Bad Grammar

Nicky Morgan wants more grammar schools.

http://schoolsweek.co.uk/grammar-school-expansion-plans-in-at-least-ten-10-new-areas/

They are called "extensions" or "annexes" or some kind of semantic rubbish but they are grammar schools.

My mum went to Grammar School, my dad didn't - he went to Secondary Modern or technical school, but he went to University and my mum didn't, because her parents didn't even think of it.  Most girls didn't and certainly not working class girls from Liverpool, maybe my dad only went because his dad had died and he had a reason to get away.

I am not suggesting that all types of education are right for everyone and shoving everyone through a system of GCSEs where there is only one level and you have to get a C or a 6 or whatever the hell it is called for anyone to give a damn or you have to get an A or an A* or a top 9 to go to the "top" universities because how else will we know if you're the right kind of person or not is wrong.  But there is something going badly wrong with our education system now.  The new examinations make sure that only the kind of person who can retain information (or learn facts) can pass the right kind of examination.  

Alan Bennett had it right a few months ago when he said

Bennett, who was educated at a grammar school in Leeds, told an audience at Cambridge University: "Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should. And if their education ends without it dawning on them, then that education has been wasted.

"My objection to private education is simply put. It is not fair. And to say that nothing is fair is not an answer. Governments, even this one, exist to make the nation's circumstances more fair, but no government, whatever its complexion, has dared to tackle private education."

Private education, free schools, grammar schools.  The only kind of education system that can make sense is to make sure that we all go to the same schools, where teachers are paid the same and have the same motivation to succeed. Not to run these schools like businesses should be a given, it does not make sense to take away a more expensive teacher because he or she is more expensive.  A child who cannot achieve a grade C can still make progress and that has to have some value.  If politicians' children went to the local comprehensives then would they really allow things to go on as they are?  

Private education does not merely ensure that students receive the "best" education, and that is debatable, it ensures that they make the right connections, that they stay within their own circles  and makes sure that the rest of stay where we are as well. The child who gets in to the grammar school on some kind of scholarship still does not have those connections, unless his or her parents can make those connections work, the sailing club, the golf course, then that child is no more likely to access those higher echelons of society than the rest of us.  And what does that child have to give or lose?  Cameron humiliating himself with a pig gives important people power over him, but what he gained in return; their support, their loyalty, bound up in a secret bond of trust that the rest of us cannot access is far beyond a few newspaper headlines and Charlie Brooker jokes.  

This government are doing all they can to maintain the status quo not to change it, or even to revert to a simpler time - to me it sounds a little like feudal law and the middle ages.  

Bread, circuses and mind control

As often happens it takes a Radio 4 programme to clarify my thinking.  Dan doesn't really believe in literature, as he's arguing that his job his harder than mine, that the A levels he teaches are more intellectually rigorous than those that I teach. What's the point, in other words, of studying literature? Or Media Studies?  Or anything else I am good at.  (Actually I am beginning to doubt how good I am, but that's another story.)

One of these arguments was suggested to me as I listened to the Radio 4 afternoon drama on Friday.  I love listening and rarely get to.  However, I was on my home from work and I heard most of it in the car.  I missed the end, as usual, but I wouldn't even have heard the start had I not left work so late because I was running around sorting out trips and marking.  That's the best thing about part time, getting to work for free when I stop being paid.

The drama was The Liberty Cap. (The Liberty Cap) about an experiment using hallucinogens to treat depression and I was inspired by the objections that main character had to the treatment.  That has to be part of the point of literature of course.  Or Media Studies for that matter.  It allows us to empathise, to put ourselves in someone else's shoes, to explore an area of emotion that we have no access to under normal circumstances in a safe environment.  But what he said made perfect sense to me.

I visited the doctor's.  It doesn't happen often, not by choice.  If I am ever really ill then I try to get an emergency appointment and by the time I get one I tend to be better.  This time the doctor asked me to return.  I was concerned I might be depressed.  The doctor said I wasn't depressed, I was a teacher and my misery was a perfectly reasonable reaction to what was happening around me.

