#oneaday, Day 79: Morning!

Good morning! 2am today. BED ERROR.

Actually, I have a marginally good reason for it this time – I was waiting up to see if there was a response from a PR representative for an article I was writing. This is something I’ve not had to do before. I probably didn’t need to wait up quite so late as I did (and play a bit of Game Room) but, well what are you going to do? (The PR rep did respond in the end, incidentally.)

So… what to talk about this time? How about the election, seeing as how it’s on everyone’s lips and Twitter feeds at the moment. Unless you’re not British, in which case you probably couldn’t give a damn what feckless idiot steps up to the plate to run our country further into the ground.

It’s going to be a strange election this time around. The government we’ve had in for the last God-knows-how long (“Labour”, for the non-British readers out there, a party traditionally associated with socialism but which has seen something of a drift towards the middle as time has gone on) has disillusioned rather a lot of people. The fact our leader is one of the most uncharismatic, doublespeak-speaking arses in British politics at the moment (not to mention the fact that we didn’t elect him) has, amongst other things, pissed off a lot of people who are ready for a change.

But the alternatives… we have the Conservative party (traditionally the “other side” to Labour, but which has again drifted rather towards the middle as time has passed) fronted by Captain Middle Class, also known as David Cameron. To give him credit where it’s due, Cameron is a better public speaker than Gordon Brown, but he is unashamedly and completely middle-class which I can’t help feeling is going to count against him. While there are a lot of middle-class people in this country, there are also a lot of working class people who think he’s nothing but a posh git. Hell, there are plenty of middle-class people who think he’s a posh git, too. Smarmy, overly-Photoshopped advertising campaigns haven’t helped, either.

Then there’s the Liberal Democrats, aka “the ones that never get in”. Traditionally, people have voted LibDem when they don’t like the other two. There’s going to be a lot of that this time around, with Labour having disillusioned a lot of people with the failures of the last thirteen years and the Conservatives alienating entire socioeconomic groups by being incredibly white and middle class. It, sadly, wouldn’t be surprising to see more radical parties like the BNP (aka “the racist ones”) get more of a foothold in Parliament.

Of course, I’m stating all this without any great understanding of the whole proceedings. This is just my opinion. But early buzz seems to suggest that we may well end up with a “hung Parliament” this time around, with no party holding a clear majority. I have no idea what that means for the country. It might actually make this election interesting for once, though.

Pity none of our politicians have the charisma of Obama. Whatever you may think of the President’s policies, you can’t argue with the fact that the man knows how to speak to a crowd.

#oneaday, Day 58: Bullshit Bingo

The school I work at (until this coming Friday, fact fans) recently had its updated OfSTED report published. For the uninitiated (and/or American) amongst you, this is the report on how “good” (sarcastic air quotes mine, not theirs) the school is. At the last inspection, shortly before I arrived at the school in November, the school was judged to be “inadequate” and in need of “special measures” for various reasons that I won’t bore you with now. The most recent report claimed that we were making “satisfactory” progress towards making the “required improvements” put forth in the “action plan”.

The crowning glory of the report, though, was the phrase “stem the tide of falling underachievement”, something which apparently we are doing. Now, I don’t know quite how many negatives are in that statement but I’m sure there’s the wrong number. Surely “falling underachievement” is a good thing, so you wouldn’t want to “stem the tide” of it? Perhaps they meant “stem the tide of falling achievement”, but that doesn’t sound quite right either. And I’m pretty sure it’s not “stem the tide of achievement”, since that is how the school got into this mess in the first place, albeit not intentionally.

There’s only one response to things like this: “BULLSHIT!”

It astonishes me quite how much people get away with peddling this nonsensical use of language under the pretence of it being “formal”. Those of you who follow me on Twitter may remember what I did to the company that supposedly “manages” the estate of apartment blocks that I live on. I went through their letter and corrected it in red pen, then posted it back to them. The results are here, if you missed it first time:

I think I was quite generous with a D-.

Then, of course, you get anyone who talks about social media “professionally”, or at least likes to think they do. They use words like “monetization strategy” and “leverage” to mean “how they are going to make money” and “use”. What is wrong with “how they make money” and “use”? We’ve been using language like that for years. Why does the technological age suddenly have to bring in a bunch of new and meaningless jargon? And, while we’re on, since when did the word “product” – without a trailing “s” – become a plural?

