Raising the unexceptional child

 I haven't blogged anything for a while.  This could be because I have been exam marking, too damn busy, but really I have been exceptionally unhappy for so long that I can't even be angry about it, let alone be funny.
I am not better or over it. But I have (sort of) taken control and (sort of ) made some decisions to tidy up my life.  I may struggle to pay my mortgage, I may be writing in a year in a homeless, husbandless half life or we may be doing some of the best things of our life, but things are different so we will see.

I am not really used to feeling this way. I am almost always in control and I was almost always the best at everything at school. I struggle even now with helping my children  with their homework as I sometimes can't teach them what seems easy to me. Pip is the same with most things, which is,I suspect why there are so many tears and tantrums when Rex beats her at x station virtual pretending to run on the spot or whatever it's called.
But Max left primary school this week. Despite the need for him  to have an easy transition, I failed to get him into the desired secondary school. I failed. I appealed. I succeeded in my appeal. But I failed. And so my son who needs security and a gentle and supported transition has none of the support that all other special children . Dan might forgive me eventually. No. No he won't. But he'll do something almost as bad soon enough and will feel uncomfortable enough not to wish to remind me of it.
I told you I don't deal well with lack of success.
So I sat in his leavers' assembly and wept. It was ok. Other parents wept too. I could disguise it as sentimentality. Other children performed. There were the comedians, the gymnasts, the sports people, the singers, the dancers even the magicians.  I couldn't see him. I strained my eyesight. I eventually spotted him in the whole year group song, grimacing and waving unselfconciously. I waved back. Then sat on my hands and rolled my eyes at no one as he developed another hand flapping habit that he didn't have until today.
My mildly autistic son now has a diagnosis of actual autism. Apparently it's not called Aspergers now. And I don't care, and I wasn't crying for him, even though he was shoved at the back of the year to sing although he's now the shortest in the year, and I wasn't crying for his autism which is hardly a surprise, and I wasn't crying for his journey into teenager hood. I like teenagers. I understand teenagers. I'm expecting that challenge. I was crying for me and him and how much harder his life will be just for a few years when those fragile acquaintances can no longer sustain their kindness for his difference and he enters a world of being an outsider, clinging to other survivors, bobbing round in the sea of high school when they can't physically get on the lifeboats with the normal, exceptional kids and don't have enough friends to drag them on.
He'll be ok. I know he will. I need to remind myself to encourage him more and celebrated his successes more and appreciate what those successes are which won't be the same as mine, or his sister's or even his remarkable little brother.
I was jealous of all those other parents though. But I will treat each of their exceptional offspring as they enter my domain of secondary school as kindly as I treat my unexceptional, exceptional young man.
The flowers in the pictures by the way, are from my exceptional colleagues and my lovely sixth formers, to "the best teacher ever" whom they "will miss". So maybe we are all exceptional to someone, even when we think we are not, maybe one size does not fit all.

Sincere apologies

The last thing I remember from my dream this morning was someone saying to me very loudly; "Aren't you forgetting something?"

My eyes popped open instantly, my heart was racing and I started to sit up in bed.  It was 6 this morning and it's a Saturday.  I get a lie-in until 8 as football doesn't start until 9.

Unfortunately, however, that is how I wake up almost every day at the moment, that constant, persistent feeling of incompleteness and stress, there is always something to do and I usually haven't done it.  More often than not at the moment, when I switch the alarm off on my phone I find that I have been in the middle of composing an email, listing an ebay item or trying to write a blog as I fell asleep the night before.

"You can't multi-task." My husband tells me.  "It just means everything gets done inefficiently."  He's all about the efficiency my husband, he finds it very difficult to understand any of the logic that goes into my decisions.

For example,  when I return at the end of a long Tuesday and collect the children from after school group (which takes at least 35 minutes; Pip has a picture to finish,  Rex hasn't had his go on the Wii and Max has been struck temporarily deaf) what should be my first task?  There are ten minutes to feed all 3 before Brownies. Usually the slow cooker has been turning Tesco Value cow flavoured pieces into steak stew,  the bread maker has produced a pale,  but perfectly edible granary loaf and 3 children can sit and negotiate about how much constitutes "enough"  until Pip has to transfer the lot to a plastic tub and "eat it on the way". 