However, as this drama made me aware, depression is also a perfect reaction.  The government have introduced massive cuts in tax credits, they have reintroduced grammar schools and that is the effect.  They are ensuring the people who could do something about it - like the trade unions are too depressed to do anything about it.  It's a form of mind control.  Gone is the idea of bread and circuses; although Strictly, Bake Off and Britain's ... Factor or whatever it's called are certainly fulfilling their remit as opiate.  And the rise in the use of food banks seems to suggest that it's better to starve us all into submission that to keep us sate.  Instead there is a focus on the steel industry and teaching, both of which have dared to raise our unionised heads above the parapets. The new union legislation that the government are trying to get through parliament is trying to ensure that we have to get a mandate for half a day's action greater than the government have to make the legislation that forbids us from doing it.

So perhaps that's the best reason for keeping reading and watching.  Something has to keep me dreaming and something else has to keep me from being depressed, because I intend to keep fighting.

Leading Ladies

Patricia Arquette used her academy award acceptance speech to call for equal pay.  We all kind of agree with that don't we?  Women and men should be paid equally for doing the same jobs, or equivalent jobs?  Except looking after children and the house, that should always be done for free, by everyone, equally.  Ah.  Well because that doesn't happen, it all sort of makes sense that it doesn't happen everywhere else.

None the less Patricia Arquette was pretty brave to say that out loud.  Maybe she's got bigger balls - sorry - tits than me (that's no better is it? Especially given her personal attributes) but I'm used to the roll of the eyes when I "go off on one" and I usually have an audience of about ten, not thousands.

I love her a bit though.  Some of my favourite things involve Patricia Arquette - True Romance in my 20s and not just for Christian Slater, Medium in my 30s and now, finally CSI:Cyber, just when I thought I had seen all the CSI they bring out one with a female lead.

And Patricia Arquette is quite a lead.  She is typical of CSI leads - Mac, Grissom, Horatio, they are solitary workaholics with little family life or romantic longevity.  I keep forgetting she isn't Allison from Medium with three daughters and the wonderful Joe.  So although she is a successful boss, who has apparently sacrificed other aspects of her personal life, so have people in equivalent roles.

I love the fact that in Medium, Arquette defended her weight gain and apparent dowdiness by reasoning that a busy mother and working wife would reasonably look like her.  Love her!  Greatest defence of my now 5 year baby weight.  Until I saw a picture of the real Allison DuBois, on whom the character was based who looks like a very glamorous actor.

In Holes, she plays the strong independent school mistress who avenges her lover's death with an equally strong Sigourney Weaver as the the other adult lead.  But the character's motivation is still a fundamentally feminine one.  Are we really only capable of springing into action in defence of our lovely husbands / boyfriends / sons?  Do none of us have any feeling for the sisterhood or society in general?  I suppose that's where Riley in CSI comes in, she is fighting for justice and the American Way or truth or was that Judge Dredd?

Even the lastest Amazon Prime Series I have started watching has Rami Malek as a secret hacker vigilante (Mr. Robot), another male lead who seems to be simultaneously keen to bring down national corporations and defend the weak and feeble women in his life who keep making bad relationship choices.  In the first episode he made a bad choice with one woman providing sex and drugs, saw a female counsellor who didn't really do a good job as she was distracted by a man and embarrassed his co-worker and best friend / secret crush in front of a room of her male bosses.  (There is a link; Christian Slater is in it.)

There can't be equal pay if there are not equal roles and so at the moment Arquette has a point.  I think it's Dyer who talks about the constructionist approach.  Does the media have to change people's perceptions or does the society it reflects have to change?  "Ah, solving that question / Brings the priest and the doctor / In their long coats / Running over the fields."

 

"I'm drowning"

The start of this school year has been a year like no other.  Every July I make a solemn promise to myself to work consistently every evening in order to prepare myself for September, and every August 31st I wonder what on earth I did with my time.

I am still not sure.  I think  the children just stayed up an hour or two later, and by 10pm I was snoring on the sofa.  I didn't even manage a glass of wine, I now officially drink less in the holidays that I do in term time.

But this year we were busy.  The rules have changed.  The syllabus has changed.  We have to teach a different A level.  GCSE is now all examination.  Oh, and  we now have to move to life beyond levels.  So while we are insisting that our year 10s and 11s understand exactly which level they are doomed to achieve we are telling our year 8s and 7s that they are better than levels.  They are "Emerging" learners.  "Emerging" from what I am not yet sure.  "But what does it mean?" I ask.  "It's about a level 4a."  Oh.