Politics are no better. Listen to our less-than-illustrious boring fart of a leader Gordon Brown speak and all you’ll hear is string after string of meaningless waffle – so utterly devoid of actual content that by the time he reaches the end of his speech you’ve completely forgotten what the question was and you’ll agree with him just to shut him up. The Tories aren’t any better. Listen to Cameron in all his shiny-headed glory and all you get is repetitive catchphrases, empty promises and a slightly larger urge to slit your wrists than when you started. If I had to pick one of them to listen to, I’d pick Cameron, but it’s a close-run thing, and with either of them I’d be chewing down on the cyanide capsules if I didn’t have other things to distract me with.

I like plain speaking. The last few jobs I’ve applied for I’ve taken this approach and communicated with the potential employers or clients as an actual human being. I’m not “passionate” about things that I’m not really passionate about. I’m not “confident and enthusiastic”. I’m not “a team player”. I’m not… you know, all the other idiotic things that people only ever write when applying for a job and eventually get found out as being a liar. I’m Pete. I’m a human. I speak English. I don’t speak jargon.

One A Day, Day 3: Why Teaching Sucks

Those of you who follow me on Twitter or know me in general will be aware that my loathing for the teaching profession is well-documented. That, of course, didn’t stop me making an ill-advised move back into it after successfully escaping for two years. But I wonder how many of you know why?

Let me tell you.

Teaching sucks. There are many reasons for this – the chief among which is that in many, many schools the possibility of actually undertaking the activity for which the profession is named – you know, “teaching” – is rendered impossible. This happens in lots of ways.

First of all, there is the declining standard of behaviour in the classroom. I have a Year 4 class – 8 and 9 year olds. These kids are already well-versed in backchat to teachers, violence towards each other, swearing, refusing to do work and taking advantage of supposed “special needs” to their own advantage. (This isn’t, of course, to put down those kids that do have genuine difficulties learning things, but rather to put down those kids who use their supposed “condition” as an excuse to behave like a twat.)

When asking for support with children like this from senior staff, the inevitable response to the poor teacher is “you need to develop some strategies”. Well, fine. Give me some. Some that work. Oh, wait, none actually do work? Right. Let’s do some nonsense with traffic lights that they’ll ignore then.

“Keep at it. Be consistent,” they’ll say. And fine, fair enough, you should be consistent in your rewards and punishments. But I am distinctly old-fashioned in the opinion that I feel children should know their place. It is not their place to question their teacher. It is not their place to refuse to do work. It is not their place to get up out of their seat and wander around the classroom. I remember the “naughty children” in my class at primary school well (largely because they were also the ones who would bully the meeker kids such as myself), and while they were silly and could be outright nasty at playtime, in the classroom there was never any wandering around or backchat. Now, it’s not an exaggeration to say it’s a daily occurrence.

Second among the reasons that teaching is impossible is everyone’s favourite friend, bureaucracy. By the end of a single day, my desk will be covered with useless pieces of paper – notes, memos, charts, tables, percentages, requests for information. All of it is meaningless, and I don’t know where it all comes from. Why do we need to know so much information? Why is the school I’m teaching at considered a “failing” school because of some of these figures? Yes, many pupils are making slow progress but that’s because, frankly, many of them came in pretty low, don’t get much support at home and don’t have the slightest clue how to behave in the classroom, even when this is pointed out by their teacher. The fact that these children are learning anything at all should be considered a success.

Another stupid thing: the excessively celebratory nature of most schools these days. It reaches a level where it is utterly meaningless. Celebration of achievement is an important part of motivation, but when children are getting certificates in assembly for “sitting quietly all day” or “always being cheerful”, I think we may be taking things a little far. (That travesty of an “awards” ceremony happens on a weekly basis, by the way.)

The theory runs that children respond better to praise and encouragement than punishments. Well, I am yet to see any evidence of that in the three schools I have taught in, amongst children aged anywhere between 8 and 16. Children respond to things that are “unpleasant” for them. They don’t want to miss out on fun things, and they definitely don’t want to look stupid in front of their friends. So why don’t we have a weekly “anti-celebration assembly” where the naughtiest children of the week are brought up to the front of the school and admonished by the headmaster? Parents could be invited. It’d be fun.

The answer to that is, of course, that it’s not politically correct to be negative. There’s even a “golden ratio”. There should be three times as much praise as there should be punishment. I don’t know who came up with that statistic, but they probably had a clipboard.

