by Anon
*
And so they all went. Brian and Anushka from Maths, Sharon and Stuart from Science, Jill from Art, Gary from ICT, Tony from DT, Ella from RE, Damilola from History, Carol from Drama, Steve from Music, Nick from PE, Dario, Stefan, Anna and Bob from Modern Languages, HoD, Little Miss Outstanding, the Librarian, half the TAs and Learning Mentors. It was like we had pulled the foundations out from under the school. It seemed the only people who weren’t leaving were the SMs. And Bill and Paula.
*
And with that, The Old Guard – a Yoda or a Hector, every one – were disappeared. And with them, it felt like a whole world had gone. We could tell ourselves lies about why they had to go – done my time, family, better salary, need a new challenge, need another language, need a sun tan and a piña colada. Many just wanted to move on to a school that perhaps wasn’t so Outstanding, and therefore slightly more human. They had been tipped over the edge by stress and disillusionment with a system that was now out of control. The very system that had improved schools almost beyond measure – from the worst to the best – was now destroying itself from within, like a phoenix whose stomach is burnt out by flaming embers.
Lesson #555
Kids Need Consistency.
To chop and change teachers all the time is discombobulating for staff and pupils alike. High-performing schools get great results, but there tends to be a concomitant high turnover of staff.
Lesson #556
Teachers Must Be Cherished.
The Old Guard provide wisdom and stability. They have relationships with kids that stretch way beyond the classroom – they have taught that kid’s brother, so they know how to approach his family; they can take stressed out new teachers under their wings; they have experience of the whirligig and whack-a-mole of the bonkers educational system, so provide valuable perspective; they are more committed to ‘passing it on’ than with results (although some manage both); they are wise. Like books, they are all too easily taken for granted and tossed on the pyre of relentless, unforgiving progress.
PART THREE
19
Please Leave This Page Blank
I was supposed to be putting the cot up. And the shelves. But the wall is just way too compelling.
It’s not just any wall. This wall is my son’s tabula rasa. The blank sheet upon which his soul will be written.
I could put the shelves up now. Get the books ready.
Goodnight Moon; Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me; Alice In Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach; Harry Potter, His Dark Materials; Greek Myths, Hamlet, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Dickinson, Hamlet, The Waste Land …
iPhone, Xbox, dope. Losing the ability to focus and communicate. Ennui. Apathy. Angst. Put books back in storage.
*
Shit. How are we going to educate him? In the Latin sense: educare; to lead out. If education is the ‘leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul’, as Miss Jean Brodie says, then it is our job to lead them to realise their own ideas and identities, rather than didactically impose ours upon them. We need to lead him away from this whole benighted culture – the screens, the violence, the misogyny, the pressure, the corruption of innocence. But he must discover the way himself.
We talked about getting out of town, moving to the countryside.
That means I either have to work at a dead-end whiteflight school with no aspirations, or a private school. I can’t handle the private-school shame. Why can’t I go private? It’s like going from walking on glass to walking on velvet, after all. Crab sandwiches for lunch. And the holidays are even longer than ours. I could do with an extra two weeks. Could start staring at that wall over there.
Apparently, you teach the whole child in a private school. As opposed to what we do, which is teaching a classroom full of amputated torsos and severed heads.
But they’re about building character, aren’t they? And all that extracurricular malarkey. I could direct them in Greek plays in the amphitheatre, lead mindfulness sessions at lunchtime, take them to Russia. They’re all Russian now, after all. Go hang out with the fam in the dacha.
We could live somewhere green and innocent, where we could teach and live and love, unharassed and unobserved.
But I’m not some craven lickspittle paid to grease the palms of an Admissions Tutor, so Piers or Sergey can snort their way through three years of ivory indolence. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the impact? Once you’ve changed lives, you can’t go back.
*
We could go away. Everyone left to go away. Away must be good. They speak different languages there, which is bound to be beneficial. Apparently, bilingual kids are smarter. Well, they can speak two languages, for one thing.
Go forth and teach all nations, like Jesus said. We could go to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, South America, Turkey, Dubai, China. Barbados!
And there’s no stigma with going private. Go private school in England, become pariah. Go International private school, become best friend. Everyone says, ‘Great, I’ll come see you next summer.’ The further you go, the more acceptable the English class system becomes.
Could go back to Tanzania. God, that was the sweet spot, right there. Get up late, do a little bit of ‘teaching’ in the mornings (reading whatever I wanted), then play football, before repairing to my hut, while I awaited the battalion of sweet, polite kids who came round every evening demanding to know more, waxing lyrical about Harry Potter and The Gods Must Be Crazy.
The school had fuck all. No photocopier, limited internet access, tiny classrooms with a corrugated roof covered in fruit bats. No standards, league tables, exams, OFSTED, iPads, Outstanding, Good, Inadequate, no features, no features at all; no data-meetings, twilight INSETs, morning briefings, admin, box-ticking, booktrawls, data-cycles, pupil voice questionnaires, Learning Walks, Cause for Concern; no stress, guilt, fear; no shame.