When I came back to school this time we hadn't quite finished all of our schemes of work,  So I am planning day to day, in the hope that someone else in my department may finish writing their contribution before I do.  "I'm drowning!" the young teacher back from Maternity leave tells me.  "It's getting on top of me!" an experienced teacher tells me.  "I'm sinking beneath all this." our new male teacher says.  All these metaphors, can you tell we're an English department?

But at some point I am going to get observed, and my year 10s need to know what their target grades are, otherwise how will they know if they are under-achieving.
"You're targeted a level 6."  I tell one.
"But I only got a band 4 for my work!" clever little Precious in the front row says, disheartened.
"Ah, no, that's ok." I say, "That's a band 4, that's our new exam board, it's about C."
"What's a C?" she asks, her clever eyes shining with tears behind her designer glasses (clear lenses).
"That's a band 6... I mean a level 6."
"Oh... I see..." she replies, sniffing uncertainly.

I am so glad she does.  I don't think I am quite there yet.

A new red dawn?

Jeremy Corbyn has done it. Somehow, against the odds, he has been elected the new leader of the Labour party.  And Tom Watson has also redeemed himself.

That means all sorts of things.  Not the least of which is that the (few) opinion polls and the general reporting of the media was right in their supposition that he would win.  Just a few months ago we were all reeling from the inaccuracy of the predictions of a general election, but this time they were spot on.  The fewer the polls, the greater the accuracy?  Not sure how that works.

I was listening to The Week in Westminster with Steve Richards on Radio 4 as the results were broadcast and once again heard Labour MPs acting as harbingers of doom on the future of the Labour party under a socialist labour.  It wasn't just sexism and nylon that was bad in the 80s kids.  The left was loony and even Kate Bush lied to me - Ken was not the man that we all needed.

Hang on though, Kate Bush was making brilliant records in the early 80s.  Dire Straits were amazing.  (Not cool, I admit, but still amazing,)  So perhaps there could have been something good?  I don't want to get too convoluted here ( although the Kate Bush references could carry on) but John Speller in particular on Radio 4 was promising a disastrous future and 18 years of Tory rule.  I was around in the 80s, but many of these new voters were not and most of the people in power in the 80s are not still in power either.  The phenomenal level of interest that the Labour leadership election has attracted was first signalled by the number of sympathy joiners to the Liberal Democrat Party in the immediate aftermath of the election.  That shocked many people into taking an interest in politics that they hadn't before - perhaps even in a party that wanted electoral reform when they saw how unrepresentative the "first past the post" system could be.

In other words some of these people are new voters.  In other words some of these people are not the type of people that John Speller believes are involved.  He went so far as to suggest that they were not representative and perhaps even only represented a narrow section of London centric society.  (Admittedly another hobby horse of mine, but in this case I am not sure he was right.)  He claimed that the new voters in the Labour party were mostly in the south-east and that perhaps that meant that the usual Labour supporters in the North and the Midlands were consequently under- represented in the vote.  If the vote had taken place as it did before Ed Milliband  change the system in 2012, then Westminster Labour MPs would have had a greater say and he said that they carried the weight of the constituents who had voted for them.

While it is true that we isolate ourself in our own little social media bubbles; surrounding ourselves with like-minded people on our social networks, blocking any of our "stupid" acquaintances who inadvertently share a "Britain First" post, reinforcing our own ideologies because it is nicer to be proved right than wrong; that also means that we perceive ourselves to be equally entitled to a say in the way things happen.  It isn't just "X factor" culture that encourages us to vote, it is the breakdown of the social barriers that allows us to believe that we are more important as we write blogs to share our views without an editor to tell us we are being libellous or simply talking rubbish and that we are as important as the celebrities and politicians (Tom Watson again) whose Twitter accounts we follow.  We can see their real unmediated words.  We expect a say.  This makes the electoral system difficult at the moment and means that people noticed when UKIP - for which they had voted, didn't increase its share of seats.

