2094: The New School

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “The New School.”

“You get to redesign school as we know it from the ground up. Will you do away with reading, writing, and arithmetic? What skills and knowledge will your school focus on imparting to young minds?”

As longtime readers (and actual friends) will know, I used to be a teacher — initially in secondary schools and later in primary schools. In the first instance, suffering a massive stress and depression-induced nervous breakdown caused me to abandon that particular career path; in the second instance, recognising the telltale signs of Something Bad About To Happen In My Brain caused me to get out before it happened again. I still do some private music teaching, but my classroom days are well and truly over.

Thing is, my woes in the classroom weren’t because I was a bad teacher. In fact, I was actually a pretty good teacher, as observations of my practice will attest. The trouble is that the way schools are in the UK today — or, at least, as they were when I was teaching back in the early years of the new millennium up until about 2010 or so — aren’t particularly conducive to effective teaching by people like me who know their stuff about a variety of topics, but who aren’t necessarily particularly strong on the whole “behaviour management” side of things. And unfortunately, the overall standard of behaviour in modern schools has significantly declined since I was a student myself; teachers no longer command respect and authority simply by virtue of the fact that they are teachers, and many students are able to get away with appalling behaviour, often with a ready-made “special educational needs” excuse ready to go as soon as you might want to do anything about it.

So what would a completely redesigned, money-is-no-object, Utopian school look like in my mind? Well, let’s consider a number of different areas.

Firstly, I think it’s important to take ability levels into account: there should be specialist teachers for different strata of ability in different subjects as well as just subject specialists. The reason I say this is that there are some teachers who are particularly adept at handling pupils who struggle to take in or retain information, and others who are particularly strong at pushing the more talented children as far as they can possibly go. Mixing both of these types of pupil in the classroom along with a bunch more who are somewhere around the middle is not conducive to good learning; the requirement to provide “differentiated” lesson plans is largely a product of the way schools work these days rather than a particularly effective, proven method of getting things done. This is particularly apparent in primary school, where classes tend to stay together for all their subjects, with one teacher expected to effectively deliver three or four different lessons simultaneously in order to cater to each of the ability groups.

When handling ability groups, however, it is, of course, important to have a little tact and sensitivity about the whole thing: there should not be a stigma attached to being in a particular group. This is something I’m not entirely sure could be prevented entirely: even if you make a specific effort to obscure the fact that groups are based on ability levels, kids, in my experience, tend to know when they’re in the “top” or “bottom” sets for something. An alternative, more radical approach, of course, would be to make schools themselves more selective, with entire educational establishments specifically catering to “challenging”, “gifted” or “average” students. That way the entire school can be set up to support all its pupils most effectively.

Yet another angle you can take on this is that modern youth’s perception of academic success and suchlike needs to be repositioned. For many years now, it’s not been particularly “cool” to perform well in school; an effective new way of thinking about school would incentivise good performance — or at least progress — to encourage all pupils to push themselves that little bit further. The con to this sort of idea, of course, is that it engenders elitism; those students who know that they are at the top of the ladder may become complacent, and this may lead to conflict. This is why I’d lean towards my earlier idea of stratifying entire educational establishments: that way, the attainment level across an entire establishment is fairly “flat” and thus all but eliminates these conflicts — though also an element of healthy competition.

Alongside questions of ability levels is the matter of the dreaded “league tables” — those facts and figures that come out each year and reduce each school down to the number of A-C grades they get at GCSE and/or A-level time. The trouble with league tables is that while they demonstrate a school’s ability to prepare pupils for exams, they don’t demonstrate other aspects of education such as preparation for later life and learning skills. They also don’t take into account how much individual pupils improve between joining and leaving a school, which, in many ways, is a far more relevant metric than just the end results of each cohort’s exams. League tables as they are, then, need to be scrapped altogether in favour of something that paints a more realistic picture of how schools are performing — and which doesn’t encourage schools to be seen as “better” or “worse” based purely on a rather arbitrary number.

Now, the biggie for me would be the matter of behaviour. As I mentioned earlier, behaviour management was not one of my strong points, and this was largely because I didn’t feel like I was particularly well-equipped to deal with a lot of situations that came my way. How do you handle a child who threatens to knife you because you asked them to stop talking, for example? A child who continues to beat up his peers because his parents told him it was all right to do so (and whose parents repeat this advice to you at a Parents’ Evening)? A child who shows fundamental disrespect for other people’s property, even when taking good care of that property would allow them to have a more enjoyable experience at school? As modern education stands, there is really very little that most teachers can do against poor behaviour; it mostly comes down to psychological tricks of various degrees: convincing children that they “want” to behave well; incentivising good behaviour; leading by example.

Balls to all that, I say; teachers need the power to punish. I’m not (necessarily) talking about corporal punishment — though I got smacked as a kid and sure as hell didn’t do the things that got me a smack again after the first time — but rather a wider range of tools and support that teachers can use to keep their classrooms under control. Whether this is additional people in the classroom to help out or stronger powers to impose sanctions on poorly behaved children, I’m not entirely sure; what does need to happen, though, is that pupils need to know their place and to show the appropriate amount of respect, both to authority figures and to their peers. This, I think, would be the most challenging part of redesigning schools, but would probably have the biggest impact if done correctly.

Other ideas I’ve had floating around my head include some means of “gamifying” the classroom. Rewards of various kinds have been proven to provide a good incentive for kids to perform and behave well, but there’s not much in the way of consistency with how these are applied between educational establishments. So how about some sort of nationwide reward scheme, administered electronically with its information stored on the Internet? There could be leaderboards and achievements, just like a video game, and these could run the gamut of the school life experience from academia to sports, thereby allowing all students to clearly see where their strengths are and have their achievements celebrated. Were money no object, these could even translate into some form of real-life rewards to encourage healthy competition or striving for clearly-defined goals.

These are all nice dreams, but unfortunately all of them would doubtless be impractical to implement in one way or another. Shame, really, since if many of these were in place, I’d strongly consider returning to the classroom. As it stands, though, I value what is left of my sanity too much to ever stand at the chalkface ever again.

2061: By Request: More About My Stint as a Teacher

Continuing with yesterday’s little exercise of taking suggestions from my Twitter followers, today I come to a request from another Michael, in this case Michael J. Hughes, aka @mobilesworking. Michael wanted to hear more about my stint as a teacher, so that’s what I’m going to write about today.