Could go to India.
I remember that video about the ‘Hole in the Wall’ we watched when we were training. There was a computer in a hole in the wall of a slum. Soon all the kids were teaching themselves, and each other, how to use it. And how to communicate. Their first English word was ‘browse’.
It won’t be long before they’re straight onto Khan Academy’s online tuition, learning everything under the sun, and by the time they’re ten they will know more than me.
Fuck that then.
Just put a screen in the wall over there and leave him to it.
*
I should have stayed in advertising making shitloads selling plastic cheese to the Saudis (despite 98 per cent market share and rampant heart disease).
I’ve got to step up a gear if I’m going to make some proper moolah. Progress ever upwards through the pay scale. Up the M1, M2 and M3 at 100 mph. I can’t pull over on the hard shoulder for a breath of fresh air and an egg sandwich. To be static is to be an obsolescent fossil of the old school, wallowing in tenure, egg on tie, muttering the same old lessons. Oh, that’s just him, they all say. Leave him to rot.
Keep on up to SMT. The more power you have, the less teaching you do; eventually, I could teach one hour a week, yet charge around the place telling people how to teach. People who, by necessity, think I’m a complete tosser.
I love teaching. But I hate being a teacher. What to do? What teacher are you?
Just teach. That’s all. Don’t take any more responsibility. No more than being a teacher and a father. That’s all the responsibility in the world.
*
I was starting to see fractals in the blankness when Amy’s waters broke. We walked around the house for a while, doing the breathing thing, and then tried to relax by eating M&Ms and watching Merchant Ivory films, but all that repressed passion delayed my son’s arrival somewhat. We should have watched Almodóvar.
Then the quickening; game on.
In the hospital, Amy was cleaved and spavined and finally my son was wrenche
d into the world against his will, backwards, upside-down, bawling to be returned. He was dumped into a tray and kept under harsh lights and prodded and pinched in a glass box and kept overnight for observations. I looked at him, this first night alone, in the cell he might call the world. Miraculously, he had been thinking before this, his mind already a bound ocean. He had heard me speak of this strange world, full of glass boxes of light surrounded by darkness. Did this live up to his expectation? What were his first impressions of this place? Of me and my strange resemblance? He looked dissatisfied. He must have been conjuring other worlds already, or uploading his consciousness to a host somewhere else.
Don’t worry, son. I will lead you out of here.
After a few more tests, he was declared alive. We could take him home.
As we gingerly brought him home in a pram, a bus coughed out four big Puffas. One of the Puffas spat a big green grolly at my feet. I was momentarily terrified: this is the way it ends. Shanked on my way back from my son’s delivery into the world.
Then the Puffa looked up at me and said, ‘A’right, Sir?’
It was Kieran.
*
The world suddenly gained weight, as if gravity were more forceful. Life was filled with warmth and joy. Amy and son were all I needed.
We did not sleep much those first few weeks. We would wake up to feed him, and then I watched him sleep. I could sit there for hours. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful.
He lay there, all scrunched up, a crushed apple in the long grass. His features were like an alien: an oval head, with sharp nose and mouth and giant, bulbous eyes. His skin was a whorl of pinks and yellows. Occasionally his arms and legs jerked up and down in a panic – and then he was still, spatchcocked. I kept checking that he was breathing by placing an iPad next to his mouth. As I watched his breath condense on the screen, he seemed to be an alien from another galaxy, acclimatising to his new atmosphere. Who knows where he came from or why – all I knew was that I would do anything to protect this fragile little shrimp.
I held him and read to him, even though he did not seem to understand. I walked around the park with him clasped to my breast and told him stories about the world around us – of sunrises and sunsets, plants and flowers, pedestrian crossings and wheelie bins. I felt sure his tiny reptilian brain could understand what I was saying in some prehistoric way. I was forced in these narratives to face up to my own ignorance. A good teacher is always learning. Why can we see the moon in the daytime? When is the best time to plant an apple tree? Where is his other shoe?
I realised I had to undo it all and see the world like a child, pointing and gasping in wonder, babbling freeform, jumping up and down at the sheer joy of it all.
*
As my son grew, the world invaded his nascent consciousness. We lay awake to the sound of his cries. Amy could bear it no longer. She put the pillow over her head and curled up into the foetal position, while I put him in the car and drove him around and around, listening to an old mix tape. Only Old Skool House would put him to sleep.
Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air…
I drove until ten or eleven at night, because I knew that as soon as I stopped the music and turned off the engine, he would start crying again. I wondered why my little alien could not cope with the atmosphere of this world. Perhaps I should just keep driving, onwards and upwards. Out of the town, up the motorway, up and up until I reach a coast, a place that is cool and windy and cleansed, where the sea rolls deep and moody and otters dance across the beach.
As I drove round the corner, I saw Kieran being pinned up against the wall by the police outside Bananaman’s coffee shop.
