The Secret Teacher

by Anon

  ‘Lady Gaga?’

  ‘This is why you need books, Liam. The bedrock of our civilisation. To spend the next oh-so precious time in your life marinading in the history of ideas. And then you can become a mortgage adviser …’

  Liam laughed in my face.

  ‘Yeah, but, Sir, it was all right for you, wasn’t it? You didn’t have to pay off the debt. I would love to be able to spend three or four years free of charge just reading books.’

  ‘Liam: you have spent the last year singularly failing to read two books, so forgive me if I find that an extremely dubious claim.’

  ‘But, Sir! What’s the point?’

  ‘The point, Liam, is that this is our culture. Without this, you don’t exist. You don’t have a soul.’

  ‘Nah, sir. This stuff is dead. Finito. Mortgages is culture.’

  ‘Unfortunately, you are absolutely right. Which is why we are going to hell in a handbasket.’

  I googled David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Address from 2005 and put it on the board. I told them that they had a lifetime of deadening routine ahead of them, and English was the only subject that would get them to fifty years old without having put a bullet in their heads. That English was about attention and consciousness, which were as endangered as libraries, trees or teachers. That the alternative is ‘unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing’.

  Liam went ‘Woooaahh.’

  Ella said, ‘Sir’s dark.’

  The bell went.

  ‘OK, off you go. And remember: you only miss the shots you don’t take.’

  ‘Wayne Gretzky!’ shouted Liam, suddenly very animated.

  *

  That year, I was doing lots more new stuff, which is what you want. Keeps you fresh. Jekyll and Hyde with Year 9s. Donnie had come up another set to Set 2. He had already made an origami model of a Victorian street, so I let him do some Show and Tell. I did The Crucible with Year 11s. We had already set the scene for the Salem Witch Trials: misogyny, irrationality, fear, mob rule. We did some McCarthy context, but it was all going on, right outside the window, all around. And, of course, The Waste Land with the 13s.

  I had said, many times, that The Waste Land was the most important poetic work of the twentieth century. (I don’t think I sounded very convincing. I’m not sure I thought this. But lots of other clever people did, so I thought I should parrot the notion.) We read it through twice, and it didn’t make any sense whatsoever. They all agreed that The Waste Land was just waste, man. I had tried everything. I started with the iPad edition. We watched Fiona Shaw performing it and Jeanette Winterson discussing it. I photocopied The Golden Bough and we read Isis and Osiris, and the Fisher King. Nada.

  I spent my evenings reading and rereading the poem trying to find a route in. I finally submitted to the path of least resistance: sex. We talked about Eliot’s unusual living arrangement with Vivienne Haigh-Wood and Bertrand Russell, but then every essay Wally wrote was about how the poem was an expression of Eliot’s sexual frustration because ‘his mate Russell was having it off with his wife in the next room’. (I was on strict instructions to keep an eye on Wally’s sexual improprieties, since he sent Mentor an email saying, ‘Miss, what was the homework? x.’ We studied that kiss for a long time. I said it was probably fine, just the way people naturally sign off a message. ‘Ugh,’ she said. ‘Gross. Just keep him away from me. And females generally.’)

  We compared the poem with rap lyrics, but they just took the piss out of me for that; it committed the Cardinal Sin of trying to be Down with the Kids. I was risking losing them altogether.

  There was nothing for it. We were going to have to join up with Tom’s class and do a performance.

  They weren’t happy. It was enough of a wrench to get them to perform it to each other, let alone to Tom’s class, who were much cooler. Alexia and Ella read the salty, mouthy music-hall barflies, Zainab ‘read’ the suitably silent Madame Sosostris, Liam was a desperate Phlebas drowning under coats. And it was all rounded off with a feeble, and out of sync, rendition of ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’.

  After the reading, I asked both classes what they heard. They were silent. They still thought it was mystifying, dull and irrelevant.

  I told them I had heard things that I hadn’t before. They still kept shtum.