Longtime readers will, of course, be aware that when I started doing this whole oneaday thing, I was still employed in education, just coming to the end of a short-term maternity cover contract where I was looking after a Year 4 class while, at the same time, the school in question was gradually collapsing into Special Measures. This meant an inordinately stressful period of my life, although anyone who has ever worked in education will know that education in general is pretty stressful; throw in regular visits from government inspectors, though, and things get a bit too much to bear. If you really want to read my thoughts and feelings from the time itself, start here and go right ahead!

In the meantime, I will attempt to give a potted history of my time at the chalkface in this single post, since it’s now a few years ago and I’ve subsequently had time to reflect on my experiences — which, while I look back on them in such a way as to know that I never, ever want to be a classroom teacher ever again, aren’t entirely negative. Just mostly negative.

I kind of fell into teaching. While I was still at school, I took on a few piano pupils, since my mother and my teacher thought that I would do a decent job of teaching them. Turns out that I did; it was hugely nerve-wracking to begin with, but I gradually settled into it, noticing things like different pupils learning in different ways and the different tutor books handling things very differently from one another. As time went on, I developed my own unique style of teaching, as most teachers did, and I was enjoying myself. I was particularly enjoying it as piano tuition can be very lucrative indeed, and when you’re a highschooler with no real “expenses” besides the latest video games, that money soon mounts up if you have a few pupils.

Anyway. A few years later, I was coming towards the end of my degree studies at Southampton University. I’d been studying English and Music, though the English component had proven to be somewhat disappointing, focusing rather too much on philosophy rather than actual English for my tastes, and the Music component had demonstrated to me that in terms of ability, I wasn’t anything particularly “special” among the overall musician community. A little disheartened, the time came for me to ponder exactly what I’d do when my degree course came to a close; I was on track to receive a decent grade (it eventually turned out to be a 2:1, which I was more than happy with) but it was occurring to me a little too late that my original idea of taking a “good, general degree” and falling into a job straight afterwards due to the multi-purpose nature of my qualification wasn’t really going to work; an awful lot of jobs that I might have been interesting were looking for specific degrees in things like management, computing and whatnot, and so I was finding myself a little despondent.

I’ll add at this point that I certainly don’t regret my time at university, as I’m aware all of the above may sound a little negative. On the contrary, I actually rather enjoyed the chance to have three years studying things that I found interesting, and I wish I could have that opportunity again in the future. I enjoy learning, even if I don’t end up being amazing at the thing I’m learning, and for that reason alone — coupled with the very good friends I made while I was there — the experience was worthwile. But I digress.

The time came to make a decision, and I thought back to my time teaching piano. I knew that teaching in the classroom wouldn’t be the same as teaching an individual pupil one-on-one, but I thought it was something potentially worth pursuing, anyway. Taking a teaching qualification, I thought, would give you a ready-made career path and hopefully sort you out for if not life then certainly the immediate future.

My PGCE (PostGraduate Certificate of Education) studies remain some of my fondest memories of university. Our tutor Rebecca Berkeley was one of the most charismatic, entertaining teachers I’ve ever had, and she set a fantastic example of how to engage and thrill people in the music classroom. Our small but dedicated cohort of trainee music teachers were enthusiastic and passionate, too, and we all had our own ideas and approaches to lessons.

Then we got into the classroom. The university had a whole bunch of partner schools in the nearby area, and I ended up at a place in Eastleigh, the next town over. This necessitated the catching of an early-morning train every day, at least until I made friends with the painfully gorgeous trainee Geography teacher Debbie, who started giving me a lift after seeing my sad figure trudging through the rain to the station one day. The school itself was an interesting structure, with its main concourse being all concrete and glass, looking to all intents and purposes like a small shopping centre rather than a school. The music department was, I recall, upstairs on the left as you went in; it consisted of a single, very wide room that always seemed much too big.

Following the suggestions and ideas we’d been given during our initial training — and after an initial period of observing the school’s resident music teacher — I prepared to deliver a short series of four lessons that I’d planned out in advance. I was very pleased with them; they represented a gradual progression from simple, straightforward activities to a more freeform assessment-style activity to finish off with, and I’d made an effort to drop in some references to things that I knew the kids would relate to in my worksheets. Thought I knew, anyway; turns out my subtle references to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which was a recent release on PlayStation 2 at the time, were… well, too subtle for them, and no-one appeared to notice them. Disappointing.

My actual delivery of the lessons varied in quality somewhat, though I attribute this partly to the variation in the makeup of the different classes. Some classes are “better” than others; sometimes all it takes is a single unruly child — usually one with “special educational needs”, it has to be said — to disrupt everything and spoil the flow of a lesson, and sometimes kids just have off days. (Sometimes teachers do, too.)

Anyway, to cut a very long story short, my teacher training proved to be a bit of a rollercoaster of emotions. When it went well, it was a fantastic feeling. When it went badly, it was the worst feeling in the world… actually, no, when I thought it had gone well but my mentor in the school told me he thought I was actually getting worse, that was the worst feeling in the world.

I passed my course comfortably in the end, and was ready to begin my career, though I already had a few misgivings based on my experiences as a student teacher. In particular, the one aspect which I had worried would prove to be the most difficult — behaviour management — did indeed turn out to be the most difficult, and more so than I’d expected. And the trouble with behaviour management is that you can fill your head with all the theories and strategies you like, sometimes they just simply don’t work; sometimes you’re just faced with a class of shitheads who don’t want to do anything, don’t like you and don’t like school in general. In which case, you’re pretty much fucked.

I encountered this position on a fairly regular basis in my first full-on teaching position, which was at a school in an army base town on the Hampshire-Surrey border. The school’s population was made up of a melting-pot of Forces kids and local traveller children, and consequently clashes were frequent and often violent. The polite term for the school would be “challenging”; the area wasn’t exactly impoverished as such, but it wasn’t particularly well off, and the school wasn’t especially well-equipped, either.

The school’s approach to staffing was to recruit people into a main position, then encourage them to try out some other subjects, too, broadening the staff’s expertise and making the whole workforce a little more flexible. It also gave the kids a bit more variety, too. I was recruited as the second music teacher at the school, but I was also presented with a few English, ICT and “Key Skills” classes. I didn’t really know what Key Skills was, but being relatively bright-eyed and keen to make a good impression, I agreed to jump in and have a go at them.