I drove around and around the environs of the school, the windows of the estates and terraced houses lit by a phosphorescent glow.
This is my community.
These kids are my responsibility.
I’ve got to see them through.
You’ve got the love I need to see me through …
20
Personal Statement
When I went back to school at the beginning of my third year, Mentor was Head of Department, Tom was Second in Department, and Trainee was an NQT. He came in that first day in a sensible suit and a full USB. Good man.
I was a Teacher Without Portfolio. I could finally just teach. I saw Head around, but he proved himself as unable to acknowledge my son’s birth as my father’s death. Well, he was busy. He had a load of new staff to train.
I was tired the whole time, but happy. My Form were beginning Year 13, their final year, and I was excited about seeing them over the finish line.
*
‘The most important thing is that you sound like you. Not like anyone else.’
They hid behind their computer screens, which pulsed with blankness. This was proving the most challenging assignment of their entire school career. For on this blank pro forma they had to project themselves. Crystallise their very essence.
‘The university professors say that every year they get thousands of statements which sound like they have been written by a focus group,’ I said. ‘Which, in many ways, they have. The clue is in the name: this is your Personal Statement. It has to be unique. It has to properly express who you really are.’
‘But, Sir: what if we don’t know who we are?’ said Liam.
‘Google it.’
‘I tried. Nuffing came up.’
‘I can’t help you with that one, Liam. Just pretend you know. That’s what life is all about. OK, let’s work on these opening lines. Can you capture their attention? Give it a go. You’ve got five minutes.’
Stares. Coughs. Sighs.
The 7-step Plan for Writing a Decent Personal Statement did not seem to be helping. Indeed, it seemed to be producing a kind of existential horror, as they realised that the exceptionalism we had drummed into them needed proof, and that they were, on paper, very similar to every other seventeen-year-old in the country. With a minute to go, they hurriedly wrote a sentence or two.
‘OK. Time’s up. Let’s hear some of these. Someone we don’t often hear from: Zainab.’
Zainab shook her head.
‘Come on, Zainab! You’re going to have to speak soon. You’re going to be sitting in a university interview. Are you just going to sit there in silence?’
Zainab nodded. I told her that I wished she would speak, because her essays were incredible, like the one she had just done for me. I said that she must do English at university. She said she wished she could, but that she was going to have to give it up. I fell to my knees and pretended to beat my head on the floor.
‘Noooo! Why?’
‘My parents don’t want me to do it.’
‘What do they want?’ I asked, rhetorically.
‘Become a doctor,’ we both said, simultaneously.
I pleaded with her to reconsider, but she was resolute. I picked myself off the floor.
‘Anyone else? Liam?’
Liam cleared his throat and opened his arms, as if performing an aria.
‘I have been interested in mortgages since a very young age. I was fascinated to know how mortgages work, and what consumers needed to do in order to get one.’
He awaited applause.
‘Have you really, Liam?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Been interested in mortgages since a very young age?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You mean instead of playing football and climbing trees you were studying mortgages?’
‘Uh-huh. What, Sir? It says here: “Make sure you express your passion for your subject.”’
‘Yeah, but don’t lie!’
‘I ain’t lying. Swear down.’
This morning was supposed to be for them to finish it off. Just tweak them. We had been trying to establish who they were and what they cared about every morning for weeks, and we were still on the first line. Their extra-curricular section was particularly weak. All the private-school kids
did a gazillion impressive things – they walked across Afghanistan and learned Mandarin and played violin to grade 8. The universities claimed they weren’t interested in anything beyond the subject any more, but it was clear extra-curricular gubbins still gave the private-school kids an advantage. It certainly gave them confidence, which was the most important attribute when going into an interview.
I asked them to write down their ideas.
‘OK. Let’s hear some of these. Ella?’
‘One thing I done is that I organised the coconut shy at my primary school.’
‘That was a while ago though, wasn’t it? Have you done anything since then?’
‘Nah.’
‘Well, maybe just cut the word “primary”. That’s called being economical with the truth.’
I perched on the desk, shaking my head.
‘I don’t get it. Look at you all. You’ve been given this incredible education. Do you only want to make money?’
Nods around the room, apart from Alexia and Zainab.
‘What about teaching?’ I asked. ‘Anyone want to be a teacher?’
Widespread derision.
‘Nah way, Sir!’
‘Bare jokes!’
And then I said it. The thing I swore I would never say.
‘In my day –’
Mother. This has to stop!
Ella cut me off.
‘Yeah, yeah. In your day, you would put books on our heads to make you stand up straight.’
‘Yeah, and bells on our foreskins to stop you – yaknowwhatImean?’
‘Ugh! Liam! That’s gross.’
I launched into an impromptu fogeyish rant about the death of Humanism.
‘Humanism! Isn’t that what university is for? Reading as many books as you can, from the greatest minds that ever thought. The best words in the best order. Who said that, Liam?’
