One A Day, Day 19: The Worst Week

After midnight again… But I haven't gone to sleep yet. Although I will be very shortly.

This week has been utterly terrible. Not just for me, but for, it seems, most people. Both my wife and I noticed an alarmingly high number of despairing status updates from our respective Facebook and Twitter friends this week, yesterday in particular.

February's always bad. I don't know what it is about it. But it's always shit. And no-one ever does anything about it.

Of course, that's a stupid statement. What CAN anyone do about it? Nothing. Except maybe declare the whole month a national holiday.

They should declare the whole month a national holiday!

All this aside, the week is now effectively over, so I am looking forward to a quiet and pointless weekend.

What about today? After my inadequacy was made official yesterday, the headteacher came to see me after school. To – get this – "check I'm still on board". Well, no, I resigned, remember? I had to bite my tongue a bit, otherwise I would have exploded at her. I'm in two minds as to whether or not I should have given her a piece of my mind about the utter meaninglessness of those stupid judgements. I'm coming down on the "don't rock the boat" side of things at the moment. Maybe I can tear shit up a bit a little closer to the end.

One thing I do want to do, though, is write up all the things that I've said are dumb about education as an article and send it somewhere like <a href="TES or even a full-on newspaper. People need to hear about the plight of teachers as so many of them – including myself – suffer in silence and don't stand up to what is effectively bullying from people who have as much value to education as a lump of steaming turd. Actually, the turd is more valuable, as at least it could be discussed in a rather unpleasant Science lesson.

Anyway. Enough of that for now. It's the weekend. I'm off for some well-earned sleep. Next week is the last week before the week-long half term vacation, then it's the home straight from there.

G'night.

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.

One A Day, Day 17: Desk

Never one to shy away from a good meme (with #oneaday itself being something of a meme anyway – and with "desk" being something of an unintentional one from the looks of things), here we are.

In front of me is my 24 inch iMac, white plastic model, the generation before they went all metallic and shiny. It has a new-style Apple keyboard and a Logitech mouse because I loathe and detest the Mighty Mouse. To the right of the mouse, laying on its side is an iPod Shuffle 1GB that I got out the other day with the intention of putting some music on for exercise purposes… then didn't.

To the left of the iMac is a stack of three blank DVD/CD spindles. One of them only has a couple of discs left, but the other two are full. In front of the DVD spindles are four pens – a green whiteboard marker, a green biro, a black Berol handwriting pen and an interactive whiteboard pen. There's also a pair of metal scissors, a roll of Sellotape and a bottle of Niceday knockoff Tippex. Sorry, "correction fluid".

Further left still, there's a Sony CRT Trinitron KV-1440UB TV-monitor which has been in good working order ever since the late 80s and early 90s. Sitting on top of the Sony screen is an Atari 800XL, a Zipstik and a Quickshot joystick.

Underneath the desk is a semi-transparent plastic tote containing an assortment of PC games that I haven't played for years. On top of that is a brown leather document wallet containing my passport, marriage certificate, university degree and teaching qualification and Criminal Records Bureau Enhanced Disclosure paperwork proving I am not a criminal. There is also an expanding sectioned file thing with a broken clasp so it won't close. This contains everything from bills to strange bits of forgotten-purpose paper to TV licenses to paperwork from houses I don't live in any more.

There are some shelves under the desk. On one of the shelves sits an Atari 1050 floppy disk drive, a few more PC games and some cardboard document folders.

The drawers to the left of my desk are broken. Try and pull one out and the front simply falls off.

In summary: I need a new desk that is bigger than this cluttered shitheap.

One A Day, Day 16: Set a Better Example

I've ranted about kids' behaviour before, and probably will do so again, especially as it's coming up to the half-term holidays and behaviour takes an inevitable hit at those times as excitement builds. Of course, at this school, behaviour is on the decline anyway, so that's small consolation.

But what about the rest of us? How are we behaving? Well, when you think about it, there are a lot of parallels between the poor behaviour of children and the way adults act around each other. And it's not a good thing in many cases.

Look at something as simple as lining up – an activity which my class (and most of the others in the school) seem to have tremendous difficulty with. It should be a case of the teacher saying "line up" and then the kids… well, lining up. It's not, as they say, rocket science. However, watch these kids attempting to do this simple activity and you'll see pushing, shoving, kids changing places, pushing in, shoving people around and generally not doing the whole "respectful" thing.

