One A Day, Day 18: Another Education Rant

Today I was told by someone I’d never met before that I was “inadequate”. Of course, this is nothing unusual to me, as my romantic history prior to meeting my wife will attest, but for someone to come in, watch you doing your job for twenty minutes and then make a summary judgement about your competence (or lack thereof) smacks of… well, bollocks, frankly.

This is one of the (many) things that is wrong with the education system. Ticklists of criteria that need to be followed. Nonsense feedback that doesn’t help in the slightest (I “didn’t teach enough” but I “talked too much”, apparently – gee, thanks, that really clears that up). The fact that you are deemed to be a terrible person if you forget to give the children a formulaic ticklist of their own to copy into their books on the board.

Today’s lesson was the first session of a new topic on poetry. The children hadn’t done much on poetry previously, and what little they had done was some time ago. So the plan which the Year 4 team (two other teachers and me) had come up with was to give them an opportunity to look at a poem and give their immediate responses, and demonstrate those responses through drawings, movement and drama. Bullshit, I know, but apparently reading a poem and talking about the language in it isn’t enough for children these days. Or maybe it is, given that not only I, but also my colleague who taught the same lesson at the same time was also judged to be “inadequate”.

Still, fuck those ratings. Doubly so because just a month or so back I was judged as “satisfactory with some good elements”. Don’t let that faint praise hit you in the ass on the way out, Ms Inspector.

I can’t have changed that much in that time. I’ll tell you what can change, though – the behaviour of children. I briefed the kids before the observer arrived today that I was expecting their best behaviour and they still decided to be little fucks and whinge and moan and complain even when trying to do the simplest possible thing.

As always, there was absolutely no helpful advice given whatsoever to deal with this sort of thing. The usual advice is “you need to develop some strategies”. Thanks. Those would be…? “Develop some strategies. Build an action plan.” Fuck off.

I may be ranting about this, but I’m actually less pissed off about this than I would have been before I’d put in my resignation. Now I know that these sort of ridiculous judgements don’t mean anything to me I can shrug them off. It doesn’t make the education system any better, however, because these same judgements are applied to all schools, whether they’re the posh school in the country village that is filled with nothing but children who have been able to read, write and add up since the age of 3, or a school with a largely transient population like where I am now. You can’t compare the two things. You can’t compare the amount of progress an upper-middle class child with a perfect home life and parental support makes with that of a Nepalese immigrant whose parent(s) don’t speak English, or that of the kid whose Dad beats the crap out of his Mum on a regular basis.

These backgrounds don’t excuse behaviour, as I’ve said previously, but they do affect how good their work is going to be. Kids develop with parental support. It’s not just the teachers’ job to instill knowledge and discipline in them – lots of that needs to come from the parents, too – and it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, guess who gets blamed? That’s right, the teachers.

So fuck teaching. If you’re considering going into it, just don’t, unless you particularly enjoy someone you’ve never met calling you “inadequate” to your face and expecting you not to punch them very hard in the neck.