Key Skills turned out to be the “get the naughty kids out of our fucking hair for an hour or so” subject. Each class was made up of no more than about ten or twelve kids, all of whom were either painfully stupid or behaved like psychopaths. There were a few instances of kids exhibiting both characteristics, but for the most part the stupid kids weren’t the problem; they’d happily get on with doodling something in crayon while the psycho kids would kick off. Because they always fucking kicked off.

In a way, I don’t really blame them; they almost certainly knew why they were in the Key Skills class, and the subject matter — which included, among other things, how to operate a washing machine — wasn’t exactly the most inspiring stuff in the world. But the amount of rage, resentment and abuse directed at me as a result was almost intolerable. On one occasion, a kid threatened to knife me because I asked him to stop talking; on another, most of the class locked me in the classroom and broke the door; the couple of pupils who had remained behind then climbed out of the window.

On another memorable occasion — and this isn’t exactly abuse, but it’s a story I delight in telling — I had taken the Year 8 Key Skills group to the library for some innocuous activity, and noticed that two members of the class — Fat Barry and his friend Shane — had been gone for some time. I eventually found them behind some bookshelves, Fat Barry straddling a face-down Shane and… gyrating.

“What are you doing?” I asked, foolishly, kicking myself mentally for not simply being assertive and telling them to “get up”.

“We’re doing a bumsex, Sir,” replied Fat Barry, with admirable politeness and deference.

Anyway. I digress. My stint at this first school lasted just a single year because the headteacher who was in charge when I first joined was seemingly Not Very Good With Money, and this meant that when the new head came on board partway through my first year as a qualified teacher, he was faced with the unenviable task of laying off a considerable proportion of the school’s staff. As one of the last in, I was, of course, one of the first out, though thankfully it wasn’t long before I managed to secure a new position in another nearby school that, this time, was in a slightly more affluent area.

I stayed at my second school for just under two years. During that time, I had some good experiences. I absolutely adored working with my GCSE group, for example, because they treated me like a human being rather than a teacher, and I reciprocated. Also it’s a magical feeling to successfully convince an entire class to spend two hours writing arrangements of Battle on the Big Bridge from Final Fantasy V. They did a great job!

I also loved working with the drama department on the production of Blood Brothers, and on the 24-hour Music Marathon for charity. I enjoyed introducing a hitherto-unexplored aspect of music technology into the classrooms of the school, and I enjoyed running groups such as the choir and the jazz band. I even quite enjoyed being a group tutor; although I didn’t teach my tutor group for any classes, we built up a reasonable rapport over the course of the two years I was with them just from registration and tutorial periods.

Unfortunately, this job nearly killed me. I had been aware of my stress levels rising for some time, but I thought I could handle it. I couldn’t. The theft of an £80 microphone from out of my locked desk in my locked classroom flipped a switch in my head, and I knew I didn’t want to do this any more, but intended to stick it out for as long as I could.

“As long as I could” turned out to not be very long at all. A particularly obnoxious year 9 class were outright refusing to sit down, be quiet and listen to the activities I had planned for them, and this turned out to be the tipping point. I ran out of the classroom, into the department’s walk-in storage cupboard — which was a bombsite after the year 9 class had, once again, failed to treat anything with any respect whatsoever — and just started crying.

I couldn’t stop. The tears kept flowing, the sobs made me gasp to a point where I could barely breathe. I collapsed to my knees, no longer caring if anyone saw or heard me. I don’t remember who did see or hear me, but someone did, because before long I was finding myself ushered into the drama department’s office — the drama room was presently vacant, and it was adjacent to my classroom. I found myself confronted with a couple concerned-looking faces; my head of department, whom I’d lashed out at over my frustration with the microphone theft a little while ago (and subsequently felt awful about) and the head of drama, a woman of considerable dry wit whom I’d always found a bit intimidating, but was now showing a softer side I hadn’t expected.

“This isn’t me,” I wheezed, gasping and gulping for air as I continued to sob. “I can’t do this. This isn’t me. This isn’t who I am.”

I don’t remember how the conversation went from there, but before long I was at home making an appointment with the doctor. I related my experiences to him and, without asking any further details or examining me, he signed me off work until the end of the term. I snuck into the school when I knew no-one would be around but it would still be open and left the doctor’s note on the reception desk; it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I didn’t want to ever set foot in that school ever again; I felt like I had disgraced myself and that I would be mercilessly abused and mocked if I was ever seen again.

I ended up only going back in there once; after I went back to the doctors as my note was nearing its expiration, I explained that I didn’t feel like I could go back, and again without hesitation, he signed me off until the end of the school year. Evidently I wasn’t the first teacher to come to him in this state. My final visit to that school was on the last day of the year, after all the kids had gone home, and I had to pick up my things. The campus was deserted; I didn’t even see any of my colleagues. I collected my things, walked out of the door and didn’t look back, swearing never to return to teaching.

Except, of course, I did. As I was coming to the end of a period working in retail, I found myself with the opportunity to try my hand at primary school teaching; my previous experience had been with secondary school teaching, and too many people had said to me that they’d thought I’d be good at primary school teaching for me to ignore. So I spent some time with a friend of mine who taught in the local area, and found the experience both enjoyable and less stressful. So I pursued it, eventually netting the maternity cover position I had when I started writing this blog every day.

Primary school teaching was, without a doubt, a better experience than secondary school teaching for the most part, even in as shitty a school as I was working in. The lessons were varied and fun to teach, and they challenged me as well as the kids; I had to flex mathematical brain muscles I hadn’t worked out in years, for example, and I enjoyed things like reading them stories and suchlike. It was also cool to be in education just at the time when new technologies like interactive whiteboards and suchlike were starting to be incorporated into classrooms, and it gave me a feeling of actually being somewhat worthwhile by being The Guy Who Knew About Computers, compared to my middle-aged female colleagues, most of whom knew how to log on to Facebook and little else.

I knew it wouldn’t last, though. I still had difficulty with behaviour management, particularly with a couple of notorious kids in my class, one of whom had a somewhat turbulent homelife that manifested itself in some seriously unpleasant tendencies. Despite the support of my long-suffering teaching assistant in the classroom — whose help I will forever be grateful for, particularly as having support in the secondary school classroom was incredibly rare — I just didn’t know what to do; I didn’t know how to make this child do what I wanted him to do, and I didn’t know how to get through to him.

