stress

I'm stressed.

How do I know I'm stressed? Let me count the ways:

1. I'm wearing mis-matched two piece suit. Now, not everyone matches their suits I know. Some go for a different colour jacket/trouser combo - but both parts of my suit are designed solely to be worn with their natural partner. Trust me. Charcoal jacket + Navy trousers = social ostracisation. I may have got dressed in the dark this morning but there is no excuse for this kind of faux-pas.

2. I walked into Cafe Nero and forgot what I wanted to order. I've ordered the same thing for going on three years and I forget what it is today. I just stood there wondering why I was in a coffee shop.

3. When I do order the barrista asks if I want it in a paper or china cup. This leads to a flurry of "paper.. china.. paper.. to go.. for here.. paper.. no.. china" until she eventually gave up listening to me and put it in a china cup regardless.

4. I have just mixed my tenses - switching from past to present to past. This is something for which I would berate a student and yet I here I am making basic grammatical error after grammatical error.

5. My school is holding a de-stress workshop soon and I am actually considering attending.

Why am I stressed? As is often the case it is a combination of factors. This is always the busiest time of the year for me. I don't know about the rest of the world - but teachers in Northern Ireland find themselves stretched in five different directions this time of year. On top of that there school inspectors assessing the school at the moment. I won't say much about my opinions of ETI inspectors; there isn't time and I'm not in the right frame of mind to be objective - suffice to say that I recognise it has to be done; I just don't like the way they do it.

I think I could safely say that teaching today is not what most people think it to be. It is certainly not what I thought it to be when I started out (so idealistically) all those years ago. It saddens me but I can't help thinking that society more and more adjusts itself to take account of the lowest common denominator often at the expense of everyone else. Take the analogy of car tax. Because there are people out there who are willing to commit fraud the rest of us end up paying higher premiums. In teaching because there are teachers out there who don't care about the pupils they work with the rest of us have to jump through hoop after hoop to make sure we are doing our best for our pupils. A worthy goal - but the irony is that often we are so busy working towards producing the paperwork, results and figures to prove we are doing our very best, that we don't have time to really get to know the people we are meant to be doing our best for.

So much of my job has become tracking and assessing and filling in spreadsheets and carrying out follow up checks and ... ... aghhh!

The thing is I know assessment is important. I know that we need to be aware of the progress achieved by what we do to inform the way we do things. I know that our teaching should take account of the individual pupils' needs and that assesment should there to drive the learning, not the other way around... just sometimes I wonder...

I realise all of this is a truism but right now it is affecting my state of mind. I'm doing my very best to avoid it adversely affecting the way I teach - perhaps at the expense of the rest of my sanity. If that's the case wearing the wrong jacket with my trousers in a coffee shop - drinking... actually I'm not sure what it is I actually ordered - is a scarifice worth making.

I am the best teacher you never had

Don't take my word for it - I have a plethora of testimonials from pupils I never taught as evidence. Indeed it's an astonishing fact that pupils I haven't taught are statistically much more likely to rate my teaching ability than those I actually taught.

Recently I was asked about privately tutoring a couple of pupils from a previous school. I mentioned it in passing to the teacher I'd been covering back then. "Oh yes." she replied, "They thought you were a great teacher. Apparently they were hoping you'd take over their class when you were finished covering for me."
I didn't know these kids. I'd never taught them - and yet somehow they see me as their path to GCSE success. So much so that they are prepared to ask their parents to pay me for it. None of the pupils I taught came looking for private tutoring - actually, that's not true. One did; but she fell out with me over an exam mark.

I bumped into another pupil at the gym. I say bumped into, but it was really more a case of him bounding over with a hand thrust out, shouting, "Sir!" I didn't recognize him - I'd never taught him. He told me how much the school (he was speaking for them all?) missed me; and how, in the run-up to his exams, would I consider helping him out with a bit of private tuition. How did he get such a positive impression of someone who he'd never seen teach. At least if he had it would have been of me covering a single lesson in science of something weird. I thought maybe he was asking me because I was the only available English teacher he knew of - but his mother told me my style of teaching had impressed him. It must be good to affect someone in a classroom at the far end of the school. It didn't seem to affect the ones in my actual classroom as much.

For the record none of this is as much of a slight against my teaching as it sounds - we all know I'm an awesome teacher. It's simply that my awesomeness fades a little with familiarity - that's natural. It's easy to be that teacher when you're popping in and out of their educational lives.
One quip about how they're not to laugh when I bang my head on the hanging board light - because it will happen; or that I got my accent from extended exposure to Due South reruns on daytime TV, and they're putty in my hands; they want to like me.

It's when you find yourself responsible for ruining their weekends by making them do coursework, or ruining their lives by giving them a less than impressive mark on their less than impressive exam paper; that's when the gold loses a little of its glister. And heaven forbid, if ever you give them anything but glowing praise at a parents' consultation - you will be dead to them. Dead.

So I'll take whatever adulation I can get - and keep on not teaching most of the world so that almost everyone will love me.

