A War On Teachers
Thursday, 7th January,
2021
Remember
when you couldn’t go out unless you were wearing hi-vis spandex for your daily
hit of exercise and that time when you could only get in your car for ‘essential
travel’ to the supermarket to load up your boot with ‘survivor gin’? And that
time when your kids were at home being ‘home-schooled’ – that was fun wasn’t
it? Oh, and that time when you had to do yoga at home with your son’s drill music
invading the newly opened calm space in your head that you had just worked so
hard to create? Yeah, remember that? Phew! Thank goodness that was last year
when nobody, not even our elite government cabinet taskforce, was prepared for
the coronavirus thingymabob… Wait, hold on, is anybody feeling a bit Groundhog
Day?
*
Hello again,
dear friends. How’s your general mood on the following scale:
Resigned/Sad/Distressed/Depressed/Woebegone/Disconsolate/Morbidly
Afraid
Of
course, it is possible to move back and forth on this scale in one day and
experience the whole gamut of emotions featured here so don’t feel limited to
choosing just one. Can anybody else hear that distant roar? Yep, that’s the mental
health tsunami picking up speed somewhere in the mid-Atlantic and it’s going to
be the wave that keeps on giving. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to
offer you any advice on how to avoid being tossed about in the emotional undertow
of the pandemic but what I can offer is a wonderful glimpse inside our current
educational system, an insider’s view of what a school looks like right now and
the general emotional vibes coming off the staff.
*
So, let’s
rewind to before Christmas. At the primary school where I work two days a week,
there were a few staff off in the final couple of weeks due to being contacted
by test and trace and told to isolate. Classes were full, though, and nothing
could stop the children looking forward to Christmas. The Christmas show
normally performed to parents had been filmed in short sections and put
together to make a film that was put onto the school’s YouTube channel. It was
a great effort but not the same as being in the hall and listening to 400
children dressed up as angels, sheep, etc and singing their hearts out which
can make even the flintiest-hearted a bit dewy-eyed.
It was
interesting to go into other schools on my other days of the week as a supply
teacher and see the differences in hygiene measures introduced to keep the
virus at bay. In one school I was told I didn’t need to keep my mask on as it
wasn’t school policy. I kept it on anyway; surely as a teacher working in
several different schools, I was a walking bio-hazard, carrying invisible virus
particles stuck to my lungs like the sticky burrs we keep having to comb out of
our puppy’s fur? One school had a complicated one-way system for moving round
the school that meant I couldn’t find my way back to the classroom after taking
the children out to the playground. Another school wanted the tables sprayed
down and cleaned three times a day. Every school had a strict hand-washing
regime and all the kids, no matter what age, were, by Christmas, pretty well-drilled.
Kids are
remarkably resilient and adapt to change more easily than you might think. They
had grown used to sitting in rows facing the front and not sharing the pens,
pencils, rulers, etc etc Apart from the oldest primary aged children, I doubt,
looking at them play and interact, that any of them gave the virus much
thought. However, any teacher that managed to successfully keep the children
from touching each other, putting things in their mouths absent-mindedly, giving
their friend a hug, ending up in the toilet at the same time as another child probably
just doesn’t exist. They are social creatures and the younger they are, the
more they feel the need to roll around on top of each other in a giddy giggling
pile.
And those
teachers – how were they looking and feeling before Christmas? I’ll tell you:
floored. The autumn term is always the longest (in weeks) and the hardest as
you set up your classroom, try and establish your routines with your class, get
to know them individually, devise ways to keep the most hard-to-reach engaged,
and prepare all the assessment folders and administrative gubbins that you will
need over the course of the academic year. And that is a normal year.