I could feel the tell-tale signs of stress creeping up on me again, and I knew I didn’t want to have another experience like the last time. So I got ahead of the game; I quit. I explained to the acting headteacher of the school what was happening with me and why I needed to get out, then I got out. Then I went to PAX in Boston to meet some friends who had previously only been usernames on the Internet. Then my then-wife left me and my life fell to pieces. But that’s a story for another day — or, more specifically, one that I’ve already told on these pages if you know where to look, and one that I can’t help but feel is still going on right now, and that is yet to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

1807: Learnin’

During quiet periods, I’ve been educating myself in some things that will doubtless prove beneficial to future career plans: specifically, I’ve been learning about the various languages of the Web thanks to a marvellous site that I remember seeing the genesis of a while back, but which I haven’t really delved into until just recently: Codecademy.

Codecademy is a site that truly leverages the idea of interactive learning and makes programming accessible to anyone, regardless of their previous skills. It covers a range of topics, starting at HTML and CSS and working through other useful technologies such as JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Python and Ruby, and also provides examples of how to use these technologies to leverage the APIs of popular platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Evernote to build your own apps.

There are a number of different approaches you can take through the currently available course material: you can take a specific “skill” (such as HTML and CSS, or JavaScript) and work your way through a series of multi-stage exercises, given clear instructions and the opportunity to immediately see the effects of your work as you go; you can take on a practical project (such as recreating the homepage of a popular site using established Web technologies such as HTML and CSS plus extensions like Bootstrap); or you can do one of the super-quick “this is what you’ll be capable of if you stick with it” projects whereby you “create” something impressive like an animated interactive picture by referencing pre-existing libraries that have conveniently been built for you.

So far I’ve found I’ve responded best to the structured, skill-based work. These courses take the longest out of all of Codecademy’s material, but they provide in-depth experience of getting your hands dirty, and tend to provide enough plausible context for the things you’re doing to make them relatable to real contexts. The JavaScript course perhaps didn’t go into quite as much depth as it could — I would have liked to see greater exploration of how JavaScript code is integrated into a website, rather than (or perhaps as well as) treating it as an entirely separate and independent language, but at least the course game me a reasonably firm understanding of some of the core concepts, and allowed me to get my head around object-oriented programming a lot more than I have done in the past.

I quite enjoy programming, though I haven’t been properly “into” it since the 8- and 16-bit eras, when I used to use variations on BASIC (Atari BASIC on the Atari 8-bit computers, and STOS on the Atari ST) to put together simple games. I fell out of the habit of programming around the time you no longer had to put line numbers in manually, though a few abortive attempts to learn over the years have made me pretty familiar with common conventions such as {curly braces} and ending lines with semicolons();

As with any new skill, the real thing you need to do to ensure the knowledge sticks it to apply what you’ve learned in some sort of practical situation. I’m hoping that the later exercises in Codecademy will provide some of this much-needed context for my learning and allow me to confidently say “yes, I do know [language]”. That sort of thing makes you eminently attractive when being considered for new positions, and while I’m not intending to move on anywhere just yet, it is, of course, always worth keeping one’s eyes open for suitable opportunities to flex one’s intellectual muscles and make use of the things you’ve learned over the years.

Still got a way to go before I’d consider putting any of these languages (except HTML and CSS, which I’m pretty confident in the use of) on my CV, though; better get back to the studying then, I guess!

1508: Learn Through Play

Learning through play is not just something for pre-schoolers; it’s something you can continue to do throughout your life, and I absolutely love it when you twig that it’s happened.

My earliest memories of genuinely learning something from a video game that wasn’t explicitly an “educational” title came in the mid-’90s when MicroProse was on top form churning out flight sim after flight sim. I learned that the F-19 wasn’t real and the F-117A was; I learned how aircraft carrier takeoffs and landings worked; I learned about the physics of flight — though admittedly, most flight sims that weren’t made by SubLOGIC and subsequently Microsoft didn’t have particularly accurate flight models — and I learned about real-world conflicts around the world, primarily in Libya and the Gulf.

More recently, my love of Japanese games has equipped me with a surprising amount of knowledge about Japanese culture and how people go about things over there. Shenmue taught me to take your shoes off when entering a Japanese person’s house; School Days taught me about saying itadakimasu before starting to eat; Persona taught me about national holidays and the way schools work in Japan. Granted, relatively little of that is what we might term “useful” knowledge (unless, of course, you’re going to live or work in Japan) but it’s still pretty cool to learn it.

My Japanese class this evening showed me that even Final Fantasy XIV has successfully taught me things, primarily through its seasonal events. Currently running, for example, is an event called “Little Ladies’ Day”, which I discovered is actually a real-life Japanese celebration in March known variously as Girls’ Day, Doll’s Day or hinamatsuri. In the questline for the seasonal event in the game, you’re tasked with taking a doll around and showing it to people, and references are often made to it being far too expensive for most people to afford. Coincidentally, the real-life dolls displayed as part of hinamatsuri celebrations are often elaborate creations that are well out of the price range of casual collectors.

This isn’t the first time Final Fantasy XIV specifically has taught me something like this; last month, the Valentine’s day celebrations had a distinctly Japanese flavour about it, too, particularly when it came to the whole “exchanging chocolates” thing. That and the costume you received as a reward for completing the questline there made you look like you were heading off to work at a maid café — no bad thing, indeed.

I find it pretty fascinating to consider video games being used in this way — to passively impart knowledge without you realising it — and am particularly inspired by the prospect this raises of my favourite entertainment medium being a brilliant means of encouraging understanding and empathy between different cultures. The industry as a whole still has a very long way to go with regards to diversity, of course — while it’s possible to learn a lot about Japanese culture through games, you’re less likely to be able to interactively immerse yourself in, say, Middle Eastern or African culture, or even subcultures from closer to home — but I have faith that over time, we will start to see more and more interactive experiences that genuinely have something to teach us, whether that’s knowledge we can actually apply in the real world, or simply a means of better understanding our fellow human beings. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

1338: Educating Everywhere

I watched an episode of Channel 4’s docusoap/fly on the wall show Educating Yorkshire earlier and, as I could have predicted, I found it most enjoyable.