Now excuse me while I "accidentally" bump my head on the board light.

spinning pins

Pupils are very perceptive - nothing get past past them. Whichever school I go to my pupils very quickly suss out my various quirks.

1) I hate having the top button of my shirt done - it’s not a fashion thing; I just don’t like the constrictive sensation of something round my neck. The pupils have to have theirs buttoned as part of their uniform so I do make the effort to set an example - but if it’s still in place come 11:15 I’ve done well. I’ve heard of pupils actually taking sweepstakes on when I reach for that button.

2) I have to bend down to get through doors. For some reason this causes them great mirth. Especially in the corridors where there is a fire door every 15 yards or so. On particularly long stretches they get to see me bend four or five times - and it never fails to amuse them.

3) I’m a fiddler. I don’t mean I play violin. I hate having nothing to do with my hands. Even when I’m teaching I’ll invariably reach for something to move around in my fingers. One class decided they wanted to see how far this would go and began placing different objects on my desk each morning. They started off small with pens and rulers, then they went a bit stranger with lipstick tubes, and then it got gradually bigger. I was standing at the front of a classroom unravelling a wire coat hanger before I finally caught on.

4) This may be related to number three - but I am the teacher who spins drawing pins (thumb tacks) on their point. Now, when I’m bored, if there’s a pin or two around, I’ll wind it up and let it go. The younger kids appear fascinated by this - especially when I get one spinning so well that it stands upright and appears to be almost motionless, balancing magically on its tip. I claim it’s educational - all about centrifugal forces etc etc. They always want to know how to do it. At one school I had about twelve pupils spending their breaktime in the playground seeing who could spin a pin the longest (my record is six minutes)

When I say they all appear fascinated that may be a little misleading. A lot of them appear fascinated - the rest all, probably accurately, see it as a sign of a misspent youth.

I sentence you to five years hard reading

There is something a bit odd about setting reading as a punishment.

I was covering a class today when another teacher poked her head round the door and asked if she could dump a disruptive pupil on me. The class I had was particularly small and deeply engrossed in what they were doing so I said it would be ok.
She brought him in, set him at a desk, gave him a novel and a sheet of questions and said “Read that chapter and answer those!”

I don’t get it - in much the same way I don’t get it anytime a teacher sets reading a story or writing something as a punishment for bad behavior.
Surely, as people trying to encourage enjoyment through reading and writing, we are being a little self defeating if we then use reading and writing as a punishment.

I love both - always have done. Perhaps that’s why I allowed myself to get detention so often when I was a school kid. But I know not everyone does. I know there are people for whom R&W is a necessity rather than a luxury. Personally I think it’s hard enough encouraging reading for enjoyment without throwing in reading for pain at the same time.

is this selfish?

One of the advantages of being alone is that you get to live off pity. In the past three weeks alone I have had casseroles, stews and home baking left at my door regularly and have been invited over for meals seven times by seven different families. See? Pity can be good.

Yesterday I was invited by a couple from Church for Sunday Lunch. They’re a lovely family – they have two young kids of about eight and ten (although don’t quote me as this is a complete guess and I’m really not good at guessing children’s ages)

Gorgeous food, interesting conversation, quirkily entertaining kids – it was a pleasant afternoon in every way – but the highlight was when we retired to the sitting room and turned on the Wii. Now I have never played a Wii before – I haven’t played any games console since I left uni. I am scared of them. I believe they kill creativity and conversation. But this was good. So good.

If anything it improved the conversation; and, although everyone suddenly became frighteningly competitive, I soon found I didn’t mind being beaten by an eight year old at Mario Kart.

But, competitive as the kids were, what struck me most about that afternoon was the effect it had on the parents. Surely not since Scalectrix was popular has there been such a ‘present for the kids’ that parents have bought thinking solely of themselves.
In the old, old days fathers would buy train sets for their sons, spend hours constructing it “together” and secretly long for their kids’ bedtime so they could sneak back to the little trains and make “choo choo” noises in the safety of solitude. Scalectrix was similar, but it involved that other mid life crisis obsession – speed. And now we have the Wii.

As I took on the father in a round of golf, having just beaten him in the shooting gallery, I saw a look of determination that told me that this was his game and he had no intention of losing.


I have no children for whom to buy myself presents, but sometimes I wonder about my motivation when setting projects or tasks for the kids at school. A phrase I tend to use too often is, “I would never set you anything I wouldn’t be prepared to do myself – so here’s an example I came up with to help you.” Let’s face it – I didn’t write that gangster story as an example of writing from another culture; I didn’t write it to provide a guide to how to write creatively for a specific audience; It had nothing to do with me trying to encourage them to structure their work imaginatively – I wrote it cause I like gangsters.

Maybe I am setting work for myself rather than my pupils. Maybe my inspiration does come from within rather than without at times. But, the way I see it, while it captures the pupils’ imagination and leads to creative and original work… then it’s all good.

Having said that there is just a chance that my next homework for my year 9s may involve them writing about a Newcastle United player eating Lemon Meringue Pie while watching old movies and getting beaten at Mario Kart.