by Anon
I was worried that Emily, who had once energised him so, was now responsible for his melancholy. I lay awake worrying about him, thinking about him sitting there reading ‘This World is not Conclusion’, and rather than seeing it as a poem that should encourage us – that evolution and faith can be contradictory, that there are limits to our reason and that it is OK to be confused and full of doubts – he would see it only as confirmation that it was pointless to try and do anything.
‘What’s the problem now?’ asked Amy at midnight.
‘I think teaching English is a bad thing.’
‘Why? I thought you were saving their souls. Leading them through “the vale of soul-making”.’
‘I think that might be a bad place for them to go. I think maybe they would be better off if they just didn’t go there.’
*
He stopped handing in essays at all. At the end of the lesson, the other students handed in their essays while Isaac bolted for the door. The punishment for missing an essay was detention; for missing two, Parental Meeting. For missing three, we would have to refer him to Tom, put him on report, and review whether he should carry on with the subject. He had missed four, but I had yet to go through the proper channels. I was trying to protect him. I knew that if I told him he was in detention, he would overreact and not come to the next lesson. And fall further behind. And so it snowballs.
We set up non-punitive, non-judgemental ‘meetings’ after lessons, during break, lunch and after school, going through his last essay. I read it out loud, gushing over how wonderful the ideas were, and showing him how all he needed to do was just sort out the syntax and grammar. But even with all the red and green lines on his Word document, he couldn’t see where he was missing capital letters, hyphens or even full stops. After our first couple of sessions, he seemed to be happy about how much he had improved his essays – from 5 out of 15 to 8 out of 15, for instance, but after the third essay, he started to feel discouraged. Like I was picking on him. After five minutes of our session, he turned and said, ‘I don’t know! I don’t know what’s wrong with it!’
‘There’s nothing wrong, Isaac,’ I said. ‘It’s not wrong. Quite the opposite. It’s brilliant. One of the best ideas I’ve heard. It just needs clarifying.’
‘You always say that!’ he screamed, with a ferocity that made me step onto the computer wires and disconnect his monitor. ‘Why are you wasting your time?’
‘I don’t understand. What do you mean, Isaac?’
‘Every lesson it’s the same. You ask a question. Zainab or Wally or Alexia answer in perfect sentences. Everything they say sounds perfect. It sounds academic. It sounds like the right answer. They are experts. You are an expert. Why are you wasting your time with a fool like me?’
He walked out and didn’t come back for two weeks.
We had a Parental Meeting, but it was impossible to get through to Mum. I got the impression that Isaac was looking after her, rather than the other way round.
*
March was the cruellest month. The coursework deadline was approaching. Teaching took a bath. It seemed like every kid in the school was in a computer room doing coursework.
As the final deadline approached, I said he had to give it to me after school that day, or he would have to redo the year. His hooded, glacial eyes stared straight through me. ‘Good,’ he said.
‘Is that what you want? Is that what you really want?’ I spluttered.
‘Yes.’
‘Look, Isaac,’ I pleaded, as I shut the door of the Business Suite, and motioned for him to sit at a computer, ‘I can’t let that happen. I will never forgive myself. You will never forgive yourself. We’re not leaving here until you put something – anything – on that page.’
We sat there for hours. Past detentions, past band practice, past play rehearsals, past the janitor emptying the bins. Six o’clock rolled around and he had written a paragraph with no full stops. Suddenly, he got up and said, ‘I’m going. That’s it. I need to go home and do it. I can’t concentrate. I promise I will email it to you tonight.’ I said I didn’t believe him, and that if I did not have it by the morning, I would have to take him off the course. He waved me away as he rushed out into the night, forgetting his art folder in the Business Suite.
The next morning, I checked my inbox. He had sent it at 4.48 a.m. I printed it off and added it to the pile. When he arrived in form, looking desolate, I congratulated him and told him to chill out. Now we could just read, recite and write poetry for the rest of term. The walls had fallen away.
*
That weekend, I had to do all the marking in the world. Friday night, I was too tired. Saturday, I stared at the wall. On Sunday I procrastinated and procrastinated. Then I went for a run.
1.9 km – Split: 8.7 miles per hour.
By Sunday night, the kitchen table was covered higgledy-piggledy with coursework and mark schemes. Amy had to eat her dinner on her lap on the sofa. At eleven, she came in and saw me with my head in my hands. She asked if I was all right. I said I wasn’t, that the coursework was all turd, that the students were all going to fail and that I was going to be fired. She took the card off the fridge and gave it to me.
‘You’re not going to be fired. You’re the Best Teache in the World Ever,’ she said as she sat on my lap and kissed me.
After she went to bed, I read through them again. Perhaps they weren’t so bad. No, in fact, they were good. Great. Alexia’s was the best – elegant, incisive and original. Zainab’s was also full marks: a little more workmanlike, but it was clear and answered the question (not to mention formatted perfectly). Wally’s was rushed but lively. Ella missed the point completely, but fair play for getting it done at all.
At 2 a.m., I stared at Isaac’s coursework.