You see, despite my unpleasant experiences at the chalkface a few years back, I still find myself interested in the world of education. I find schools to be fascinating places, with their collection of hundreds or even thousands of diverse people thrown together and expected to survive without killing each other. They’re a great source of stories, both from the perspective of the teachers and the pupils, and I am constantly fascinated by fiction set in schools. (This explains my love of the following things: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; appalling high school drama movies; slice of life anime; visual novels)

Educating Yorkshire is set up well to tell some of these supposedly real stories, and it tells them well. Over the course of the single episode I watched today, we learned about the school’s headteacher and his ideals; the students’ attitudes towards him; the “back stories” of two persistent troublemakers; and a few other things besides. Although everything that happened was mundane to the max, these stories were presented in a compelling manner that made them interesting.

One image I absolutely could not get out of my head, though, was how much typical disciplinary proceedings at a school resemble a police interrogation — or at least one as depicted in the media. Before long, I was picturing Cole Phelps from L.A. Noire yelling at a kid (“[DOUBT] You did it, didn’t you, you sick son of a bitch!”) and pondering if there might be a market for a video game in which you play a teacher and have to investigate these incredibly mundane transgressions.

Well, I’d play it, even if no-one else would. Though given some of the creative interactive experiences we’re starting to get today, now, I can’t help but feel I might not be alone!

#oneaday Day 946: Things I Actually Miss About School

For the most part, I don’t miss my own school days. I spent a lot of them being bullied by douchebags who hopefully haven’t amounted to anything by now, one of whom I rather memorably punched in the face just as the headmaster was coming around the corner. (He sided with me after the fact, noting that my outburst of aggression was quite understandable, given bully in question’s history. I got away with nothing more than a “five minute report”, a piece of paper I had to get signed by teachers every five minutes during break and lunchtime.)

But there were good times too. So I thought I’d share a few.

The Rough Book

Our school library used to sell exercise books for a few pence, just in case you lost yours and wanted to replace it without having to tell your teacher that you’d lost your book. The librarian (Mrs Miller, no! We will not let you go!) asked no questions, though, other than “what colour would you like?”

And so it was that my friend Ed and I brought in the concept of the “Rough Book” — an exercise book ostensibly for quick scribblings, sketching and note-taking but which usually ended up completely covered in graffiti, drawings of cocks and an elaborate middle two pages flamboyantly depicting the name of whichever girl I had made the mistake of telling my friends I fancied that week.

A key part of the Rough Book’s appeal was keeping it secret, and for the most part we managed to do so without it being confiscated or even spotted. It was immensely satisfying but also a bit sad to reach the end of one — while it was possible to look back on all the silly drawings we had done over the course of a few weeks, the book’s “magic” was lost, and it usually found its way into the bin eventually — largely because we didn’t want our parents and/or teachers seeing all the pictures of cocks and swear words we’d scrawled all over every available inch.

Music Concerts

Our school used to do two big concerts a year — one in the summer, one around Christmas time. The weekly rehearsals for the various groups tended to revolve around practicing pieces for these big events, which always enjoyed a strong turnout from parents and friends of the school. Going to music groups was one of my main forms of socialising at school — since I lived seven miles away, it wasn’t always easy to just pop over to a friend’s house for pizza and video games, and music groups gave me a chance to make some new friends and see some of my existing friends in a new context. They were fun.

There was something special about concert night, though — a strange, almost romantic atmosphere in the air. Inevitably, being a horny teenager, I’d interpret this atmosphere as “God, I’d really like to get off with someone” and spend as much of the evening as possible attempting to flirt with the girls from the clarinet section. (Ahh, Nikki. How hot you were.) Being a zitty, socially-incompetent loser with crap hair, I inevitably failed to drum up the confidence to do anything to take advantage of the romance in the air, but all of the girls were good enough to humour me and not just tell me to fuck off, which was nice.

Learning Shit

You know, I actually enjoyed the whole “learning” part of school. (This is probably why I was bullied so much.) I loved the fact that on any given day, we got to learn German, saw a plank of wood in half, spectacularly fail to compose a “reggae” piece and listen to our maths teacher make up an anecdote about the time he went windsurfing and knew he was exactly 200 metres from the shoreline. Exactly how much of that stuff has been retained over the years is perhaps questionable (my use of German nowadays can probably be filed under “racism”, or “Englishman Abroad” at the very least) but I enjoyed learning it at the time.

Except maths. I hated maths with a passion. Maths homework used to make me genuinely angry. In retrospect, this was silly, because a lot of things in the real world involve maths to various degrees. Granted, I have little use for quadratic equations in my daily life (and thus can’t remember what they are) but things like basic algebra and arithmetic occasionally come in handy.

The Canteen

I typically used to take a packed lunch to school, so eating in the canteen was a rare treat. They served chips and pizza and other awesome things, most of which Jamie Oliver has probably banned by now. In the upper school dining hall (which was later converted into part of the new sixth form centre that my year was the first to pass through) you could get chips and frickin’ cheese.

The Teachers

Yeah, I actually miss the people who taught me. It would probably be horrifying to see how much they’ve aged by now, since the mental image I have of all of them is how they were between the years of 1992 and 1999, but there were some truly fine folks at the chalkface of my school. There were scary teachers, friendly teachers, knowledgeable teachers, weird teachers and, yes, hot teachers — but I can’t remember any that I particularly disliked as such. (Except for the guy who taught me four-part harmony for A-Level music, but he was a peripatetic music teacher and thus didn’t count.) I wonder how many of them are still there. I also occasionally wonder how many of the students I worked with during my thankfully short teaching career will remember me in years to come?

That’s enough waxing nostalgic for tonight, I think. Time to sleep.

#oneaday Day 841: Badass Teacher

I know I’ve said many, many times on this blog that I’d never go back to teaching (and for the sake of my own mental health it’s probably for the best that I don’t) but I still, at times, find myself idly wondering how I’d manage The Perfect Classroom. By that I mean at a school that wasn’t struggling to keep its head above water, that was adequately staffed, that was populated by children of a decent range of ability levels but whom weren’t misbehaving little shitbags. A non-existent school, then, but a good starting point for a dream nonetheless.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument this Perfect Classroom is at a primary school, because that generally means sticking with the same class the whole time and building up a good relationship with them. On balance, I think I slightly preferred that to the constant coming and going of secondary education in which it was very difficult to learn names even after several months of teaching the same children.

