I have worked hard today. And I feel guilty for saying that since I have been sitting on my arse all day and my father-in-law wouldn't find that an acceptable way of working. I repeatedly feel like I have to apologise for being a teacher, for not doing proper work. And today I wasn't even teaching; I was trying to help other teachers not be sacked for being ill.
It is emotionally draining and I am knackered after arguing over and over again that it is not fair that someone should lose their job for being off sick. This was all thrown into sharp relief by a programme on Radio 4 tonight.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b055g8zh
This was File on 4 and the title of the programme was "Sick of school". It analysed the recent workload survey and commented on the number of teachers who are off sick with stress, it suggested that perhaps we aren't all whingers, that perhaps we do work hard, even perhaps, that no end of holidays can ever compensate for working 14 hour days, 6 days a week.
What could be even more frustrating is that I can't help feeling that all our hard work is somehow misdirected. Teachers work hard because we love our job and love the kids we teach but we are being held responsible for every aspect of parenting and education and there are not enough hours in the day. Students spend less that 10% of the year at school, but every new initiative seems to fall to schools. Sexting, religious tolerance, citizenship. And GCSEs. 3 levels of progress. Literacy. Prepared for the workplace. Any workplace. It no longer seems to be any one else's responsiblity to train teenagers. It's hard to know what else we can do. In an interview on the Radio 4 "Today" programme on Monday morning Trevor Phillips was being interviewed about his new documentary "Things We Won't Say About Race Which Are True" http://www.channel4.com/info/press/programme-information/things-we-wont-say-about-race-that-are-true
and made some really interesting comments. He said that it was difficult to get certain statistics involving race acknowledged publicly. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02m37ld
He said "The big educational success story of the last ten year has been London schools which used to be at the bottom of the league tables and now it's at the top...the high performing ethnic minority groups Chinese, Indian, African and Polish have exploded in numbers". He was suggesting that we could really learn from this and rather than see this as merely a correlation in numbers, explore the reasons for the good performance of these ethnic groups and learn lessons from them in how to achieve this success for all ethnic groups.
It makes me wonder if race is the only reason that this story hasn't gained greater attention from the press and teachers' groups. This also suggests that a school's performance may not be solely down to the teaching or the management, but may, believe it or not, have something to do with the social background of the children we teach. In fact, the family or ethnic background of the students may have more to do with the results than the teachers. Who knew?
I am not trying to suggest that all the work we do is without merit, we can produce all sorts of wonderfully positive effects, but I see my year 11s for 3 hours a week, and on Monday morning, one of them always stay in bed after a night of GTA. On Thursday afternoon; Neil always spends 15 minutes with his head on the desk saying how tired he is, 15 minutes longing for KFC and 15 minutes asking if we can watch a video. Sometimes he uses paragraphs and I want to ruffle his hair.
But that's the relaxing part of the job. I'd rather deal with an irrational 15 year old than an academy chain who don't want to pay middle aged women for their experience when they've had surgery and need a few more weeks to recover. That's stressful.
Wednesday 18 March 2015
Friday 13 March 2015
Equal Rites
Lots has happened this week, topped off by the fact that as usual, I am sitting watching Comic Relief and sobbing my eyes out as I always watch the documentary bits out of guilt. This is despite coming home so tired after work this evening that I was sobbing into the washing up as I felt too weary to even stand up. I couldn't do a proper job; how do surgeons do it? How do fire men and women? Police officers? Those poor factory workers who have to work nights? My friend who works for Coca Cola and does the same shifts as the factory workers? Hopeless. The last time I felt like this I was waking up 3 or 4 times a night to feed a crying baby and then getting up at 5 with a toddler and walking another one to school a couple of hours later.
I want to talk about divorce settlements; women being told to get a job or claiming their husband's post-divorce income, but yesterday Terry Pratchett died.
As a massively geeky teenager whose best friends were boys, I had to do something to fit in. It couldn't be computer games, although I spent a shameful number of Saturday afternoons watching my brother and my friends play Doom or Quake or possibly even the first GTA, I'm not sure, it was the late eighties, perhaps most of the time was spent waiting for the games to load. I watched (and loved) Alien and Aliens, Terminator and Terminator 2, I saw Metallica in concert and owned an cd single by Joe Satriani, I attempted to play a game involving lots of talking and throwing multi coloured dice with an eccentric number of faces - that wasn't going anywhere. I couldn't quite bring myself to read Lord of the Rings so the compromise was Discworld.
I was resistant at first. This was taking the aspirational geekdom to a whole new level. Reading fantasy? Time to strap on a wooden sword and run through the woods in leather skirts? I was missing a trick actually, had I been able to overcome my crippling lack of self confidence I could have been a warrior goddess in an armour corset, a bosomy wench or a purple velvet-swathed sourcer-ductress and I would have had my pick of pale and hopeful unshaven-yet-strangely-smooth warriors. But I was wrong. This was fantasy, but not as I had previously perceived it through the lens of not actually having read it.