  Lesson #697

  Admitting That You Do Not Understand Is a Great Leveller and Pays Great Dividends.

  At times like this, you have to level with them. I said I felt frustrated by the poem – I thought it was great but now wasn’t sure. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a load of old cobblers. I pointed to the Eliot quote on the wall – ‘Genuine poetry communicates before it is understood’ – and Keats’s definition of Negative Capability. I tried to help them understand that they needed to undo themselves, to dismantle their analytical apparatus. We had to get past the alarm that would go off when they looked at a line, an alarm that then disabled their minds and told them that they didn’t understand any of it. It was healthy to be in doubt and confusion. We did not have to reach after an absolute answer. What Eliot was getting at could be beyond data and even language.

  For the Plenary, I wearily asked, one last time, what they had heard. Anything. They started to tentatively offer ideas: ‘environment’, ‘destruction’, ‘connection’, ‘community’, ‘alienation’.

  Boom ting.

  I charged out on duty.

  Yes!

  Breakthrough!

  Come ON!

  I charged around the playground, punching the air. I noticed VP staring at me, so I came to a standstill and put my hands behind my back, and gave her a salute. I breathed out deep foggy breaths and patted my hands against my coat, then walked in purposeful circles, past the other teachers on duty, muttering, ‘Chilly!’ or ‘Blimey!’ or ‘Should have worn the leggings!’

  Skip. Skip. Skip. Skip. Skip.

  There’s that kid again. The one with the haircut that looks like a loaf of bread. And that one – the one with the crazy deep-blue eyes. Those have to be lenses. Nod to that History teacher who is always late on duty.

  My legs are churning, but I maintain outward grace. I am a swan. Zen Zeus.

  A ball flew over the cage. I kicked back a curling cross, which landed perfectly on the lanky Year 11s’s head. They all cheered.

  Zen Zeus Zidane.

  I realised Salim was standing next to me, hands thrust deep into his pockets, beanie hat pulled far too far down his forehead, toes pointing inwards. We stood for a while, looking around in contented silence. I looked at the great leafless horse chestnut trees with the conkers beneath them like fallen Christmas baubles. It was such a nostalgic sight, conjuring childhood memories of a hundred breaks and lunchtimes, of string and vinegar and five-ers. I picked up a conker and turned it round in my hand.

  ‘What is that?’ he asked.

  ‘That, Salim, is a conker.’

  ‘What does it do?’

  ‘Well, Salim, this is …’

  What the fuck is a conker?

  ‘It’s a … well, a … a, you know …’

  ‘No. What is it?’

  ‘It’s a … a seed! Yup, that’s right. It’s a baby tree. A big acorn.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And in my day, we used to put string through them and varnish them in vinegar and then have competitions where you had to knock the other kid’s conker off the string.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, because it was fun.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you got to knock the other conker off and that showed that you had the biggest and best conker. It’s Social Darwinism, basically. “He who has the longest stick will knock down the most persimmons.”’

  ‘What’s a persimmon?’

  Why did I say that?

  ‘It’s like a plum.’

  ‘What’s Social Darwinism?’

  ‘The idea that you are born with the bigge
st conker. Or stick. So you either have it, or you don’t. So you must stay in the same place in which you are born. You cannot improve yourself in any way, say through education. What do you think of that idea?’

  He shrugged.

  Skip. Skip. Skip.

  Gradually, almost imperceptibly, one of his feet started to shuffle. Back and forward, back and forward, the soles of his Clarks dragging across the concrete in a smooth moonwalk.

  ‘Are you dancing?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘That looks like a great dance. Is there any more?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  His arms cut the air, while his whole torso flexed and his hips writhed. It was a startling unspooling of silky movement. I said I wished he had told me he was a world-famous Bollywood star. I realised VP was eyeballing me and gesturing for me to circulate, so I perambulated, like an Edwardian consumptive taking the air, walking round and around, feigning interest in the utterly repetitive.

  Skip. Skip. Skip. Skip. Skip.