But every now and again I forget,  or there's an unexpected meeting,  or I got up too late and then it is necessary to slide the washing up away to the end of one worktop while I squeeze in a chopping board to get something on the go while I hear Rex read and remind Max to complete his homework and Pip to empty her share of the dishwasher which she didn't do this morning as she was too busy labelling her bedroom with pink post its.

Even in that time I will be expected to stop,  mid-cook,  to get three drinks,  wipe one bottom,  establish what has been accidentally erased from my email while someone was "trying to get on mathletics",  empty the bin,  feed the cat,  give Dan an update on my day,  take a phone call from a union member,  ring the insurance company,  persuade my mum that now is a fine time to ring and not to ring back later when I'm less busy -  because then I'll be marking,  get a white wash on because someone has been stock piling dirty school T shirts in his room,  order a repeat prescription before the doctor's closes,  get Rex to set the table to stop him stealing Max's sword,  smooth things over when Rex gets Max "the wrong fork" cook something vegetarian for me and sew on the interest badge I forgot. 

Women don't multi task because we think we can,  or it's sensible. Often we agree with you guys, it would be better to concentrate on one thing at a time,  but I have ten things to do. All before 5:30 when normal people apparently finish work,  and if I don't start them all they won't stand a chance of getting done. And I'm sorry,  darling,  if I didn't finish loading the dishwasher,  but I was interrupted 3 times by each child who tried to ask you a question,  but you were busy. 

All of which preamble makes me wonder how Nicky Morgan gets a damn thing done these days.  What with forcing every school to become an Academy and testing spellings and connectives at Key Stage 1, added to scrapping the use of baseline tests,  it's no wonder mistakes are made. But Nicky Morgan isn't just scrapping the Local Education Authorities, if all of these academies go badly - and many of them already are, the secretary of state has ultimate responsibility.  The department that accidentally printed the real tests online. The secretary of state who hand wrote "sincerily" at the end of the letter.  (I haven't yet been able to prove that it should have been "faithfully" anyway - but wouldn't that be nice?)  As Michael Rosen has so reasonably demonstrated in his comments on the subject; there is nothing wrong with it, as far as we're concerned, but we've been told that our opinions don't matter.  If you have chosen that word as a key word on the list - and it probably should be - it's been on my list of commonly misspelt words for GCSE for 20 years, then make sure you spell that one right.  It's a trick to play on the examiners, I tell my students, you may not know every word but learn the ones that everyone else spells wrong.  It's the same problem with some PE teachers, they tend to become heads of year because they're the only ones with the time, but if you've got an English department next door, then for goodness' sake get one of them to check the letter before you send it home.  They'll love it. We're all pedants.  Which is probably why we're all enjoying this so much. We have been held to account for so much over the last few years that we are relishing the chance to see someone else get into trouble for a change.

Anyway, I'd better stop writing and get some sleep, after I've emptied the dishwasher at least, I've got an early start tomorrow, it's Sunday, St George's Day Parade, now where's that Promise Badge?

Hunting for the unions

This is why you need me. I am having once again to justify the work I do to a school which has converted to an academy and doesn't wish to pay into facilities funds.

I understand why. "But your members are entitled to representation." A glossed HR person will say to me smugly when I explain that I can't attend a meeting at 2 days' notice because I am mostly a teacher. You have to attend is the implication. Your member is entitled to representation, we, as an organisation, are not obliged to make sure they have help. And I'll turn up to this meeting, and you'll probably sack them anyway. Even if you're in the wrong.Even if I prove you're in the wrong. You're prepared, happy even, to settle out of court, with a privacy clause.

So the press, the public, the politicians, remain suspicious of the unions. Jeremy Hunt is currently imposing a change of conditions on the doctors. Because, pretty much, he does not give a damn about maintaining their good will. As with teachers, politicians seem to assume there is a large cohort of potential junior doctors just waiting in the wings, waiting for all these lazy, uncommitted doctors to emigrate/quit so that they can leap into this new world of 24/7 hospitals (which apparently doesn't exist at the moment-who knew?) and accept the new terms and conditions. No wonder they are resistant. Perhaps they have witnessed teachers struggling with their new performance related pay and effective privatisation. But look at the success. Oh no, that's right. Teacher recruitment targets have been missed for the third year running.