Now think back to the last time you drove on a motorway. One of several things probably happened – firstly, you may well have been driving along in the fast lane, overtaking cars that were going slower than you and possibly (naughty naughty) breaking the speed limit of 70mph a little bit yourself. The longer you stay in the fast lane, the closer the probability of someone driving either a BMW, a Mercedes, an Audi or a 4×4 behemoth coming up behind you at twice the speed you're doing, flashing their lights and getting pissy if you don't move, possibly weaving unsafely around the other slower cars in the other lanes just to get past you. There are, in many cases, kids in the back of these cars.

Secondly, if you've been stuck in a traffic jam recently (and thanks to whateverthefuck Winchester's town planners have done to the route to the motorway, I get stuck in one every bastard day) you'll inevitably see at least five douchebags changing lanes every three second in an attempt to get to the "front" (and I use the term loosely, since I don't believe there ever is a "front" to a traffic jam on a motorway) and irritate everyone else. Again, there are, in many cases, kids in the back of these cars.

Pushing. Shoving. Being aggressive. See the parallels?

Then there's violence. Kids thump each other all the time. But why? It could be violent video games (which they shouldn't be playing). It could be violent TV (which they shouldn't be watching). Or it could be violent parents or older siblings setting that example.

The list goes on. Alcohol abuse. Drug abuse. Treating people as sex objects rather than, you know, people. I could go on. But I won't. At least not right now.

My point, then, is this:

Grown-ups. Children are watching, so grow the fuck up.

The best teacher in the world isn't going to change a child's behaviour if there isn't the backup from the parental side of things. And I know there are parents out there who do set good examples, take an interest in their children and make an effort not to turn them into douchebags. But there are just as many – and it's a growing number – who don't give a toss, or worse, think it's somehow funny or endearing that their children act like thugs.

In unrelated news, Mass Effect 2 is frickin' amazing.

One A Day, Day 15: Blips

Blips today. Nothing that interesting to say, so I'll go with the snippet approach.

Back to work today. Boo. But at least I could get away with making them all do a writing test this morning, so I didn't have to do very much for the first hour or so. Hooray! I also tidied my classroom and filed the bajillion bits of paper that were littering the top of my desk… some (well, most) into the bin and others into actual files with dividers and everything. Suddenly, by doing that, I feel a bit less incompetent. Still doesn't make me want to carry on though – teaching's had its chance.

Took me two hours to get to work this morning. It's usually an hour's drive. The last hour was taken up by the last three miles of the journey. It was one of those annoying traffic jams where it wasn't at all obvious what the problem was – and there probably wasn't anything at the front of it. It had snowed a little bit, but not enough to make the roads perilous, so I'm not sure that could be an excuse. I could be wrong though.

Currently installing Mass Effect 2. I've been replaying the prequel as a Renegade (went as a Paragon on my first playthrough) but overenthusiastic tweets from friends have made me want to jump on board and import my old Paragon character.

Also found one of the best apps out there for iPhone 1st gen/3G owners – iVideoCamera. It's 59p and is a fully-functional video camera with export to camera roll, Twitter, YouTube and Wi-Fi. The quality isn't quite as good as with a proper 3GS, but it's certainly acceptable. You can use it in either 160xsomething mode at full frame rate for unlimited recording, or 320xsomething at 10fps for "high quality" mode. Both look just fine, and are certainly enough to shoot a quick video and post to Twitter or something. So if you still have a 3G like me, then it's a great app. And cheap.

Well, that's about that for today. Sorry I don't have more to say. But the whole thing with "one a day" is that not every day is vastly interesting. Go and look at my photos from yesterday if you haven't already. The low-level pebbly beach shot with the nice depth of field is currently my desktop background.

One A Day, Day 14: CLICK.

Well, we took our photography trip. So, without further ado, here's a selection. These haven't been adjusted or fiddled around with yet, so some of them are a bit dark and the white balance is a bit wonky on some of them as Sam and I were experimenting with settings. Still, I thought I'd share anyway.

These were taken at Lepe Country Park, which is here. It's a relatively unremarkable beach, but it has a few hidden interesting bits, and some D-Day remains if you're willing to walk far enough. Plus, of course, pebbles, sand and seaweed. Apparently between April and September part of it is a bathing beach but I can't imagine dipping myself into that grotty water and coming out alive.

One A Day, Day 13: Round Midnight

Yes, I'm aware it's after midnight. But the official One A Day rules clearly state (somewhere… possibly not on that page, but I can't be bothered to look it up right now) that the "day" is from when you get up until when you go to bed. And I'm not in bed yet. So there.

It is, however, late, so this entry is going to be somewhat phoned in. Fortunately, there's not a great deal to talk about today. Got up, played some Mass Effect in preparation for the sequel, played some Star Trek Online (which the official Head Start has now begun for) and went to my buddy Sam's for some board games, Chinese and booze. We played Power Grid. I lost. Then we played Carcassonne, and I also lost. Still, never mind. It's the taking part that counts, and all that.