Then there’s the Tories’ bright idea to bring in “superteachers”. This is never going to work, because the profession has such a high turnover anyway – mostly for the reasons outlined above along with the stress and the health problems that causes – that limiting access to it smacks of stupidity. In fact, this article from the Daily Mash sums it up beautifully.

Those who find success and fulfilment in the teaching profession are either very brave, very resilient or very stupid. Whatever it is, they have my eternal respect, because I’m not one of them. At the first opportunity to arise, I will be out of that door, never to return.

And this time I mean it!

We’re Doing It Wrong

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My hatred and loathing for my home country of the UK has been well documented both on these pages, on Twitter and in various other places that I’ve deposited little pockets of mental detritus around the Web. The reasons for this are manifold, of course, but the recent US elections highlighted one of the reasons that I don’t feel proud to be British, English, United Kingdomish, whatever you want to call me.

Congratulations, by the way, America. You made the right choice by electing Obama as President-elect, the first black President the US has ever seen (a fact the BBC were fond of reminding us roughly every ten seconds during their coverage). You have elected a leader who is intelligent, articulate and inspirational – a leader who certainly gives the impression that he can make a difference and who inspires trust in the things he says. His acceptance speech made me want to shed a tear and made me feel proud and patriotic… towards America.

I’m sure pretty much everyone has seen this by now, but here we go again:

The man is a fantastic public speaker, it can’t be denied – even if you don’t agree with everything he says, or doubt he’ll be able to get the job done, or whatever… there’s no denying that he knows how to instill confidence and pride in a crowd.

We get this:

This is Gordon Brown. He is our Prime Minister. Our unelected Prime Minister, I might add, who sat waiting for Blair to resign like a rabid dog waiting to pounce on a hunk of meat before jumping in and continuing the mess his predecessor had created.

There are many things I object to about Gordon Brown and his government. The biggest thing that struck me about the US election is that I actually cared about the outcome. I cared about the candidates. I was keen for Obama to win because I supported him as a person, I supported what he stood for and I found him an inspirational candidate. I felt uneasy about McCain and particularly about the Evil Ice Bitch that stood with him with her strangely plastic face. Conversely, I’ve watched several UK elections over the years and not one of them has inspired the same kind of pride, patriotism and edge-of-the-seat excitement that the US elections did. This is largely to do with the fact that our politicians are boring and uninspiring, as clearly demonstrated above.

Couple this with the fact that they seem to make consistently stupid decisions, particularly when it comes to things like criminal rights, education and the like, and I can say with some confidence that I have roughly 0% confidence and trust in our government… and the trouble is that the “other sides” don’t inspire much confidence either. David Cameron is a posh public-school boy who is widely regarded as “out of touch” with much of society. I will likely vote for him in the next election purely because I’ve seen what a hash Gordon Brown and the Labour Party have made in the last few years, but I know that it’s unlikely there will be any great change. Our “third option”, the Liberal Democrats, may as well not exist because they consistently gain so little votes in the elections that their presence is merely an annoyance to the “big two” parties.

Our MPs are fond of that particularly odious brand of management-speak and obfuscation of what they actually mean through dumb buzz-words. (I realise “obfuscation” may qualify as one of those words, but I like it.) None of them will ever answer a direct question. I realise that this is nothing new, but it does little to inspire confidence. Obama has, conversely, in the speeches I have witnessed so far, been relatively plain-speaking and comes across as honest. Time will tell if he can live up to his promises, but at least I’m feeling pretty good about him at the moment.

I don’t see any change forthcoming in the UK. Each new generation of politicians in this country is more boring, dull, morose and out-of-touch than the last. Each new generation is doing more and more damage to the country in the name of being “progressive” and encouraging “diversity” when in fact all they are doing is removing rights from people who deserve them and providing them to people who don’t, like criminals and poorly-behaved children in schools. As a result, the country is becoming apathetic, with little to no respect for authority. There’s no chance of any kind of “revolution” forthcoming because the country is so weary and exhausted by the constant beatdowns and the amount of effort it takes to get a straight answer out of a politician.

I realise this all sounds a bit Daily Mail-ish and for that I apologise. But I wanted to share my thoughts, post-election. I am filled with pride and “patriotism” (for want of a better word) towards America at the moment, but it only highlights the fact that we’re doing it wrong here.