Loving the chalk

Yesterday was the last day of our Year 11 students' obligatory secondary education. They were absolutely ballistic. It was a great reminder of what people like myself are there for.

Thursday was our last lesson together, and they were almost beyond control. We had a few last things to cover on the syllabus and amazingly we got through most of them, which was a lot more than I thought we'd get done. Then they chose a spokesperson to tell me what they make of me as a teacher, and then asked me to sign yearbooks, have pictures taken with me... This is the class I've been battling with for the last 6 months, having to raise hell for the first 15 to 20 minutes, and threatening detentions etc. to get them to do anything. It always comes as something of a surprise to find that students who are the toughest to teach are often the most attached.

The strange thing is, all the conflict going on is what seems to make all this work. The kids in most of my classes don't really have people around who have insisted they calm down and concentrate on anything. Their lives are fraught with conflicts, urgent orders to help out around the house, around the shop, pick up their little brothers, or fight with the rest of their siblings to earn some attention or any other sort of reward. So anyone who can get them to sit down, shut the hell up, and concentrate on a piece of writing is actually doing a hell of a lot for them. Doesn't feel like it when you're the idiot at the front of the room dealing with 30 kids trying to pull every trick in the book to wind you up, but it has its value somewhere.

My last few posts have sounded a bit disillusioned with teaching, as a couple of my friends remarked. Of course I love this job; I got out of it for a time and realised nothing else was quite so satisfying. So it's worth remembering why I'm in this.

Beyond the Hegelian struggle that was year 11, finally behind me now, the real solace of my week's work is creative writing lessons with the younger kids, particularly year 7s. One of my classes is a lower set with mostly non-native speakers, who are amazed by the fact that I can type really fast and spell correctly each time. They do exercises in their workbooks, and correct them using mini-whiteboards on which they hold up their answers. When I use the interactive whiteboard (a big screen where I can project documents) to type up our corrections, they look around in amazement that all my fingers are moving at once, and I can put all the commas in the right places without looking at the screen.

My year 8 class - a top set - a bit sneakier than year 7s, after a year of having streams of English teachers going past, so they're not so easily impressed. They clearly read a lot, though, and two of them are always keen to perform their writing in front of the class. Last week was an extract from Touching the Void which is a biographical account of two mountaineers who survive an incredible mountain accident over three days. They had to write a chair-gripping interview with one of the survivors, and our lesson ended with the performance of one of their scripts, which was like a cross between a circus clown act and a Brazilian soap opera.

When things get tough at school, the moment you think it's the most frustrating, pointless system of government hackery, and you'd prefer a 9 to 5 in KFC than sticking around the stinking staffroom for another second, a partially-sighted 11 year old with a backpack bigger than he is stares up at you from the front of a classroom and tells you it was the best poetry lesson he's ever had, and can he take it home to show his Mum. Now who could turn away from that?

Teaching

I've started to wonder what teaching was like before there was any such thing as school. Is it possible that we've somehow killed teaching with school, just like hospitals generate illness or a Ministry of Defense can generate war?

I'm reading through some openings to Gothic novels which I set as a creative writing task for my year ten students, and most of them have gone to town on it. Tried to incorporate the Gothic setting and characters into an original script, making use of twists or red herrings to lead the reader on... Basically they've ticked all the boxes, and in some cases, tried to do something new or interesting. But Claire, one of my brightest students, wrote a tale called: "Bruce the Emo Shark Who Cuts Himself" in which she derides this shark for being 'emo', or as the kids understand it, a depressed, self-indulgent Goth who takes himself too seriously.

I'm sure this is a crucial part of her path to fulfilment; rebelling against her English teacher by deriding the writing task and seeing if he'll pick up on it. In the Freudian sense, it's all very healthy, normal and adolescent. But a part of me muses as to what Claire is doing taking up a seat in a classroom. Wouldn't she be better suited to doing something else? She's coasting her way to a mediocre GCSE, for whom exactly? Certainly not for her own benefit.

Before there were huge buildings called schools which housed dozens of classrooms, interactive whiteboards, book cupboards, libraries, canteens, and absolutely mind-numbing amounts of paper (where does it all go???), people still got an education. They paid for it, or offered their labour in exchange for training. They picked stuff up, trained at things to be considered worthy of a trade, or made damn sure they were found in the right place at the right time by people who needed them.

I'm sure it was all quite undemocratic and class-biased. Just like school still is today, mind you; nobody is fooled by the comprehensive school's used of streaming by 'ability'; it's basically a social segregation. But ok, it could be a little more meritocratic than depending on the size of your father's address book for your career prospects. But nonetheless, I wonder if education systems kill education.

At the moment my Year 11 class is one week from their study leave. Only for them, that means a week from holidays. They basically refuse to work now, and I have to kick out 4 or 5 per lesson to have any peace and quiet from them. They've given up, imagining that somebody will rescue them out of this. And they're probably right.

The paradigm in the UK is that education is the problem of the educators. Teachers are responsible and accountable for how much students achieve and learn, and parents are only consulted for a 5 minute interview once a year, where in fact they are told what they should or shouldn't be doing to support the school. So it's not their problem.

Plus, when a kid does mess around and give the finger to the whole system, they're basically taken off to a room, a programme or a college which will give them another option for 'success', which basically amounts to somebody else telling them something less difficult they're being offered in exchange for cooperation. At no point does anybody really say: "Either you perk up or you're out", and actually mean it.