We did rediscover the wonder of gin and tonic though. In recent years, I've found that a lot of booze leaves me with an unpleasant feeling of heartburn very quickly, meaning I can't drink much of a lot of things and when I do, I don't enjoy them that much. The G&Ts we had tonight went down rather too smoothly if anything, and made the already-lengthy game of Power Grid last even longer than usual. That's no bad thing, though, since it's a fun game that taxes your brain.

Tomorrow I may be taking a trip with Sam to take some photos. Haven't got my camera out to take some proper photos for ages, so if we do go it'll be good to get back into it. Interesting ones will, of course, be shared here.

Right. Now it's time for bed. G'nite.

One A Day, Day 12: It's pronounced B-O-LL-O-CK-S.

Good evening! Since my wife's viewing of televisual car crash Popstar to Opera Star precludes my playing of Mass Effect and its sequel on the TV, and Star Trek Online has decided to update itself with a patch that will take 5 hours to download on Steam (despite the fact I was playing it earlier with no problems), now's as good a time as any to get today's entry done.

Today I would like to rant about phonics, since I had a long, boring, pointless and patronising training day on this very subject today.

For the uninitiated, phonics is the theory which suggests that children should learn reading by sounding out individual phonemes in words, then learn how to "blend" them together where appropriate. It also suggests that it's sensible to teach six-year olds the words "morpheme", "phoneme", "grapheme", "digraph" and "trigraph" – words which I didn't come across until I studied English Language at A-level (age 16-18) and again at university.

The flaw, in case you haven't spotted it, is that English isn't a phonetic language. We have so many different ways of pronouncing each letter in our alphabet that using phonics to teach reading quickly becomes useless – and in the meantime, it fucks up spelling ability.

As if to emphasise this point, the official materials for teaching phonics from the government include an appendix of the most "high-frequency" words in the English language. Out of the thirty most-used words in the English language, fourteen of them are designated "tricky" words, which means that the phonics rules don't apply to them. Well, if the phonics rules don't apply to almost half of the most common words in the language, exactly what use is it to anyone?

The funny thing is, I can't remember how I learned to read. I imagine that's not an uncommon thought – childhood memories fade over time, after all – but I'm pretty sure it didn't involve phonics at any point. I can tell this because I can spell, and don't think that because "rough" is pronounced "r-u-ff" that it should be spelled that way too, which is what I see kids doing on a daily basis.

It's difficult to know what to suggest, though. Phonics is fashionable. Someone somewhere said it was "good" and it stuck. As with most fashions, this is nothing to do with how good it is. It is simply the "in" thing at the time.

It doesn't help, of course, that the leader of today's training day was a patronising, aggressive middle-aged harpy who clearly had a chip on her shoulder about something. Her holier-than-thou attitude towards phonics and teaching reading and her steadfast refusal to consider any alternatives (even doing an arrogant "shaking head" movement whenever anyone raised a point she didn't agree with) made everyone resent the process even more than its inherent stupidity already did.

This video pretty much sums up the problem:

(Thanks to Jeff Parsons for bringing this to my attention.)

Here's a poem, too. Don't say I'm not good to you.

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead –
For goodness sake don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart –
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

Quoted by Vivian Cook and Melvin Bragg 2004,
by Richard Krogh, in D Bolinger & D A Sears, Aspects of Language, 1981,
and in Spelling Progress Bulletin March 1961, Brush up on your English.

One A Day, Day 10: On The Edge

Part the First

Horrible day today. The behaviour of the children is getting worse and worse and I feel powerless to do anything about it. Probably because I am powerless to do anything about it. My predecessor apparently used to "bellow" at them every so often to get them to be quiet, but last time I bellowed at them (which got the point across nicely, incidentally) I ended up being the one getting told off for it. Which is pretty ridiculous, really.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Children respond to shock tactics and humiliation. The stupid culture of reward that is instilled in modern education now does not achieve anything. When you reward children for everything, including sitting down on a chair (I'm not joking) all rewards completely lose their impact and all you're left with are punishments… which don't work because the kids don't respect adults. It's a complete no-win situation and short of a drastic shakeup of the education system, I don't see a way forward. But it's not politically correct to punish children. It's not even politically correct to shout at them any more. Teachers are impotent in the face of poor behaviour.

Take one kid in my class. I won't use his real name. Let's call him Jack. No, actually, let's call him Cock. Because he is.

Cock has a difficult home life – one of those indecipherable ones involving domestic violence and on-off relationships. As a result (apparently) he's become the person he is – rude, argumentative, confrontational, violent, cheeky and lazy. The school he's at now – where I teach him – was about his third in the space of a couple of months when he arrived.