The Discworld is a wonderful place with fantastic characters. It's a parallel world which is flat, balanced on the back of four elephants, riding on the back of Great A'Tuin a giant turtle swimming through space. Ok, so far, so normal fantasy, but it is so much more, Over the series of thirty something / forty (?) books Pratchett wrote satire, parody, pastiche while simultaneously creating a unique cast of characters beautifully delineated and developed over the entire series. If you were fond of Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg you could read the witches' books, if, like me, your favourite books were the detective style Guards! Guards! series with the hard drinking, seen it all Captain Vimes you could read those. And if you like Death - well - you could find him in every book, but the ones which explored his complicated relationship with his adopted daughter Susan were some of the best. I loved the satirical representation of the corrupt government of the Patrician and the insight into Macbeth that the witches' books suggested. Clever literary allusions were sprinkled throughout the books but not enough to spoil brilliantly crafted stories.
Of course, as the only girl in that group of tree huggers meant that I was, even then, rather taken by the female characters in the books. There were many strong male characters in the books, many of the main characters were men and when there were female characters they were often cast in conventional female roles - witches, dominant queens, daughters, supportive wives, but there are also many lead women with their personalities as carefully drawn as any of the male roles. In one of the very first books a girl tries to gain admission to the male enclave of the Unseen University - it's called "Equal Rites". I am quite keen on Angua, a great police officer brought in with the city's desire to recruit minorities, not because she's a woman - because she's a werewolf.
Granny and Nanny firmly operate within the roles ascribed to women, but they have no problem controlling the men, and Pratchett very consciously challenges the maiden, mother, crone / whore stereotypes perpetuated throughout literature. But Adora, Angua and most of all Susan take control in their own right and have their own place on the Discworld, it was certainly a place I wanted to be.
He aten't ded. Not while we have the books.
I want to talk about divorce settlements; women being told to get a job or claiming their husband's post-divorce income, but yesterday Terry Pratchett died.
As a massively geeky teenager whose best friends were boys, I had to do something to fit in. It couldn't be computer games, although I spent a shameful number of Saturday afternoons watching my brother and my friends play Doom or Quake or possibly even the first GTA, I'm not sure, it was the late eighties, perhaps most of the time was spent waiting for the games to load. I watched (and loved) Alien and Aliens, Terminator and Terminator 2, I saw Metallica in concert and owned an cd single by Joe Satriani, I attempted to play a game involving lots of talking and throwing multi coloured dice with an eccentric number of faces - that wasn't going anywhere. I couldn't quite bring myself to read Lord of the Rings so the compromise was Discworld.
I was resistant at first. This was taking the aspirational geekdom to a whole new level. Reading fantasy? Time to strap on a wooden sword and run through the woods in leather skirts? I was missing a trick actually, had I been able to overcome my crippling lack of self confidence I could have been a warrior goddess in an armour corset, a bosomy wench or a purple velvet-swathed sourcer-ductress and I would have had my pick of pale and hopeful unshaven-yet-strangely-smooth warriors. But I was wrong. This was fantasy, but not as I had previously perceived it through the lens of not actually having read it.
The Discworld is a wonderful place with fantastic characters. It's a parallel world which is flat, balanced on the back of four elephants, riding on the back of Great A'Tuin a giant turtle swimming through space. Ok, so far, so normal fantasy, but it is so much more, Over the series of thirty something / forty (?) books Pratchett wrote satire, parody, pastiche while simultaneously creating a unique cast of characters beautifully delineated and developed over the entire series. If you were fond of Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg you could read the witches' books, if, like me, your favourite books were the detective style Guards! Guards! series with the hard drinking, seen it all Captain Vimes you could read those. And if you like Death - well - you could find him in every book, but the ones which explored his complicated relationship with his adopted daughter Susan were some of the best. I loved the satirical representation of the corrupt government of the Patrician and the insight into Macbeth that the witches' books suggested. Clever literary allusions were sprinkled throughout the books but not enough to spoil brilliantly crafted stories.
Of course, as the only girl in that group of tree huggers meant that I was, even then, rather taken by the female characters in the books. There were many strong male characters in the books, many of the main characters were men and when there were female characters they were often cast in conventional female roles - witches, dominant queens, daughters, supportive wives, but there are also many lead women with their personalities as carefully drawn as any of the male roles. In one of the very first books a girl tries to gain admission to the male enclave of the Unseen University - it's called "Equal Rites". I am quite keen on Angua, a great police officer brought in with the city's desire to recruit minorities, not because she's a woman - because she's a werewolf.
Granny and Nanny firmly operate within the roles ascribed to women, but they have no problem controlling the men, and Pratchett very consciously challenges the maiden, mother, crone / whore stereotypes perpetuated throughout literature. But Adora, Angua and most of all Susan take control in their own right and have their own place on the Discworld, it was certainly a place I wanted to be.
He aten't ded. Not while we have the books.
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