by Anon
I yawned, and was about to close my MacBook, but thought I should just take a cheeky peek at Facebook. Oooh, hello. Lots of panicked and angry posts from teachers about OFSTED: ‘This is a fucking joke. We shouldn’t have to do this, not now. It’s not like I don’t have enough to worry about with exams. I mean, what is the point?’; ‘Totally agree, we should all go on strike’; ‘Smiley emoji’; ‘Two smiley emojis’; ‘Ten smiley emojis. See you all tomorrow!!!!!! Xxxxxxx.’
Little Miss Outstanding had written, ‘That thing where you should be planning lessons and marking books for an inspection, and you are actually busy finding amusing gifs to make your SMARTboard look pretty … lalalalalaaaaa!’
She was clearly crapping herself.
I finally trudged upstairs to the spare room at 1 a.m.
I lay awake for hours.
*
I should have taught Catch-22.
My main goal was to get results. The only way I could get results was for the kids to do practice papers. But if the OFSTED inspector saw them just doing practice papers, then I would be given Inadequate. Which would mean I was a shit teacher. Yet, if I only taught All Singing All Dancing OFSTED lessons, then the OFSTED inspector might come in and give me a Good or Outstanding, but the kids wouldn’t do any exam practice, and so would fail their exams. Which would mean I was a shit teacher.
I would be crazy to teach any more lessons, and sane if I didn’t; but if I was sane, then I would have to teach.
*
The lessons passed in anxious torpor.
Nobody came.
YEAR 11, WEDNESDAY, PERIOD 3.
I handed out a coloured flow chart with all the phrases and connectives they needed to know for each question. I wrote Lesson Objectives:
To feedback on homework
To develop skimming and scanning and inference skills
To establish a regular routine of triangulation
Janice said, ‘What?’
I said, ‘Just do it.’
A man with a clipboard entered, navigated past Rich’s knees, and stood at the back of the classroom.
No. Not now. Any time but now.
‘Sir, what’s triangulation?’
‘Well, it’s … er … marking, basically. Which brings me to your work I need to give back. Yes. So, unfortunately nobody did very well. I mean, you did. Or rather, you do. Normally. But this time you didn’t.’
He’s writing something down.
‘Janice, if you could hand them back. So if you look at the papers, I think we all had a problem with the orangutans and whether or not they were similar to humans. So let’s try that question again, but this time ensuring that we infer rather than explain …’
‘Sir, what is the difference between explaining and inferring?’
‘Well, you see, explaining uses words like, erm … whereas inferring uses words like erm …’
He’s writing notes. What is he writing? I haven’t said anything yet! Oh God, he’s looking in their books! No, no, no! Not Janice! Hers is one of the only ones I haven’t marked! Come on, man! They’ve been doing practice papers! On paper! He’s circling something on his pad.
‘What was I saying …?’ I whispered.
‘You were going to tell us the difference between explaining and inferring?’
‘Yes, well, explaining, you see, is when you explain something …’
They stared at me.
Mr OFSTED held his pen to his lips.
‘Sir, what is the meaning … what is the meaning …?’
‘Er … I used to know this …’
‘Sir? Are you OK?’
I stared out of the window at the smoking triangular chimney. The Grand Vizier Lizards had their teeth into me and were beaming me up to their spaceship.
‘Sorry … I used to be able to speak … language …’
*
At the end of the lesson, I ran to the toilet. MegaDumper was in there; I hammered on the door, demanding he get out.
I changed as fast as I could and just ran.
And ran.