I can't do anything with him. And when he chooses to kick off, he drags the rest of the class along with him. Because, being kids, they find it hilarious when he lies on the floor, or runs around chasing people, or starts shouting "The Pakistanis are coming!". In a school with a rather large ethnic minority population.

And there's nothing you can do about it. He's been spoken to by me and senior members of staff at the school. His parents have been spoken to. He's had letters home. He has special sessions with teaching assistants. Yet still he's an asshole. His home life is used as a constant excuse for his shitty behaviour. And while it may upset him, that's still not an excuse. There's too much hand-wringing over what are delightfully termed "challenging" children. They should suffer the consequences of poor behaviour just like everyone else. Except no-one else really suffers any consequences either.

Right. Starting to see the problem here.

Still, after handing in my written resignation I calculated today that I only have 51 days until my escape – only 35 of which are actually teaching days. Which is nice. Beginning to wish I had just given them a week's notice and buggered off.

Part the Second

So Apple finally announced the iPad, the official name of the "Apple tablet" which everyone has inexplicably known about for months. And already there are painfully unfunny jokes going around about the "iTampon". I may just be grumpy because of a shit day, but I don't find that even a little bit funny – largely because we've had things called "[something] pad" for years and no-one has ever commented. My estimation of the intelligence of the Internet has just dropped a notch, and I'm reminded of something Mark Whiting of the Squadron of Shame said on our Deus Ex podcast – "Back in '99 we all thought the Internet would turn into SkyNet. This was before we knew it would turn into 4Chan."

As for the device itself… it's a big iPhone which, at this time, I have no interest in owning. I like proper computers too much to even consider a tablet. Call me a traditionalist.

Part the Third

At the time of writing, in 12 hours' time, there will be something exciting announced on Good Old Games. They have been cock-teasing everybody for the last few days on Facebook and Twitter… tomorrow we'll get to finally find out what the big news is. I'm certainly intrigued. You should be too.

Now it's late. Time for bed for me. This entry has been fragmented, but so has my brain. I really don't want to have to go in and deal with those kids again tomorrow… but I have to just keep counting down to first freedom and then an undoubtedly awesome time at PAX East. I can't wait. For either thing.

Good night.

One A Day, Day 9: All Wound Up

All wound up, on the edge, terrified. Sleep disturbed, restless mind, petrified. Bouts of fear permeate all I see. Heightening nervousness threatens me.

That's the opening to Dream Theater's Panic Attack, a song I adore both for its Castlevania-esque piano/orchestra/choir breaks every so often but also for its blunt, honest portrayal of what it feels like to have a mind that's so stressed out it feels like you might explode.

Feeling that right now. The pounding inside my head isn't helping the feeling, as I have a headache from the very depths of R'lyeh to contend with at the moment and I am holding the annoying children I have to endure for my day job personally responsible. Tuesday is supposed to be my "quiet day", with the morning spent doing planning for the upcoming week, but the kids I teach more than made up for me not having the morning with them by not shutting up for the whole bloody afternoon. It didn't help that our Maths lesson was interrupted by having to line up, go downstairs and watch twenty minutes of Indian dancing before going back to finish off a task which they didn't understand not because it was too difficult for them but because they didn't fucking listen the first time and the second time and the third time I explained what the little shits were supposed to be doing.

Arrrrgh! How annoying!

*breathes*

So how are you, reader? I hope my misfortune is either entertaining, eye-opening or both to you. The main reason today didn't give me a complete nervous breakdown is the knowledge that it's not forever. The only thing I wish I didn't have to deal with is the fact that the school I work at is in "special measures", which means that government inspectors (who have probably never spent even a single hour at the chalkface) came around to look at it (before I arrived, I might add) and judged it as "failing". Like I said in the last post I mentioned this in, the fact that we can get any work at all out of some of these horrendous children is a minor miracle. Still, the government judges the school as "failing", which means extra stress for everyone involved as the inspectors return every so often at very short notice to come and see how things are improving. This also means we have people from the local education authority coming at short notice to see how things are doing. This means we have lesson observations at incredibly inconvenient times, like next week. At least whatever outcome this observation has no longer matters for me, though I feel for my poor colleague in the classroom next door who not only has a lesson observation but also has to spend a protracted amount of time in the company of The Most Miserable Woman In The World talking about assessments we haven't done yet.

I am clearly making the right decision to escape from this as early as possible. There will be no regrets. At least when I look back on the three years and one term that I've spent as a teacher, I have enough experience to say 1) "I'm never doing that again!" and 2) "Thinking about teaching? DON'T BE AN IDIOT."

Now there's something they don't say in their patronising, unrealistic adverts.