Montag has escaped the alienation of the mechanical society he left behind. Perhaps he will help establish a better one by remembering the words in the book he will commit to memory. This suggests that by staying connected to books, which are a reflection of other people’s thinking, we stay connected as human beings one to the other. Books, then, are an antidote to alienation.
That’s really good.
Suspiciously good.
I Googled the most suspicious sentence. Sure enough, there it was. The whole shitshow. Thank you, enotes High School Teacher. You have just been complicit in Isaac’s downfall.
*
We were reaping the whirlwind. We went to such lengths to help our students – differentiation, ‘scaffolding’ (essay plans, quote sheets) – that when they reached Sixth Form, they did not trust their own minds. It was like watching a great mist descend over the generations, like the mist of forgetting in The Buried Giant, whereby they gradually lost their memories, originality and spark. If I showed them where to look – which meant I had to take them to the computer room and tell them what to Google – and then gave them an essay plan, they would work hard and produce something decent, but workmanlike. I was helping them to get the marks, but I was taking away their originality. The critics they found on the internet became a critical crutch. I tried to show them that it was just a game, that ‘a critic’s job is to say a rhinoceros is not an elephant’, but they did not trust their own voices. They were only seventeen, after all. Who really knows what they think then?
I could see Isaac doing it. Sitting in his room, staring at the empty white annotationless borders of the book, cursing himself for not writing anything down, wondering about whether to message Zainab, who was currently looking at her edition, with all its pink annotations and underlinings, and writing them up into another full-mark essay in her bulbous turquoise pen. A perfect script, for Sir to photocopy. Sir wouldn’t even need to read it, just put it down on the photocopier and hand it out with that smug look on his face.
Here’s how it is done.
So much better than yours.
You useless slug.
He clicked, opened Pandora’s Box and descended into the vortex. Down and down he f
ell, through leagues of vacuity, hitting uncertain worlds, looking around for anything to moor himself, desperately trying to grasp onto a rung on the ladder of wobbly blue links.
I can’t believe he has fallen for this. After all I had ranted about the fucking internet. Sure, it had finally broke down the walls. Now they had access to the riches of learning, which was previously the preserve of the elite. But they didn’t know where to look. I showed them Wikipedia, the London Review of Books, the New Yorker, academic articles. They would skim, shrug, then click onto the next link. And the next. And the next. They seemed completely desensitised to all of it.
Lesson #433
The Medium Is the Mess of the Age.
Every lesson, I banged on and on about how going on the internet was like shaking the epistemological kaleidoscope while trying to make sense of the disconnected fragments; how it represents the end of attention, and attention is culture, as William James said; how going from a literate culture to a digital culture represents the same shift as when writing replaced the oral tradition, which made Plato fear that memory would be replaced (I made them take old-fashioned notes, which caused all manner of consternation); how being permanently connected only makes you anxious and unhappy; how the whole thing was a desperate shouty competition, the exact opposite of the quiet reflection needed for poetry; how it was the end of critical authority – it was once possible, way back when I was a kid (‘Was dat Roman times?’ asked Liam) to have a few great books on a shelf and refer to them again and again, and that was your world, your solace; but now culture was a deracinated free-for all, the centre cannot hold; now we are in a relativistic universe, English Literature is on the same plane as Meedja, it is basically YouTube Studies with a sprinkling of poetry, poetry that is difficult to read beneath the flashing ads; there is no way of distinguishing between the opinions of Harold Bloom, Germaine Greer and Billy McGinty in his bedroom, it is all fair game after all, and all on the same plane: an open forum, a great wall-less palace of light, without definition or form or craft or care; just slap any old shit up there and just click on anything, anything will do. In Jonathan Franzen’s words, which you can Google, cut and paste: ‘All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off.’
*
The kids were right to take the piss out of me. I had become an old fart.
*
I gave back their coursework.
I let everyone go, then kept Isaac back, as I pulled up an essay on my computer.
‘What’s this?’ he said.
‘You tell me.’
‘Tell you what?’
‘Why have I got that essay on my screen?’
‘Dunno, Sir.’
‘You’ve never seen that before?’
‘What is it?’
‘Who wrote that?’
‘Dunno, Sir.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘You said that, Isaac.’
He paused and gaped a little.
‘Did I?’
‘Yes. What did you mean by that?’
‘Erm –’
‘The plagiarism is so obvious it is embarrassing. It doesn’t read anything like you. I wish it did, because you can write. If you had written everything you had just said in class, you would have an A. Plagiarism is a very serious crime. Next time, at least change the font.’
I told him I had spoken to Head. The punishment was a week’s suspension. He started weeping and giant snot bubbles blew out of his nose, like a whale’s spume.
I was worried what he might do, so I filled in a Cause for Concern form and sent it to Tom. He didn’t acknowledge it. I just carried on teaching, with Isaac sometimes present and sometimes not. I challenged Tom in the hallway. Tom said that we were in an impossible bind; Isaac refused to work, but was old enough that he had to check himself into Social Services. As he refused to do that, we had to just hope we could help him see the light. I saw a glimmer of compassion cross Tom’s face. A pulse of life. The red Terminator light fading.