*
1 mile – Split: 8.56 minutes per mile … He’s on the C/D Borderline so you need to target him. I’m on the AC/DC Borderline. I’m UP. Now I’m DOWN … I’ve been down so long it looks like up … Sir, what is the difference between explaining and describing and inferring? Sir? SIR? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE? … I think his inability to speak ENG LANG rendered his lesson INADEQUATE, I would place him on a Cause for Concern OFSTED EDEXCEL MOPCEF Ultrasound …
Maybe you can learn to speak English? Data clusterfuck. A.B – A.B – A.B.C – Year 11 Set 3s are weak … 2 miles – Split: 8.7 miles per hour – Triangulation for the Nation – Discombobulation – Disintegration – Dystopian – It’s just Diss – Isn’t that in Norfolk? – Nor FUCK – Shuffle – No more – No more Marking – Mark it, nuncle: Have more than thou showest, Speak less than thou knowest … Fitter. Happier. More Efficient. Like a gerbil. On a treadmill. On Prozac – Shit, what’s wrong with my phone? – Come on – Play – Oh God, I’ve got to call Apple again – I can never remember my password – How was your Genius session today?
18
Library Fire
I ran in the next morning to find Bill chiselling ‘OUT’ into the zinc sign.
‘Outstanding!’ I cried.
‘You can’t argue with that, can ya?’
*
The SMs were delighted; they strolled the halls smiling and congratulating teachers. They felt we had reached the Promised Land, and now anything was possible. Among the rest of the staff, however, there a mood of exhausted discontent. Now the focus of OFSTED had been taken away, staff thought about issues they did not have time to address during the rest of the year: changes to the curriculum, cuts, stress, work overload, pay. They spent their free periods searching for jobs and drooling over websites of International Schools, dreaming of other lives.
Every day, there were more rumours. The Doommongers were in their element as they spread butter on their toasted pitta bread.
‘Have you heard?’
‘No, what?’
‘Sharon. From Science.’
‘No. She’s not!’
‘Yup.’
‘And Brian from Maths.’
‘No!’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Not to mention Barry the TA.’
‘No! He can’t!’
‘Well, that’s it then.’
‘We’re fucked. Might as well leave.’
Everyone was leaving. Everyone. Well, not strictly everyone. Some people. But by the time it had progressed through the Doom-monger Telegraph, it had become everyone. There would be no teachers left. It would just be the Doom-mongers, a bag of pitta bread and some laminated cue cards.
*
The meeting had to be on the downlow. The emails had gone out to our private emails, rather than our work ones, to maintain secrecy. The Union Rep approached us individually in the playground with a furtive wink.
Meeting, after school. In the Library.
All the unions were going on strike the next day, so the Library was as packed as on a Friday night.
‘OK. Before we start, I want to make sure that whatever is said in this room stays in this room,’ said Union Rep, like a guerrilla plotting to overthrow a military dictatorship. ‘Now, Head is aware of the Strike Action. We had a very constructive meeting.’
‘And?’
‘No calling out.’
‘Order!’
‘Mine’s a Stella!’
‘And … it was a very constructive conversation. We met eye to eye, and there is definitely going to be some movement on these issues.’
‘Can you be more specific?’
Union Rep looked over his shoulder surreptitiously.
‘Not. At. This. Moment. But, as I say, we had a very healthy dialogue. Whoever marches tomorrow will not dock any pay. You will not need to set cover. And it will not affect your reputation.’
‘Is the school
going to shut?’
‘I really pushed for it. Really, I did. But he wouldn’t budge.’
Boos and whistles.
‘OK, OK, OK. Look, what could I do? Nothing shuts the school. Not snow, not strikes, not anything. The school will stay open and sub teachers will be bussed in. The kids will all be doing practice papers in the gym while we are marching.’
There were some grumbles from the Old Guard, who wanted the school to shut down. The kids needed to have their education disrupted. The parents needed to freak out that their dear progeny might miss some crucial exam preparation. They needed to know that we were working under intolerable conditions.
The sad realisation was that it was probably best for the kids to do practice papers in the gym until the exams. We were no longer needed. The strike was explicitly about the banner issues of pay, cuts and work overload; implicitly, we were protesting out of anxiety at our own obsolescence.