I certainly don't think education should be a privilege of the well-behaved and the most able. But I do think somebody should call Claire on her talent at scraping through year after year of school without learning anything, by telling her to perk up or face the consequences. It means treating kids like adults. Do we have the guts?

Really?

Yesterday was a day of celebration in the tiny town of Whitton which I currently inhabit. The neighbourhood is sandwiched between Twickenham - a well-to-do riverside haven for Land-Rover driving, middle-class bankers - and Hounslow - a pocket of working-class Asian, Polish and Ethiopean families, bunched under the Heathrow airport flight path to keep their house prices nice and cheap. So Whitton is a bit of both. It has the white suburban feel to it, but it's also pretty rough round the edges. Mullets and football scarves in just about every pub, a big St. George's day parade etc... you get the picture.

So Cancer Research was holding a three-legged-race, presumably in honour of May Day in some vague form, but it was bascially an excuse for people to get dressed in ridiculous costumes and get shamelessly drunk in the daytime, during a long weekend. I was dragged out by my Irish housemate, who rightly told me I wasn't getting involved in any of the local colours and I needed to experience this thing. So down the pub I went, and chewed the fat with Tim, while watching the residents spilling themselves out of their hula-dancer skirts and tight-fitting leather outfits, ironically quoting Little Britain or Shameless, or other similar TV shows.

By the time we got home to eat dinner, my housemate was completely worse for wear, and ended up eating my starter as well as his, spilling his plate on the grass (I served the food in the garden out of well-timed precaution) and pouring wine all over the kitchen floor. He went to bed punchdrunk, and there was no way I was either waking him out of it, or going back to the alien world of the local pub without him. It would literally have been like an episode of Star Trek, with Captain Spock lost among a tribe of Clingon-hostile locals, but without the option of being beamed up by a Scotsman. So I kicked around at home reading, watching TV and realising I'm as much of a foreigner here than I ever was in Stuttgart, if not more.

I enjoy going out for a pint, don't get me wrong. I like standing around a pub talking rubbish as much as the next guy. But it genuinely disturbs people that I don't have an identifiable accent or a single place that I come from. It makes them feel awkward, uncomfortable, and even somehow judged. They keep asking "But no, really, are you Irish or what?", and when they don't get a straight answer (because there isn't one), they sort of peter out the conversation or change the subject and wander off. They're either afraid I'll say or do something they won't understand and will therefore look ignorant or stupid, or else they think they'll say something which is offensive or racist, but won't know till it's too late. After all, the French love their food and the Swedish make Ikea furniture, but what do you talk about (or not talk about) around a French-Irishman with an accent from god-knows-where?

Ah, the thrills and spills of being the product of an 'international' background. You are successfully trained to never quite fit in anywhere except other people who've had a mixed background, however freethinking and culturally aware you think you are. You think you've got the freedom to adapt to living anywhere, without suspecting how people will (or won't) adapt to you...

Meanwhile, as I went out for my evening walk yesterday, I noticed some kids hanging around a chip shop, at about 10.15 at night. I realised one of them was from my year 7 English class, and he was holding hands with a bleached-haired blonde in a miniskirt which left precious little to the imagination. He's twelve! I know this is a sign of aging, when you start railing against young girls' clothing, but I just couldn't get over that this twelve year old was already so streetwise. It just begs the question as to what he's going to do when his real teenage rebellion sets in, if that's his normal Sunday evening at twelve years old.

I'm decidedly not a Whittonite, if that's what they're called. But it's an eye opener, at least.

Book Review: Why I'm Not a Christian

Over the last Easter break, I got tired of reading fiction, and decided to dabble in some philosophy. Anything that was well written and accessible, and funnily enough, there's more than you'd think. One of the books recommended on the shelves in the shop I was in was a collection of articles and speeches by Bertrand Russell, entitled Why I'm Not a Christian.

It probably sounds like a Richard Dawkins-esque attack on the lack of evidence for religious belief, which bluntly discards religion as a sort of senseless craze, and discredits the history of theology which supports it. Far from it. Russell was writing and talking from about 1895 to 1960 on this topic, and never really made it his academic specialism. He was a logician and mathematician who simply had a few things to say about religion. It just so happens that he puts arguments I have always believed myself far better than I can.

Firstly, that the arguments in support of Christianity are almost identical to those supporting other dogmas which we now discredit as being either dangerous or irrational. For instance, the idea that the beliefs are worth supporting because they're good for society or it helps to uphold moral values - regardless of whether or not they are actually true - is a slippery slope. It's like telling children that the bogeyman is out to get them to keep them in bed, or lying to your wife about cheating on her. It assumes people are willing to settle for untruths, and sets up a very bad social precedent.

Regardless of whether the moral principles of Christianity are 'good', its history is pretty dismal. From crusades to inquisitions, to attacks on its strongest ideologues, like Thomas Paine or Martin Luther, Christian institutions have done at least as much harm as they have good. Russell argues that any ideology which claims to have an unquestionable access to truth, coupled with a sense of owning moral values, will inevitably result in haughy, judgemental and eventually punitive behaviour. He draws analogies with Russian communism, indicating that the various strands of Christianity have followed an almost identical path. The purges, genocides, pogroms all stem from that same dangerous cocktail of dogma and moral superiority.

Russell puts it far better than I do, of course, and one chapter even transcribes a debate between Russell and a leading contemporary theologian, arguing about the requirement of a God to talk of a meaningful universe; a debate which has largely been railroaded by the Dawkinses of this sensationalist world.

More's the Pity.