Now
overlay everything with a pandemic. A teacher is legally (and morally)
responsible for the children in their care every day. To keep them safe is the
bottom line. Any parent who has thrown a birthday party in their own home for more
than about seven young children knows that a couple of hours of managing these
little egos and their frantic energy levels is just about possible if it only
happens once and you have 364 days to recover before, perhaps/perhaps not,
doing it again. Now imagine doing it with an invisible, highly-transmissible, in
some cases deadly, virus in the room. Still going to go ahead with the pirate/princess
party? No, of course you won’t.
But teachers
are resilient, too. We put up with government mandates all the time, no matter
how unworkable or unnecessary they seem to us. If we do have the temerity to
complain, then we are denounced as intransigent or left-leaning rebels. I’ll
put that last idea into context. With primary schools due to reopen to all pupils
as usual at the beginning of January, all the teaching unions, every one of
them, asked their members to not go in, to send a letter to their headteachers
that explained they felt it was unsafe to go in to their workplace due to the
high number of infections in the community and thereby invoking their right to
remain away until it was safe to return.
I felt conflicted
reading these communications from the unions. I agreed that schools were unsafe
and their opening would lead to the virus taking further hold in the community.
I felt that opening schools would be putting the children at risk and, even
though they were unlikely to fall ill, they would quickly transmit the virus to
their parents and family. On the other hand, I felt my duty to go and teach if
the school was open and the children were there. This is the same moral imperative
I have always felt and that has led to myself and teachers all over the country
going in to school and teaching even when feeling unwell; only flu and snow
have tended to prevent me from going in.
So, I
emailed my headteacher and explained that although I had serious misgivings
about the situation, I would be in as usual. On the Monday, there were three
(out of about forty) staff not there. All of them have serious health
conditions that put them at risk or children or partners who are at serious
risk. The rest of the staff were there again, their sense of duty to the
children overpowering their own fears and the advice of their own unions.
The
teachers, as usual, had been in over the Christmas break to change all the displays
in their classrooms for the new topics they were teaching. Resources were
printed, photocopied and lying in wait. Boris had made it clear that primary
schools were going to be open as usual and so all preparations had been made. Nearly
all of the children came in, too, with perhaps a dozen kept home because of
parents’ fears.
Then,
that night, Bozza announces the lockdown and closure of schools to all except
keyworker and vulnerable children. You don’t need me to tell you what this does
to the mood in school, simply imagine starting a war and making all
preparations, sending the troops over the top and the aerial bombardments and
the ships and planes all mobilized, with all the sacrifice and heroism involved,
and then calling it off after one day. One fucking day! (I am not trying to
paint teachers as soldiers but it seems an apt metaphor for the old World War
One adage that the men were ‘lions led by donkeys’).
Imagine
our (or any) headteacher throughout this. First, you have the possibility you
will have pupils without the staff to teach them due to unions recommending something
different to government. Then you open, despite any misgivings you may
personally have about the wisdom/safety of this. Then, immediately, you are
told to close and move all the learning online – for tomorrow. On Monday
morning, Boris Johnson was on Sky News telling the world that schools were safe
and it was vital to keep them open for children’s welfare. By Monday night, he
had his solemn face back on and it was ‘sadly’ this and ‘alas’ for that. The
teachers’ WhatsApp group was ‘lively’ that evening and some of the language
might have been considered slightly fruity to the ears of the average primary
age child.
In
school, it was rather surreal to have the school full on one day and nearly
empty on the next; kids, now you see them, now you don’t. I had a brief chat
with our head standing in the dinner hall where there were about 200 dinner
servings for about 60 children, the orders being placed for the week as if we
were open normally. When I told her that I didn’t envy her responsibilities with
all the constant last-minute changes, she admitted to having a permanent ‘tension
headache’. Everything was so last minute, she said. She is a brilliant head and
she works hard to look after her staff’s wellbeing but who is looking out for
hers? If she walks away from the profession, I wouldn’t blame her but it would
be a terrible loss.