*
The next morning we all had a good lie-in, watched a bit of Jeremy Kyle, had a fry-up and then met at the train station. We gathered in the square, marched along behind some large banners, chanted, and then got back on the train home. We were back in the Library, tucking into pints, before the kids were out of the gym.
‘Well, that was underwhelming,’ I said.
‘That’s the Blob for ya,’ said HoD. ‘By the end of this year, every member of the Blob will be gone, you mark my words. The Death Star sees us as the problem. Under the ancien régime, kids were spending all their time in a spliffed-out haze while their loony-lefty teachers promoted deviance, drugs, revolution and homosexuality. We need to be purged.’
A jubilant version of ‘Hey Jude’ struck up, as HoD asked me what I wanted to do with my sixth formers next year. I told him I was going to do The Waste Land. He guffawed.
‘Let me guess: you thought studying The Waste Land was going to civilise the natives?’
‘Something like that.’
‘By furnishing them with pretentious quotes to roll out to impress people at dinner parties for the rest of their lives? Eliot was a waste man. And that was some dumb Upanishad he chose. Do Baldwin. They don’t need a poem about a depressed right-wing loser wandering around complaining about not getting laid. They need The Fire Next Time. They need a fucking fire lit under them.’
‘It’s a bit difficult to light a fire in a vacuum.’
‘Tell me about it. I used to teach upstairs in this mental room with crumbling eaves and crazy crenellations. It’s now the Business Studies Suite with zinc carpets. I used to go in there and fucking howl Howl at them. We did it all: James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Flannery O’Connor, Thom Gunn, Kurt Vonnegut. It was the nuts.’
He drifted into another reverie about the old days.
‘You know that when Baldwin was a teenager he used to walk from Harlem to the New York Public Library every day to read? That’s the bit I love about my job. When I tell the kids that, and then I say: go down to the Library and find any book you want. And just read for a double period. Fucking magic. I come down and just browse. I run my fingers along the bookshelves, and pick books at random. I whisper into their ears that what they’ve got is good, but this one is the one for their eyes only. And they go away and they read that and they are changed for ever.’ He belched defiantly. ‘We had an English teacher here who had been a pianist on cruise ships. One day he found a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea lying around on a deckchair and he read it in one sitting. Made him decide he had to be an English teacher just so he could teach that book. That’s what I want in my Department. I don’t want TeachFirst, Ask Questions Later. I want Teach Now, Forever. I don’t want people who get firsts from Oxbridge. Best teachers I ever met failed their exams. Or they’re school drop-outs. Or dyslexics. Wow, they can teach. People who can see things a bit differently, who are imaginative, who understand the struggle of learning, who’ve got a bit of grit. People don’t teach because they think they know it all, but because they realise how little we really know. People who know how precious education is. People who understand that this shit is all there is. I want a school that values people and books.’
‘“The vale of soul-making”.’
‘Yup. Keats knew. The world is a school, and the human heart is the book in that school. Baldwin knew that. Vonnegut knew that. Books are sacred and must never be banned or burnt, in schools or anywhere else. Because that’s what’s happening. That’s right. I heard yesterday that we’re closing the fucking Library. That’s it! Books? Who needs ’em? You can just Google ’em!’
HoD gulped down his pint and slammed it on the table.
‘What do we value? Hmm? Chairs? His chairs, his Bimmer and his screens. Did you see the delivery this week? Another shitload of screens. One screen for every pupil, that’s the goal. Ensure they never have to look at a teacher, or into their soul. That’s money that should have gone on books for the Library, which he is fucking closing. Fucking scandal. Just click on the link, copy, paste. Turn on, tune out. Go ’puta, go uni, go job – What do we value? We used to have assemblies with Nelson Mandela or Noam Chomsky. Now what do we get? Whoever won The Apprentice. “This morning, we are going to look at how you can aspire to use your education to make money and suck out your soul. Then when we have dominated you, 95 per cent Arse to Cock, we will send you out ravaged and lobotomised to be supplicant to The Man. To the Soulless Technocracy.”’