Hunt and others portray "the unions" as part of the blob. A huge amalgous mass which has been criticised for being negative about teaching, standing in the way, looking backward. They seem to assume that there is a very top down approach with some driven ideologue at the head, cascading its poison down to the lower ranks. A model, in fact, more similar to a political party.

That is not what unions are. Unions started with the workers, trying to ensure safe working conditions, promoting the idea of coming together so that it was more difficult to single out individuals. Now they are a body of professionals, and in the case of many jobs like teaching and medicine, a body of skilled, dedicated professionals who drive themselves into an early grave by their hard work and are led by a vocation, with the interests of their patients and pupils at heart. Unions are fighting for the best medical, educational and professional outcomes, not their best interests as is suggested by MPs. Believe us, if we were in it for the money we'd have done something else. Like politicians. And we still could. We are highly qualified, unlike the bank of people who will be dragged in to replace us when we are driven out by unattainable targets and unsafe working conditions that do not have the best interests of professionals or those they are looking after at the centre.

Bloody women. They come over here and take our foreigners.

It's no secret that the only soap opera I even claim to follow is The Archers. For the uninitiated, it's an every day story of country folk, and follows the lives of farming families in the mythical rural community of Ambridge. But that's not the best bit. Oh no. It's only on for about 12 minutes a day, straight after 630 comedy, so I can listen almost every day while I clear up in the kitchen and start work before I read stories and argue the benefits of real over false teeth with the unwilling primary school children. And it's on the radio. So it takes less attention than anything tv based, and considerably less attention than these super cool Scandinavian dramas that don't allow me to simultaneously mark and do a Tesco shop.

Anyway, The Archers has a particularly strong storyline at the moment following the abusive relationship between Helen and Rob. The poor actor seems to have had to stop tweeting, so involved is the audience in his compelling performance as a controlling, manipulative, sexist ... I'm doing it now.

The script writers are taking a risk with this storyline because it is a long slow burner of a plot and they haven't rushed it. There hasn't been any easy crisis point yet where the apparently intelligent Helen has walked in on Rob faxing fivers to his ex wife or blackmailing his former boss. Ok, so Helen is the vulnerable anorexic daughter of a former feminist whose last relationship ended in the suicide of her older lover, but she had independently given birth to an ivf baby as a single mother. Her descent into victim has been well written and many of the discussion threads (yes, don't judge) seem to admire the portrayal of her.

One of the main aspects of his character that rings so true is the way he controls her under the guise of love and care, there is no physical abuse. "You're so tired, darling, sit down and put your feet up while I arrange to have your wages paid into my account / spend your grandma's inheritance / sabotage the relationship with your best friend / mother / son."  Brilliant.

Like some men, Rob seems to doubt the competence of women and negates their ability while on the surface, building up their role in another way.  Women can do this to other women too.  "But you're so good with the children darling."  "Wouldn't it be nice to be at home for a little bit longer."  This links (indirectly, but bear with me) to the Koln attacks on women at New Year.  Police officers have been accused of playing down some of the common features of the attacks and the chief of police has lost his position.

The main common features of these attacks were that men attacked these women.  That is the main point.  And I'm not a 70s style all men are potential rapists feminist.  All men don't do these kind of things. Some men do.  And some men escape a life from a terrible country and adjust to life in a European country.  And some men attack women.

The appropriate reaction is surely to question society's respect for women but not use this as a vehicle for criticising immigration policy.  Just to top it all off, Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the EDL trotted off to a Pegida rally to stir up some trouble.  Nice to see parties like that promoting cross cultural unity between our German neighbours.  "They come over here (I paraphrase) and attack our women (I quote)."

Whose women? Sorry?  Who was he talking to? Well not me, I don't think I have any women.  Don't get me wrong, I didn't really think he was talking on my behalf in the first place, I strongly believe that that man and I have never had an opinion in common, but that doesn't mean I am not offended by his failure to assume that any women could be listening to him.

Perhaps there are no racist women in the world, what a nice thought.  Oh. there are you say!  So he's just addressing the men, in the full knowledge that there is 50% of the population who apparently need protecting by their men.

Following this, the mayor of Koln, Henriette Reker suggested that women should stay at arm's length from men.  Women don't need that kind of protection, men don't need protection from themselves.  The vast majority of men do not find themself accidentally and randomly groping women on the way past.  They should not be treated with any more suspicion than a group of men who are apparently immigrants.