I am Northern and living in the Midlands and I would not have a vote in the leadership election under the old system as my constituency MP is Conservative.  I could have had a vote if I had wanted to register as an affiliate member of the Labour Party.  There are many voters in Northamptonshire who voted for Labour but who are not represented by their current Conservative Constituency MPs because we do not have a system of PR.  There are also many voters in Northamptonshire who were pretty sure that the Tories would get in in Northamptonshire again and chose not to vote for Labour because they were not left wing enough.  If your protest vote isn't going to count it doesn't matter who you vote for.  So I resent being told that the Labour party which should be my representative; as a working person from working class roots, from Liverpool, growing up in an industrial Lancashire mill town,  needs to adapt itself to the electorate in order to win.  Stop trying to poach votes from the Tories and start taking back the working people who think that UKIP are the new spokespeople for working people, from the Green party who seem to have taken some of their ideas from the Socialist Workers, from the Liberal Democrats who used to seem a bit apart from two party Punch and Judy Politics.  And most importantly of all, do what Corbyn seems to have already done, take votes from the people who up until recently couldn't care less about politics and made sweeping statements about how it didn't matter.  More people didn't vote for the Conservatives than voted for the Conservatives, and even more people didn't vote for anyone at all.

I don't know if this is a new dawn for politics in general, but it's nice to feel like we're in the middle of something exciting.

Genderation Gap

I have just returned after a week with the Grandparents.  We stayed in an old farmhouse in Hay-on-Wye.  It was a gorgeous building, beautifully simply decorated and rented by a nice man, my age, who grew up on the farm.

However, it transpires that I missed my husband an awful lot - he did not join us for reasons that will become clear.  I also need a Starbucks within daily commute, a good internet connection, a phone signal... oh heavens, what have I become?  And what I need most of all is a daily drive that doesn't involve ploughing the Volvo into a hedge every evening while I cope with bickering siblings, an advice-filled father and locals who know the road so well that they can drive down it at about 45 mph either because they know the road so well or don't expect bloody tourists to be crawling around every blind bend.

I can cope with holidays with my father, just about, after all I grew up with them didn't I?  Dan did not and would really struggle and as a consequence, so would I.  That is just too many bridges to build.  Dan's idea of a holiday is to do well ... very little.  He likes to watch television, play and preferably complete a number of boxed sets and a video game.  This takes time, sometimes nights without sleep.  When we do go away, he still likes to take things easy.  We're on holiday after all, there is no rush.  He likes to have a big breakfast, and then a sit down.  My father, on the other hand, thinks that holidays are for doing things in.  If we're not out of the house by eleven, he starts to pace, or build a gazebo.  I recognise that I also have inherited this impatience and as a consequence we now travel separately to weddings and museums.

After day 4 or 5 however, I started to relax a little.  I became almost used to the routine, having a coffee made for me as soon as we got in, having help putting the children to bed (although I was still needed for stories), opening a bottle of wine before dinner.  Why can't I do this more often? I wondered to myself, before remembering that when I get home from work, I race to cook dinner before bedtime, so I can start work again.  That explains the lack of wine.  I don't even want to think about the "s" word, I'm already having panic attacks.

I then remembered that my mum had always (sort of ) had that opportunity through most of my childhood.  She was a stay-at-home mum for much of that time.  I don't like to admit that I would now like to stay at home.  I do not want to go to work.  But I can't help it now.  We're on the mortgage treadmill, or is it the huge debt treadmill?  Then I remember that that is also why I wanted to work.  I wanted my children to have all the things that I thought I was missing out on when I was younger.  There are some things I cannot balance.

Oh well, I'm opening another bottle of wine, there are still a few days left.

Are politicians heavyweight enough?

A journalist from The Mail on Sunday apparently asked Liz Kendall about her weight.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liz-kendall-brands-journalist-unbelievable-over-questions-about-her-weight-10399838.html
She told him to "fuck off."

I hope that's true. I want it to be. She goes up in my estimation massively if that is the case. The same journalist; also according to The Independent obviously has a bit of a thing about weight as he  had not only asked George Osborne a similar question , but also compared Liz Kendall to Catherine Middleton. Does it make it a feminist issue?

This is tricky. We have to be careful nowadays. It's not ok to be a bulimic or an anorexic. We used to have them at school, but now those conditions are treated as part of the increasing range of mental health issues that we face every day in school and are expected to be included in our normal teaching duties. And at least that means that we seem to recognise some of the complicated nature of these conditions as being about control and not just unrealistic visions of beauty.

It's also not ok to be overweight. We have no respect for fat people.  We seem to approve of fat children being taken into care to save them from their evil parents. Fat politicians are a bit of a joke. Look at the response to Eric Pickles. Look at Cyril Smith; not so funny now.

Liz Kendall doesn't have children. That doesn't bother me. I still believe I may have more in common with her than David Cameron. I don't care how heavy she is. None of my fucking business.