A few short
weeks ago, I followed a link from the Guardian website that alluded to a Sun
columnist weighing in against teachers. I couldn’t resist. Sometimes, my anger
likes more fuel poured on the fire and here it was. I will provide a few choice
quotes from the piece by Rod Liddle:
“Teaching
unions are now insisting that the schools break up for Christmas earlier than
usual. This is so teachers can avoid “stress”. What stress, exactly? The stress
of working for a living?”
“Is there any profession in the country which has had an easier, stress-free
nine months than the teaching profession?”
But has any body of people lowered itself more
in the eyes of the public than our teachers, spurred on by their unions? I
can’t think of one offhand.”
“What the teaching unions have made abundantly clear is that teaching children is at the
very bottom of their to-do list.”
“Our country has let its children down. They have come bottom
of our list for too long. Let 2021 be the year we put them first. All agreed?
Good. Now, somebody tell the teachers.”
While
I am dispelling myths about lazy, feckless teachers, let me tell you that in
fourteen years of teaching, I averaged a 50-60 hour week. I did not work from
8: 45am to 3pm each day and then saunter down the beach. I worked evenings and
weekends. Some days, I started at 7am and finished at 10pm with short breaks
only for food. I wasn’t in it for the money (starting on £21,000 approx. with several
pay freezes imposed for public sector workers) or for the Post-it notes. I
taught children because I like them. I find them great fun and interesting and
curious and I wanted to be someone who could filter the world to their consciousnesses
with empathy, excitement, wonder, and humour.
No
child I taught will remember how they learnt to use a fronted adverbial in my
classroom and instead, I hope that they remember the general atmosphere in the
classroom and the time I took 45 minutes to do the register in the style of an
American motivational gym instructor or the African call-and-response song we
sang on Fridays before we went home as a moment of joy and bonding even in the
hardest of weeks when our tempers had frayed.
So,
Rod Liddle. I put this to you: has anyone had it easier these past few months
than newspaper columnists? No shortage of things to write about, surely, but I
suppose taking aim at teachers, who are largely voiceless in the public
discourse, is pretty easy. And, working from home, are we, Rod? Maybe, now that
you are not in the office, a four-hour lunch break is possible with a few malt
whiskies to help you get typing again in the afternoon, your fake righteousness
now bubbling away like a wet fart.
Do you fancy a job swap, Rod, old chum? If teachers have it so easy, maybe you would like to give it a go. I don’t mind sitting at a computer, typing my thoughts onto the page, in fact, I’m doing it right now! I do quite fancy sitting at the back of the classroom like an OFSTED inspector with a clipboard, whilst you are giving ‘stress-free’ teaching a go, making notes on your general incompetence and then giving you some verbal ‘feedback’. I’ll give you some time to think about it and maybe to have a shave and change your incontinence pants.
And
while we are on OFSTED, let’s save a final thought for two more of my favourite
people: Amanda Spielman (head of OFSTED) and Gavin Williamson (Education
Secretary). I’ll start with Amanda who is often on the radio as I drive to work
and who seems to be approaching education from a philosophical viewpoint somewhere
in the broad vicinity of Rod Liddle. She always manages to sound perpetually disappointed
at the lack of effort schools are making to educate children.
Back
at the beginning of the first lockdown, she made a lot of noise about how
schools weren’t allowing enough children to attend whilst at the same time government
advice was to seat them with a minimum of 1 distance between each of their
green, glowing, virus-laden bodies. I worked out that even in the biggest classroom
in our school, you could sit 12 children in this way. Amanda was not deterred;
headteachers needed to be more ‘flexible’ in their thinking, she said, whilst declining
to offer any details (sitting them on the roof of the school?) More recently,
she has been declaiming that some children had lost some basic skills, because
of the interruption of their education, such as ‘using a knife and fork’.
Now,
teachers have a wide remit and I have, during my time as a teacher, taught the
following: Indian Dance, Buddhist Philosophy, finding the missing angle in a triangle,
basic coding for computers, Galileo’s refutation of Aristotle’s notion that
heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, swimming, how to tie a reef
knot, cycling proficiency, the Viking invasions and pillages of the northern
monasteries, and rather a lot more, but I have never, not even in Reception,
taught a child to use a knife and fork.