So thank you Rob, and Henriette and even Tommy, but I and other women don't need defending against immigrants, or men for that matter.  We need protecting from scare-mongering and the media excitement over the commodification of women's bodies that continue the myth that we are anyone's for the taking.

The scent of sexism

I know it's Christmas, but the build up has been dragging on for the past 6 months.  The increase in perfume adverts is a sure sign that the season of selling and buying has begun.

Perfume is expensive, eau de toilette, aftershave whatever you are buying.  I don't travel abroad, so if I'm lucky, I receive a bottle of perfume to last the year.  Still Calvin Klein Eternity from my mum, because that is the last one she remembers me wearing, and Coco Chanel Mademoiselle from my father in law because he was instructed to buy that for me once.  (I love that, but one of our senior managers wears a lot of it and you can tell if she's in her office or not from the smell in the corridor so I've gone off that a bit.)  My darling Dan was metrosexual before the term was first coined, he virtually invented the term male grooming and seems to get through a bottle a month.  Not Coco Chanel, that would be weird, nor any Chanel as I have never yet been able to afford to treat him to that.

It is a tiny bit strange advertising fragrance on the television, surely we buy it for the smell which currently cannot be conveyed through the visual medium, and I find it so hard to believe that we are sold an image that is more important than the smell.  All the bottles end up looking the same in the shop anyway don't they?  And whatever you spray on a tiny scrap of card smells completely different when you have accidentally put it through the washing machine the next day.

It is even tricky to talk about. How do you describe a scent?  It ends up sounding like a pretentious wine description on the shelf of a supermarket "with undertones of cinnamon and the sunshine in an early evening bower".  I always use the word "smell" when I am introducing the idea of language change in English; write down as many words as you can think of which are synonyms for smell.  Now classify them into good and bad.  Most of the bad ones have Anglo Saxon roots (stench, stink) whereas the positive associations are with words of French origin (scent, perfume) coming in after 1066 and associated with the middle classes.  Typically,we have kept all the nouns we can find in English, making it just so important to find exactly the right words and make sure than we can identify all non-native speakers.

All of which makes the concept behind many perfume companies' advertising even more completely baffling.  They are almost always inappropriately glamorous with ludicrously young couples doing stupidly attractive things.  There is a Johnny Depp one this year that may ruin many of my favourite films which suggests independence and the open road, I always imagined Johnny Depp would smell rather musty.

The collection I have tried to avoid paying any attention to this year includes a woman rapturously clutching a perfume bottle while she writhes on the floor, perhaps making love to an invisible and nicely perfumed man.  Because...why?  Buy a woman perfume and she'll put on a sex show for you?  I don't get it.  Then there's a very pretty Greek sort of goddess woman who catches some Greekish mortal men with no knickers on and gives the camera an arch kind of look, because everyone knows there is nothing more attractive to a woman than mens' cocks.  And some of these may be famous Greek gods or footballers, if it's not David Beckham then I'm struggling with names.

The worst one I've seen is another Adonis type, although he might be a little bit more Norse in his godlike status, there seem to be lots of mountains and storms in black and white behind him.  Now I wasn't watching this one too carefully, I'll be honest.  Television in general is a time for me to catch up on my emails and I frequently get requests from my husband to stop working, but the gist of it seemed to result in him returning to his changing room after a feat of extreme physical prowess and  being presented with, presumably as part of his winnings, a crowd of semi naked women.

It makes me yearn for the heroin chic of the Calvin Klein campaign of 1994 or so, with Kate Moss and a number of androgynously skinny models in black and white who were so sexy they could have been having sex with the whole crowd or themselves, or just the nearest person - I slightly forget the point of the advert but the point was they all smelt the same. Although male grooming is now seen as acceptable if not essential, as the standards are raised for men to be allowed to behave more like women, it has only seemed to raise the bar for women who still have to be that little bit more groomed than men. And smell nice.  And be so highly sexed that a bottle of perfume leaves them writhing on the floor with unfulfilled lust that you - yes you, presumably male audience, could satisfy simply by stepping into the picture. And sit around waiting until he has finished his sports just to... I have no idea... lick him clean?

Happy Christmas everyone and a fresh and pleasantly scented new year to you.  I'll be crushing up rose petals in summer to make my own scent.  Tweet me your recipes.  @housefeminist

Where is the big society when you need it?