  A ball slammed into my head. An unfeasibly tall boy held up his unfeasibly massive hands and said, ‘Sorry, Sir!’

  Wow, those Year 10s are getting sweaty. Glad I don’t have them next lesson. Oh shit, here comes Head. Head down. Walk with purpose. Grimace.

  ‘Sir.’

  He addressed me! That’s a first. Called me Sir!

  ‘Ahem. Hi.’

  Skip. Skip. Skip.

  The blue electric neon clock clicked from 10.19 to 10.20; the flirty History teacher turned on her heel with a wink; Salim shuffled back and forth; Mercedes skipped over the skipping rope; Donnie carried his origami model carefully across the playground; VP nodded for me to wind it all up. As the great chaotic murmuration was swept into order, I felt my chakras aligning and marvelled at the unity and rhythm of the universe.

  Who knew The Waste Man could be so uplifting?

  Lesson #711

  When This job Is Shit, It’s Hideous.

  But When You Have a Breakthrough, There’s Nothing Like It.

  What a job! The infinite variety! Every day I am a shapeshifter. I transmute from teacher to parent to therapist to sociologist to director to actor to game-show host to data manager to policeman to prison guard to alchemist to guru to arsehole to God to human. I am all of these things and none of them. I am whatever they decide I am.

  Teaching is one of our few natural functions, which we discover as we grow. We cannot escape it. The humanity, the nurturing, the joy of discovery. It is all we are here for.

  21

  Alexia

  She still wouldn’t say a damned word. Kept quiet the whole lesson. She was starting to annoy me.

  From the Starter through to the Plenary, she never put her hand up or offered her ideas, even though she could destroy us all. In group work, she drew out the best of her group – enabling them to speak and annotate the text and encouraging their ideas – without ever telling them what she thought. She was a guileful, subtle teacher. Far better than me. I often invited her to teach the class, but she demurred, so I had to bang on myself.

  After a double lesson one afternoon, I asked her why she never said anything, to which she replied she didn’t know. I told her she had to stop being so humble, that we were all desperate to hear her ideas. She said she felt weird speaking in class. I accused her of doing everyone a disservice – I think I went as far as to say she was neglecting her role as a Senior Student – it was her job to tell us, to show the rest of the class what an A* response sounded like; to model the way to think about literature.

  She said she found The Waste Man too difficult to talk about.

  ‘I know it’s difficult –’ I said.

  ‘No, it’s not that it’s difficult. It’s that it’s difficult to talk about. I find it overwhelming. It’s … shattering.’

  Oh.

  OH.

  OK.

  Then out of nowhere, she said, ‘You know when all our faces are blank and we’re all looking out the window?’

  I knew that sensation only too well.

  ‘It’s because you said something really deep and it’s sinking in.’

  I was struck dumb. You reach a stage with teaching where you think back on lessons, and you have just been going through the motions. Delivering. Facilitating. And yet, there are those wonderful moments scattered through the week where you go off on a tangent, or give them a personal anecdote, and you say something they never forget.

  Lesson #808

  They Remember the Tangents.

  ‘Yesterday,’ she said, ‘when you said that thing about Kubrick. How he had said, “The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent.” And how we have to find our own meaning, our own light in the vast darkness.’

  Who’d have thought it? Perhaps Meedja wasn’t so useless after all.

  Having puffed me up, she then knocked me down. She pointed out a mistake I had made. I asked her why she didn’t tell me at the time; she said, ‘I didn’t want to disrupt the class.’ I said, ‘That’s what we need! That’s what makes my life worth living! We need disruptors! For God’s sake, the world is full of all these idiots who call themselves disruptors. We are crying out for a genuinely intelligent disruptor.’