Organisation is the key to a successful classroom, so I’d have some sort of technological solution — ideally portable — in place to keep things organise. I’m thinking an iPad, tooled up with a specialised app such as TeacherPal or a more generalised database like Bento. Within said technological solution I’d keep detailed, ongoing records on my students and also include a photograph to help prevent forgotten names. Using said technological solution I’d be able to quickly call up information on a particular student’s work and progress when required, be that for report-writing season or a parents’ evening.

Said portable device would also, ideally, be hooked up to the interactive whiteboards that are present in most classrooms (essentially giant touchscreens with a projector) in order to allow presentation of material on the screen while remaining “mobile”. (The inspectors love it when you don’t stay at the front of the room all the time.)

Technology can also play a good role in home-school communication, and certainly none of the schools I worked at in the past took advantage of this. Statistically speaking, it’s highly likely that a good proportion of the parents of the children in the class would have social media accounts, so why not take advantage of that? My class would have a Twitter and Facebook presence maintained (and carefully moderated) by me. The pages would provide regular updates on what the class has been up to and, crucially, publicly note any and all homework that had been set. Homework is a thorny issue, particularly in primary education, but having it spelled out in black and white on an “official” social media page would certainly allow me and the parents of my students to keep on top of things.

The social media page wouldn’t just be a glorified homework diary, of course. It would also be a great place for celebrating achievements, which is something that pretty much every school is big on. This could range from sharing the names of who won things like attendance certificates to pictures of good work. (Obviously care would have to be taken with photos, names and other details that end up in the public domain lest the Thought Police swoop in and decry you as some sort of kiddie porn-peddling pervert.)

In the classroom’s day-to-day life, I’d make an effort to use gamification theories to encourage students to progress. I’d allow them to earn rewards of some description — perhaps some form of “experience points” system, with tangible rewards given on every “level up”, or perhaps some sort of “achievement” system, again with tangible rewards on offer for significant achievements. These wouldn’t have to be big things — a congratulatory letter home, a sticker, some crappy pound shop toy — but they’d help motivate the kids to do their best. (I know, you shouldn’t have to “bribe” children to do good work, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to make them feel good about their achievements.)

It’s a nice dream, isn’t it? Pity it will probably never happen.

#oneaday Day 803: Why Teaching Sucks Redux

I’ve been trawling through my blog’s top search terms recently and besides this post, which has been a permanent fixture on that list for somewhere around two years now, one of the most consistent things that people find me through is the simple, clear phrase “teaching sucks”.

I have touched on this subject before — hence the presence of the search term — but perhaps haven’t described the extent to which I suffered in particularly great detail. This was for several reasons, chief among which was the fact that I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to go back into that particular career path. I spent a year of my life earning a professional qualification to prove that I’m allowed to stand up in front of children and tell them things, after all, so I didn’t want to rule it out entirely.

Having found myself doing things that I actually enjoy now, however, I’m pretty certain that I won’t ever be jumping back on that train. So here, then, are just some of the many reasons Why Teaching Sucks.

My first teaching position was at a comprehensive secondary school somewhere near the Surrey/Hampshire border. I was hired as a music teacher, though had also agreed to take on some additional responsibilities because I’d been advised that making yourself out to be somewhat flexible was The Thing to Do. Specifically, I’d said that I’d also be happy to take on some English and ICT teaching as appropriate, though with the proviso that I’d not been specifically trained in those subject areas.

I was offered the job, and it was something of a relief as it was getting rather late to be applying for positions. I had been feeling a growing sense of unease — was I doing something terribly wrong at interview? Was I not cut out for this career? Was I a bad person? Some of these thoughts were unreasonable and irrational, of course, but it’s the way my brain works. So when the headteacher offered me the position, his only criticism of my interview and observed lesson being the fact that my tie was a little bit creased, I accepted with haste. (As a matter of fact, in most cases you don’t have any option but to accept with haste when being interviewed for a position at a school — most seem to expect you to give an answer there and then.)

The time came to start. My heart was in my mouth as the fateful day in September approached, though I was pleased there were a few days to plan and prepare before the kids actually showed up. I took the time to get to know my colleague in the Music department, and also discovered that I’d been signed up to teach “Key Skills” lessons. The exact nature of these lessons wasn’t entirely clear, but I was promised that all lesson plans and relevant material would be prepared for me.

By the time the kids arrived, I was starting to feel reasonably positive. I could do this. I was trying desperately to ignore the things some of my new colleagues had said about the local squaddies’ families having semi-regular violent altercations with local traveller families, and felt pretty much prepared for what faced me.

Things got underway, and to cut a long story short, it wasn’t exactly plain sailing. Year 7 classes were mostly manageable, as the kids were generally fairly bright-eyed and fresh from primary school. Above that, though, and things got difficult. There was the kid whose mum said he didn’t have to attend detentions, making all punishments effectively worthless. There was the kid who liked to climb bookshelves. There was the kid who threatened to knife me when I politely asked him to be quiet.

It wasn’t all bad times, of course. My GCSE Music class were a joy to spend time with, and while some of them weren’t the most gifted musicians in the world, they were fun to hang out with and always tried their best because they liked what they were doing, and they liked me. There were other students who brought a bit of light into the darkness, too, some of whom I’ve discussed on this very blog. And the school production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a particular highlight that I doubt I’ll ever forget — even if it meant me staying up until 3 in the morning arranging music on several occasions. And my colleagues were consistently super-awesome — what I discovered in that school was that people tend to stick together in adversity to support and help each other. I made some good friends, and without them I probably wouldn’t have made it as far as I did.

It wasn’t to last. The previous headteacher retired and a new head came in — oddly enough, he was an ex-teacher of my housemate at the time, though that’s somewhat beside the point. The new head had been brought in to “fix” things — the school was about half a million in the red, behaviour was awful and clearly Things Needed To Be Done. So he did — he immediately expelled a selection of the worst kids in the school (and expelling kids is not an easy process these days), which made him look like he meant business. And he then set about tackling the budgetary problems.

Unfortunately, this meant redundancies. And it became abundantly apparent that the Music department was going to be on the chopping block. As I was the last in, I was also highly likely to be the first out, and sure enough, I was informed that my job would likely no longer be there after the end of the year.