‘You always get all ubi sunt after a couple –’
‘Don’t ubi sunt me, you ring.’
‘Don’t you think there’s just a hint of rose-tinted spectacles here?’
‘Yeah. Of course there is. I’m getting older and more nostalgic. Whatevs. Look. This is serious. Fewer and fewer kids are doing English. There are hardly any Music teachers being trained. Everyone’s doing Science. Great for doctors and engineering, gnads for us.’
‘Lots of people want to do Media.’
‘Great. Yeah, thanks for that. This is the death of Humanist education, which has been the foundation of education in this country for centuries. We are replacing these robust, tangible pillars with ephemeral clickbait. Soon the school will just be kids at computers all day long, with headphones on, doing the same Maths problem on an online programme until they get it right. You will be even more redundant than you are now. I’m gonna hire some hotshot teachers in China – or even better, a robot AI – who can teach via Skype and download the multiple-choice answers into their facescreens. And you, my friend, can have my poxy job.’
He went quiet.
‘No, really. I’m leaving.’
‘No!’
‘Yup.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Dunno. Fishing. Poetry. Anything but this. I can’t do it no more. When you lose that thing with teaching, it’s time to move on.’
He always said this. As he himself admitted, he had been about to leave since he arrived. But this time, there was a more profound melancholy to the statement.
‘We’ll all be gone. Me. That guy. Her. Him. All of us. Ubi sunt, indeed.’
Tom sat down next to us, sighing, ‘Ah, I’ve heard this rant before.’
‘Where you been?’ shouted HoD. ‘Havin’ a Tommy Tank in the bogs over my Much Ado lesson?’
‘You wish,’ muttered Tom as he looked out of the window.
‘Oh, sorry to bore you’, HoD huffed. He got up, flashed a glare, and shuffled out of the Library.
After an awkward silence, Tom asked how Amy was doing, then told me that they too were expecting. I hugged him delightedly, then recommended NCT groups and car seats. He apologised for how things had soured between us. I told him I forgave him; we laughed at the notion that we were the only ones left – well, us and the weird Trainee, who was bound to get a job now, no matter how shit he was – so we had to stick together. We said we would get together over the summer. He shook my hand warmly and smiled, his eyes glimmering.
*
Then it was exams.
Invigilation.
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Turn over your papers.
Stare at wall.
Stare at Janice inferring.
Jeremy Kyle game.
Go and stand behind the student most likely to:
Go to prison.
Be the first person on Mars.
Be a bigamist.
More paper.
Five minutes.
Time’s up.
PLEASE LEAVE THIS PAGE BLANK.
Back to the Department. More crying kids upset by HoD leaving. And the rest of the Old Guard.
Even Little Miss Outstanding was out of there. It was an unavoidable truth that she was leaving. The cards covered every surface.
‘Miss! I can’t believe you are leaving! Please take me with you! Please be my teacher forever!!!!’
When I asked where she was going, she mumbled something about a school in the countryside that was really relaxed, but she wouldn’t tell me its name. Definitely private, then. Nothing to be ashamed of, I said. They say it’s like going from walking on glass to walking on velvet, after all.
*
At the Final Assembly, Head showed the opening of The Devil Wears Prada, in which Meryl Streep comes into the office and everyone changes their shoes, cleans their desks, straightens the flowers. Head said, ‘Well, put me in a dress and call me a woman.’ I think he thought this was an example of good power. I tuned out after that. I awoke as the samba band were playing ‘Gold’ by Spandau Ballet. Exit music.
*
HoD bade us a brief farewell in the Department. He said this wasn’t goodbye, and that we were all ring pieces, but that he loved us all and we were the best around. Then he threw Cheese Strings at us and told us to hurry up and get to the Canteen.
*
The All Staff Leaving Do was so long we had to have an interval. Head tried to say some poignant things, but he was drowned out by applause and shouting.