How
to pick up and hold a pencil correctly, yes. How not to eat with your hands, no.
And when I work back from Amanda’s comment, I end up with the following
equation. Lockdowns = lack of formal school-based learning/increased time at
home to learn practical skills. If anything, lockdowns should have meant lots
of children came back to school able to tie their own shoelaces, bake a cake,
identify different trees, ride a bike, change a plug, build a rocket, solve the
Goldback conjecture, and yes, use a fucking knife and fork without stabbing
oneself in the eye or cutting one’s own hand off.
Extrapolating
from Amanda’s complaint, we must actually imagine that some parents were so
overwhelmed by trying to home-school their child, that they abandoned the use
of cutlery altogether and fed their children from dog bowls placed near the
bins at the back of the house.
Let’s
move on to Gavin, shall we? When Boris Johnson won the Conservatives a
landslide victory in the 2019 election, the appointment of his cabinet must
have seemed like a royal doling out of favours. In normal times, we would probably
never have heard of Gavin Williamson and Matt Hancock who must have thought it
was going to be such a wheeze, heading up a government ministry of little
import with Brexit taking up all of the available politi-space for a good
while. Gavin could cook up some scheme about teaching northerners to speak
proper English and Matt could make a little bit of noise about poor people
eating less sugar and being less fat. Instead, they have both had to preside
over the most royal of shitshows.
A
quick look back at Gavin’s highlight reel conjures up the following:
·
First lockdown
inspires a declaration that schools are not doing enough to engage children in remote
learning
·
Failure to deliver
the laptops to children without equipment to engage in remote learning
·
Decision to let an
algorithm chew up teacher assessments and spit them out for GCSE and A level
results
·
U-turn on algorithm
decision after it ends up downgrading most vulnerable and minority ethnic
children’s results
·
Decision not to
sponsor the funding of school meals for children in need in summer holidays
·
U-turn on school
meals in holidays after a footballer tells him off
·
Decision not to
sponsor the funding of school meals for children in need during second lockdown
·
U-turn after being
told off by the same footballer
·
Threatens to sue some
secondary schools in London who want to shut three days before the end of term
because of high infection rates in the community
·
A week later,
declares secondary schools must become test centres for all their pupils at beginning
of January (come on, teachers, you’ve had your feet up all year!)
·
Decision that secondary
schools must not open for the first two weeks of January because of high infection
rates in whole of the country
·
Decision that primary
schools will open anyway because little people can only carry the virus and
spread it but will not die and primary teachers are two-a-penny, anyway
·
One day later, decision
that primary schools must shut immediately. Little people are suddenly glowing
bright green again and teachers have decided they are not as expendable as the
government thinks
·
The next day, Gavin
declares that all schools must provide 3-5 hours on remote learning a day and
if they don’t, then they are to report the school to OFSTED straight away who
will go in wearing their hazmat suits and conduct an immediate inspection to include
the new cutlery test to determine if children really can use a knife and fork
What a year he’s had when you boil it down like that! What an
advert for education! Can you see the stream of wannabe teachers, bright-eyed
and bushy-tailed, all ready to march onto the frontline and get a taste of the
high excitement…? No, of course you can’t.
So, if you’re going to take aim, Rod/Amanda/Gavin, then try
this commonly held, well-trodden, process: cogitate, surmise, research,
collate, present. Whatever you do, do not try cogitate-present. Only the higher
order species can conflate the process, and Rod/Amanda/Gavin – you’re just not
there yet.
Latest data for the UK (as of 12pm):
Infected: 2.89
million
Deaths: 78,508
People I know who are infected: Nobody.
Song of the Day: ‘Nobody’s Fool’ – Shakey Graves
Comments
Post a Comment