  Gradually, the disruption began. I could see her straining at the bit. She could do the essays in her sleep, and she got full marks for almost all of them. When I printed them off and handed them out for the rest of the class to Peer Assess, she sighed and told me to put them in the bin. She was frustrated by the formulaic nature of the essay mark schemes – we had to teach them to crowbar Assessment Objectives into their essays, giving them allotted marks for AO3 (critics) and AO4 (context), for instance. She had devised an essay formula, a paragraph formula, a sentence formula, and that was all there was to it. But English wasn’t Maths – it couldn’t fit into boxes this way. The mark schemes didn’t demand that she approach the texts on their terms. She started producing essays that were cynical in the way they knowingly undermined the tick-box expectations. She was in danger of self-destructing.

  To begin with, she didn’t care much for The Waste Man; it was too patriarchal, canonical, full of nonsense. Then Tom and I took a trip to the Globe to see a celebrated production of The Tempest by an experimental Eastern European company. I was wary since the trip to Oxford – not to mention the trip to see The Crucible in the suburbs where the actors blacked up – but I was sure this was a winner. It was youthful, dynamic, physical, and with an angry contemporary political dimension. If they wrote about this in the exam, they would surely get maximum brownie points.

  When we reached London Bridge, Tom told them he had a secret mission. But it wasn’t compulsory. Indeed, he wouldn’t advise it at all.

  This is how to negotiate with kids. It’s like my piano teacher said: If you want kids to play the piano, lock up the piano. Or you want to get a great essay on Wide Sargasso Sea, make them read Jane Eyre, then mention offhand after a lesson that there is a really dangerous, sexy, radical version set in the Caribbean, but we don’t have time for that now.

  We recited:

  Unreal City,

  Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

  I had not thought death had undone so many.

  They were cringing with embarrassment.

  Tom lectured them about the different eras of the city, and made them try to guess when each building had been built. We walked across the bridge into the oncoming tide of commuters and, a century on, it was still the case that ‘each man fixed his eyes before his feet’. Or rather, their phones. Tom challenged the kids to make eye contact with more than three people between the start and end of the bridge. The City boys couldn’t believe their luck when all these young women started giving them the eye. Alexia was totally game, unlike adults would have been. Suddenly, she came out of her shell and was connecting with every commuter, bringing them out of their prison.
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  Then we went to Tate Modern and stood on the bridge over the Turbine Hall. Tom told them to imagine being a child in this wide cavernous space and Alexia ran down and encouraged the rest of them to roll down the giant ramp. It was impudent and childish, and they did it without shame.

  At the Globe, we had to be groundlings, which meant standing up and getting ‘bare cold’. The ‘physical theatre’ element of the play was predominant; it wasn’t long before naked people were waving dustsheets, writhing and playing freeform jazz, shouting in a strange language. Prospero was portrayed as an incontinent, Ariel as a pill head, and Caliban as a member of the Taliban. The play had been heavily edited; some of Shakespeare’s imperishable language appeared on screens, but we were groundlings, so we missed most of it.

  On the train back – after I had swept the carriage for suspicious characters – we agreed that we shouldn’t do anything cultural ever again.

  But I assured them that reading the play would be different. Like The Waste Man, there was a way to make this real. To make it ours.

  *

  Once The Waste Man clicked, Alexia fell for Modernism hard.

  She was enthralled by Virginia Woolf; every time I walked past her, she was reading a different book: Dalloway in the Library, Lighthouse in the Canteen, Orlando on the picnic table, Room of One’s Own in the Common Room. It was infectious. The other students across the year saw her reading, and wanted to read too, because she was a high-achieving Senior Student who was also humble. Everyone liked and respected her. She talked to Ella about how she could link the superficialities of Jazz Age New York to the London of Dalloway; to Zainab about feminism and the stream-of-consciousness technique; she discussed Baldwin and Ellison with Isaac at lunchtime; she put a copy of The Golden Notebook in the Common Room. Alexia set up a book club after school and invited writers to come into school (which the SMs tried to block, but we worked out how to smuggle them in). She made reading cool.

  And so the books took root within them and the great flourishing began. Day by day, page by page, they learned to own the texts and to trust their own minds. We sat in the denuded Library, picking the last precious leaves off the tree.