*
Isaac came back eventually, but we had to take him off the course. I tried to make him see that it was all going to be fine. That he could still go to Art College. He didn’t need English. Reading is for life.
He didn’t say anything. He had been conditioned to think that university was the only barometer of success. I told him his Art was far more important. But he couldn’t see that. In the eyes of the school and society, he had failed, and there was nothing I could say to convince him. Everywhere he looked, he saw a system that valued what he struggled with.
I had failed him, because I had overwhelmed him with other voices, before I had let him truly trust his own.
Lesson #468
You’ve Just Got To Say What You Feel, Not What You Ought To Say.
17
Triangulation for the Nation
ALL STAFF: URGENT
There will be an URGENT briefing in the auditorium this afternoon at 4.30 p.m.
There were grave faces all round. The Doom-mongers of the Department thought that a student must have committed suicide. We tea-tottered up to the auditorium in silence.
Head addressed us as if he was announcing that we were going to war.
‘I want to thank you all for staying behind after school. The news that we have been expecting has arrived.’
Humanities grabbed hold of each other, whimpering.
‘The day that many of us had feared is now upon us.’
The French teacher exhaled like a horse.
‘We are to be Ofstedded.’
Music laughed. Maths cheered. Humanities wept.
‘OFSTED have informed us that they will visit some time over the next week. But do not worry. It is not something to fear. It is something to embrace. So after this briefing, I want everyone to go back to their departments and prepare for battle.’
*
Back in the Department, we leant on desks nervously, looking at HoD for guidance.
‘What?’ he shouted, defensively. ‘What do you want me to say? We’re an Outstanding department. You are all Outstanding teachers. Just do what you do. Come on! Seriously. What’s got into you? I go into your lessons regularly and most of the lessons I see are Good or Outstanding. Don’t change a thing.’
‘But how do you know that what they are looking for is the same thing that you look for?’ chipped in Mentor.
‘Look, I know these people. I’ve worked with the fuckers. They’re all failed teachers. They will always be looking for the thing you’re not doing. That’s their modus operandi. So just do what you do best. As long as your books are marked to buggery, we put up some nice displays of kids’ work, and you don’t get so freaked out you can’t speak, we’re going to be fine.’
Of course we would be fine. We were great. Weren’t we? And we could just do what those other schools do and put all the naughty kids in the Portakabin round the back of the bike sheds.
*
And so the Terror returned.
Everything ramped up to warp factor gazillion. We were all to be on our guard at all times. Total vigilance. Never relax, never settle. You never know when they might appear and just OFSTED you.
We got the green pens out every lesson. Teaching took another bath. No chance of learning any new poetry, or performing the next scene. We just went back over all the old essays and covered them in green pen.
Book Peeks were over; entire sets of books were now piled up in Departments for Book Examinations. The sharks were at the door every lesson. But they didn’t just hover. They were diving into the tank, devouring, ripping, crunching bones. Clouds of blood drifted up the glass. The wounded and dying hobbling around with stumps where their legs or arms once were. It was a massacre. Everyone Inadequate.
*
At the point of barest stress, another email.
URGENT!!!
REMINDER: Twilight Session today!!!
I clicked on the digital envelope
. The envelope opened; an invitation floated upwards; the invitation unfolded to reveal a page of ornate calligraphy:
You are cordially invited to a CPD Twilight Session: ‘Mastery and Proficiency in Classroom Observation. Part 1: MOPCEF – The Basics’ Auditorium, 4.30 p.m. Please bring your iPads. Charged.
It was time for a session with the Educational Leadership and Development Consultant. Little Miss Outstanding could barely contain herself.
The rumour was that he had become a Consultant after he had turned around a failing school.
‘I thought we had already been turned around?’ I said.
‘He wants to turn us back round the other way again,’ said HoD.
We researched him on the internet. There was a fawning interview in a soft-focus digizine and lots of tweets, most of which seemed to consist of gnomic aphorisms plucked from Brainyquote, like ‘Education is the art of making man ethical’ and ‘Achievement is the horse; self-esteem is the cart.’ All we really needed to know was that he was one of them. A Future Leader. Like Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, he had come from downtown on a mission of mercy to transform us deadbeats into high-performing, high-octane Cityslickers.
He had been into a few lessons already. Mentor had volunteered. She was always Outstanding, after all. He went to see her Year 9 Set 4s doing Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter, which seemed apt. Whereas most observers sit at the back for most of the lesson, Educational Consultant was busy, getting among the students’ books from the get-go, obsessed with how much progress the student had made in the last week, half-hour, minute. After the lesson, she had gone to see him for what he called a ‘Meta-Feedback Loop’. He ushered her onto a beanbag, while he ran his long fingernails around his mug of peppermint tea, saying, ‘Make yourself comfy, make yourself comfy.’ He said how much he enjoyed the lesson, then gave fair and constructive feedback.
