then I might as well prolong the awkward silence for everyone else too. After a short eternity I rose from my chair, gave the other candidates a curt nod, and left the room, resisting any urges to be petulant and slam the door. No lunch! The greatest humiliation of it all! And it was a thirty minute drive back to my house.

Still, I had a good afternoon of lounging around instead of the alternative: waiting anxiously for a formal interview, then hanging around to be told the results. And I feel lucky, in a way, firstly to have seen a school whose website promises so much and whose derelict buildings told a different tale, and secondly, to have discovered so soon the sadistic tendencies of the headteacher.

Argh grrrr - a right rant!

Sometimes it really is the day to end all days, the day when it would be so easy just to walk right out of the classroom, then walk out of the school, and keep on walking, preferably with a middle finger extended in the general direction of all the rubbish left behind.

Year 11 are being particularly horrific at the moment. Not only do I teach a class of rude, disruptive, ungrateful and "not bovvered" brats, but I also have the misfortune of having most of them in my registration group too. Most mornings start with a torrent of swearing, abusive language to each other and to the world in general, ignored instructions to remove coats and scarves, followed by fifteen minutes of me trying to ignore conversations I really don't want to hear.

This morning was no exception. Year 11 as a whole have sensed that the end of compulsory schooling is nigh. The recent warm weather only spurred on the sense of freedom. Whilst most teachers start to panic on their behalf, running around after missing coursework and photocopying study sheets, the majority of Year 11 are planning parties and not giving a shit because in their opinions they will soon be untouchable and sooooo out of there. My Year 11 teaching group have adopted a pack mentality of utter ignorance and rudeness. I'm counting down our final lessons with a mixture of relief and anxiety. Some of the class are desperate for further knowledge and help, but they are overwhelmed by the noisy and disrespectful majority. The boys are locking horns like raging rhinos, pushing and fighting each other before, after, and during lessons. The girls are preoccupied with scowling and bitching and saying "you know what, though, yeah" a lot. They feel compelled to argue that black is, in fact, sky blue pink, and that I'm an out of touch eejit for not knowing that.

As we sorted out coursework, most of which was done in Year 10 with their last teacher, I've lost count of the number of times I've been told she was a "crap" teacher when I know that by reputation she was fearsome and innovative and got good results. What a legacy to retire with: your final students, in their ignorance, only remembering you as "crap" because they couldn't be bothered to turn in coursework by the right deadlines.

So after a morning of stroppy form group and antagonistic GCSE group, I thought I was going to burst a blood vessel. What choices are there? Rise to the bait of being wound up? No. Engage in a discussion and hear out their views? Impossible: it's a one way street of closed minds and filthy mouths. Try to ignore it all and keep calm? That's the only option I've seen as viable, but it's so hard. But it's also rather defeatist. And it leads to zero job satisfaction.

Last week I tired to engage the same group in some fancy lesson to revise quite a dry topic if you're 16 years old and thinking of blow jobs not revision. It ended up with paper aeroplane revision sheets and stolen scissors. And I thought to myself, why waste my time preparing stuff like that when it ends up with such total disrespect?

One morning a huddle of my tutor group were loudly discussing how rude they had been to another teacher the day before. It became a competition of bravado: each trying to out-do the others with what they had told a teacher to do or how they had acted. The rest of the class had stopped their conversations to listen, and so I couldn't close my ears to it any more. I asked them if they thought that people became teachers because they wanted constant abuse, or if it's because they wanted to help educate people. Their replies were quite disturbing, and can be summarised as such:

A) most teachers are on power trips, and they only become teachers because they like feeling powerful in front of teenagers;
B) if you don't like getting verbal abuse all day long, then why do you become a teacher? If you don't want abuse, you should go and work in a primary school.

And that's it. My right to reply or attempts to introduce some logic into the room were shouted down by snarling mouths and noses wrinkled with disgust. And since then, they seem to be stuck in a rut of repetitive discussion about which teachers they hate more than others, and who's going to get what before they leave in May. One foul-mouthed boy, who each morning is either nursing a hangover or verbally abusing everyone that walks through the door, told me that I'm the only teacher he doesn't have a grudge against. At which point one of the mouthiest girls burted out: "Oh I have a grudge..." but luckily for me or her the bell started to drown out what I've done to piss her off. And this is the girl for whom, just two weeks ago, I wrote a glowing reference for FE college, where she can train to care for people's babies, and possibly deafen them with her shrieking and foul mouth.

So I'm going to make myself a little chart and start to tick off the days before Year 11, in their own words, "do one" and "bugger off". And how they will cope in the big bad world with attitudes like that... Well, I'd like to be a fly on the wall - and possibly a fly on their dinner, serving up some of the crap they've given me over the past few months.