Rex has decided he wants to collect Match Attax.  As far as I can tell these are the Panini stickers we used to collect when we were at school.  Football does not really play a big role in our house, we watch rugby but football is even slightly discouraged.  If you were to buy sufficient stickers to fill an album and did not get any swaps at all it would take you 57 weeks and £3576 to collect all the stickers - maybe - quite a lot of money anyway.  My children don't even have an album.  It was too expensive, so they are randomly swapping pretty coloured stickers for other pretty coloured stickers and commenting on the relative merits of people they have never heard of.  It's a little reminiscent of the episode of The IT Crowd where Moss and Roy are practising manliness and learn a few key phrases to join in with football conversations; "Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"

So every now and then, they all ask to spend their meagre pocket money on over priced packets of these little fragments of confetti and I grudgingly agree.  The other day they were standing at the counter, purses in hand ready to each pay individually for a £1 packet of stickers with a queue of six people behind us and I didn't have enough cash for the lacto free milk for which I was having to delve into the overdraft.  I paid by card and paid for their stickers simultaneously to try and save time.  When we got home, I asked for the money for the stickers.  "But we still have it." Rex declared, suspiciously guarding his rainbow purse in his sticky fist.
"No," I explained, "I paid for it with card so you need to give me the money."
"But that was the bank's money." he countered, quite accurately.
"Yes but for your stickers."

The rest of the details are tedious, but needless to say I had to wait for them to go to bed and sneak the money out of their purses later.

It seems to me that David Cameron is having the same trouble understanding economic policy as my 5 year old.  He doesn't seem to understand that once the money is gone, it is gone and cannot be spent twice over.

Today it has emerged in a Guardian article that David Cameron has written to his local County Council in his role as a constituency MP to ask them about all the cuts to local services.It's like a Monty Python Sketch, or Yes, Minister, or ... or Prisoner .."Who is responsible for this mess? " "You are number one."

I think he genuinely believed that there was a whole raft of people out there willing to pick up the pieces of these massive cuts to council funding, a whole set of elderly ladies who were just dying to get up off the sofa and stack books at the local libraries.  And I wonder if people who have been brought up in privileged environments have only a vague understanding of what the "simple folk" do all day. Perhaps, at David Cameron's school, food magically appeared, rooms were magically tidied and no one ever questioned where it all came from, it was only when Hermione reminded everyone that there were actual house elves doing all the work that any of us thought about it. Oh no wait, that was Hogwarts...and Cameron's school didn't have girls, so no wonder he never gave it any consideration.  So as a consequence it's no wonder that some MPs are convinced that there are myriad back room staff who fanny about with press releases and clean and type things and all those little jobs that don't take very long really, why would you need to actually pay someone to do them?  No doubt someone would be happy to give up a couple of hours a day to help feed the children / type up letters / organise road safety / teach a class of twenty four five year olds.  Just the little things.

That army of volunteers does not exist.  I am a volunteer, I know.  My mother-in-law couldn't retire early, she still does extra shifts if she needs to to pay the mortgage because her pension isn't going to go that far and she's worked her whole life.  Other grandparents are having to look after their grandchildren because childcare is so expensive and all mothers have to go back to work.  Anybody else with a couple of hours on their hands is usually trying to pick up a couple of extra hours of work to help make ends meet because wages are static and everything else isn't.  It is not that people are not willing, but if a job is worth doing then it is worth being paid for and these things are valuable.

Our library in the village is threatened with closure. It is an amazing place and really active, always full of people, a great resource.  Pip and Rex love borrowing sock monkeys as much as books.  There are always free activities and crafts for children.  They are really well attended but the librarian is not allowed to charge for those things, not even to cover costs.  She is allowed to charge adults for activities so she often gives up her evenings to run quizzes and other activities to raise the money, to pay for the children's activities. She doesn't even live in the village and has to drive out to open up the building so she feels she may as well be there.  This is on top of her full days at work, and when she goes / retires, they may not even appoint another qualified librarian, because that is too expensive and apparently anyone can put books on shelves.


I am no more likely to convince David Cameron of the ludicrousness of the display than I am to convince Rex that the money is not there any more but I have to keep trying to convince everyone else to remind politicians and voters to think really carefully about the value these public services provide before the big yellow taxi comes for me, because we really are not going to realise what we've got until it's gone.

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.