Although I regularly went home cursing the names of the students I taught for the stress they caused me, I sort of enjoyed the job, and very much enjoyed the financial security of having regular income. I didn’t want that to go away, and broke down in tears in the Music department staffroom one lunchtime. It was not a pleasant feeling, though it was somewhat cathartic to let out the pent-up emotions while surrounded by sympathetic ears. It didn’t help that I was then invited to effectively go and plead for my job to the board of governors, a soul-destroyingly humiliating experience which I hope I never have to go through again.

By the time the end of term came, however, I’d secured a new position at a nearby school and was feeling a little more positive about things. My first impression of the new school had been a positive one, and I felt better about the whole “security” thing. I even managed to give a memorable leaving speech, during which I was able to slip in a saucy joke at the deputy headmistress’ expense, offer some earnest thanks to the colleagues who had made my time at that school bearable, and wish them luck for the undoubtedly tough times ahead.

The summer holidays came and went, and I found myself at the new school. This was in a more affluent area, but it was still “the shit school” in the town in question. Once again I went in, got to know my colleagues and prepared for the coming storm.

And once again, all was well to begin with. In most schools, new teachers can enjoy a few weeks of relative calm as the students acclimatise to the new regime, occasionally push the boundaries but mostly seem to want to get on with things. As time passed, however, things declined somewhat. It became more and more difficult to control the classes as the children became more and more confident — overconfident, some might say. I had several pieces of expensive equipment stolen from my (locked) classroom, I was verbally abused on a regular basis, the equipment in the department hadn’t been refreshed for a good ten years and there was no money to buy any more, and I was starting to feel the “cracks” from stress.

In the case of this school, there was no sense of camaraderie — at least, I didn’t encounter any. No-one talked to me in the staffroom. Even my own departmental colleague preferred to hang out with her friend from Maths than talk to me. I found myself feeling unsupported, unliked and unappreciated. When things went well, I felt like I didn’t receive recognition for them. And when things went badly, I felt like I didn’t get the help I so desperately needed. I ended up taking quite a few days off sick when I felt I couldn’t cope or face the day ahead — and still had to send in work for my classes to complete when that happened.

One particular day I was teaching a class, and had just set them off on an activity to compose some music. I had divided them into groups, I had set clear expectations as to what I wanted them to do and when I expected it to be done by, and I had the equipment set up ready to record their work at the end of the session. In short, there wasn’t much else I could have done in order to make that lesson run any smoother.

Unfortunately, it was that day that several groups of students decided to kick off. No-one was concentrating on the task, despite my going around and helping them. Group members were arguing, disagreeing and in some cases threatening to get violent with one another. And they would not respond to me at all.

I could feel the pressure building in my brain like a pot slowly coming to the boil. I knew that something was going to give. I felt it happen as I was standing out in the main hall trying to convince the children who were using the piano to get on with their work rather than thump each other with percussion instruments. Nothing was happening. Nothing was working. I couldn’t cope. I wanted out. I couldn’t escape, and right at that point, there was nothing I wanted more than to be somewhere else.

I ran off and broke down in tears, thankfully out of sight of the students. It’s a blur as to what exactly happened — I think I hid in the equipment cupboard. Somehow someone found me — either my departmental colleague or the Drama teacher — and gently escorted me into our office, away from prying eyes.

I was sobbing uncontrollably by this point. “I can’t do this,” I remember saying. “This isn’t me. This isn’t me.” Over and over. At the back of my mind the mostly-dominated rational part of my brain was thinking “so this is what a nervous breakdown feels like”, and my body was certainly providing an apt demonstration. It took a long time for me to calm down, by which time someone had gone and placated my class, or removed them to somewhere else — I didn’t know. I didn’t care by this point, either.

I escaped the premises as soon as I could, went home and cried again. I had got myself into this situation, and I didn’t know how to get out. I was scared. I was sad. I was angry. I didn’t know what to do — but I knew what I didn’t want to do.

I made an appointment with my doctor. The time came to see her and, voice shaking, I explained how terrible I was feeling and how I had suffered my embarrassing emotional breakdown. I was terrified that the doctor would judge me, tell me I was being stupid, refuse to do anything and force me back into that hell. But she didn’t. She gave me a sympathetic look and asked me what I wanted her to do for me.

“I can’t go back there,” I said. “I just can’t.”

She nodded, clearly understanding, and wrote me a sick note signing me off for “work-related stress”. I couldn’t face handing it to someone in person, so the next day, I wrote a brief letter to the headteacher apologising for my absence, attached the sick note and took it into the school one afternoon when I knew all the staff would be in a meeting. I left it there, swearing I would never set foot in that place again.

The next day, the headteacher’s personal assistant phoned me, saying that the head was concerned about me and wanted to come over to my house and talk later that week. Panicking and not knowing what to do, I said that would be all right and immediately regretted it the moment after I put the phone down. I took to a teachers’ forum I frequented and picked the brains of the community — was this normal, I wanted to know? Was it something I should be allowing?

It was recommended that I contact my union representative, and I did so. They told me that it would probably be a bad idea to have that meeting, so, not being able to face any more phone calls — telephobia, remember — I sent an email to the head’s assistant saying that I was sorry, but I didn’t think the meeting would be a good idea. I then closed my email program and promptly became terrified and paranoid about what the response would be. I was too afraid to look at it for most of the rest of the day, but when I did, I found that I had actually received a rather understanding response. I realised that in my mind, I was building up a feeling that everyone was out to get me, that I wasn’t safe, that I couldn’t escape. But it transpired that people were just worried about me.

This story has already gone on a long time — longer than I perhaps intended — so I’ll just say at this point that I, unsurprisingly, resigned from my post while I was signed off sick. I sent a lengthy letter explaining exactly why I was resigning, taking the opportunity to share a number of concerns that both my colleagues and I had. I received a response from the head thanking me for the time I had served at the school, and noting that my concerns were valid, warranted and shared by many other members of staff, including him. That made me feel a bit better.

Since that time, I haven’t really looked back. I spent a short time working in a primary school as an experiment to see if working with younger kids was any easier, but no — all the same stressors were still there. Behaviour, threats of violence, government interference, endless bureaucracy and the constant feeling that you’re doing a Bad Job even when you’re not. It didn’t help, of course, that I was working at a school that was failing so hard it was in “Special Measures”, meaning that government interference was even higher than it usually was. But that’s a story for another time — in fact, the way that particular sorry episode made me feel is chronicled extensively at the start of my “oneaday” entries.

Fortunately, in that case, I was on a temporary contract rather than a full-time permanent position. As such, I was free to walk away — even though at the time I didn’t have anything to go to. To date, I sometimes wonder if I made the right decision, as it proved to be the catalyst for a fairly cataclysmic Heroic BSOD in my own personal story.

But looking at where I am now… I’m in a better place. (No, not dead. Though it’s not an exaggeration to say that was, at a number of points during the story above, a very real concern.) I’m doing a job I enjoy, living with a person I love and leading a life which may not be perfect, but it’s certainly pretty good. Had I stayed in teaching, I’m not sure I’d be able to say the same thing.

If you read all that, thanks for listening.

TL;DR: Don’t go into teaching. It’ll fry your brain.

#oneaday Day 759: I Said Byte, Byte, Mrs Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is here!

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s the official website.

Still no clue? It’s a little computer (and I mean little — it’s about the size of a credit card) that costs approximately £16 and is capable of outputting 1080p video via HDMI. David “I Made Elite, No Not the Call of Duty thing” Braben was involved in its development and has been a vocal spokesperson in the run-up to its release, but the device itself is the brainchild of one Eben Upton, a former lecturer at Cambridge University.

You’re probably thinking that £16 is pretty cheap for a fully-functional computer, and that there must be some sort of catch. Well, it’s not a “catch” as such, but don’t expect to be playing The Old Republic on this little beast. Boasting 128MB or 256MB of RAM and a 700MHz ARM processor similar to that found in a low-end smartphone, it’s not going to set the world alight with its performance, but that really isn’t the point of it.

Instead, Upton, Braben and the other industry luminaries who have worked on the project are hoping that the device will inspire a quiet revolution in computer science teaching. Due to the system’s low cost, it will be a simple matter for schools to outfit themselves with a veritable arsenal of Raspberry Pis, allowing large numbers of kids the opportunity to get hands-on time with a real computer and learn some useful skills.

This is a hot-button issue in the UK at the moment, as the Livingstone-Hope Next Gen Skills report published last year found that computer science teaching in the UK was, to put it politely, somewhat lacking. The National Curriculum prescribes that children should be equipped with certain information and communication technology skills by the end of their school career, but the goals are distinctly unambitious and, more to the point, have not exactly moved with the times. There’s a strong focus on Microsoft Office and little else — no exploration of web design, website administration, database management, programming, and certainly very little in the way of creative design work such as Photoshop.

Part of this is a cost issue, of course — even at educational pricing, Photoshop is still pretty frickin’ expensive — but that doesn’t diminish the fact that kids aren’t leaving school with the computer skills that they’d need to find jobs in the tech industries. They’re maybe leaving with enough knowledge to allow them to fulfil a secretarial role, but that’s about it. They certainly wouldn’t be building a website, looking after a CRM or even inputting data into a CMS. Any knowledge of social networking and blogging is done on their own time — and all credit to the kids of today, they take to it like a duck to water.

What the Raspberry Pi team hopes to achieve with the little computer that could is to provide kids with a piece of kit that is built for tinkering with. Many pieces of consumer electronics in the home these days are locked down tightly to prevent modification and experimentation — in the case of games consoles, users are even punished for unauthorised system modifications in many cases. There’s also a high barrier for entry to development in many cases — expensive software packages, development kits, membership in “developer programmes” all build up costs to a level unfeasible for the hobbyist to contemplate, especially if they’re not sure whether or not they’ll be able to develop the skills necessary to enjoy success.

The Raspberry Pi, running on Fedora Linux and designed to be expandable with all manner of external hardware, is a low-cost step that will allow a much greater number of people access to some truly open hardware with which they can experiment, tinker and learn all manner of exciting things. And even if they find that their brain is completely incapable of wrapping itself around complex computer-related concepts, they’re only out of pocket by £16 when all’s said and done. (Plus the cost of monitor, keyboard and other bits and bobs, but that’s beside the point.)

Hopefully the Raspberry Pi will convince schools to throw out the abject tedium of the National Curriculum’s ICT programme and start exploring more relevant, exciting topics surrounding computing. It might also convince schools to hire ICT teachers who actually know something about computers, rather than treating it as a second-class subject to be handled by teachers of completely unrelated disciplines as a means of filling up some of their free periods. What a brave new world that would be.

Will it be a success? Impossible to say at this juncture, as the simple existence of the product doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be buy-in from the people who it is aimed at. But we’ll see.

To find out more, check out the official site. You’ll be able to order one for yourself at the end of this month, and educational packages including additional equipment, documentation and all manner of other goodies are on track for a September-ish release from the sounds of things.

#oneaday Day 691: Satisfactory is Unacceptable

It’s been a while since I had a teaching-related rant, but this article helpfully reminded me why I’m in no hurry to go back, despite being currently out of a job.

Any profession where it’s considered unacceptable to be graded “satisfactory” is not a profession I want to work in. And I’d argue it’s a profession that’s in need of a good shakeup.

Where do these rankings come from? OfSTED, or the Office for Standards in Education if you’re unfamiliar and/or foreign. Every so often, a school gets a bunch of inspectors descend upon the place to nose around everything it’s up to. As part of this process, inspectors drop in to a number of lessons for 15-20 minutes and then assign an arbitrary grade to the lesson, branding it anywhere between “Inadequate” (4) and “Outstanding” (1). These grades are also applied to other areas in the school, such as behaviour, “value for money” (i.e. how well the school is budgeting and spending what money it gets from the local authority) and numerous other factors.

Fine. I get the need to inspect places and ensure they’re doing their job. What I don’t get is the inconsistency in OfSTED’s approach. 15-20 minutes observation of one lesson is not enough to understand how well a teacher teaches. That teacher might have the worst class in the world, and may have scored a major victory on that day simply by having them sat down and listening for once. But if the children aren’t deemed to be “learning anything”, then BAM! That’s an “inadequate” mark right there.

Or it might not be — it may well be a “satisfactory” grade, depending on what else happens.

Now, the word “satisfactory” carries certain assumptions with it. Namely, it implies that the person declaring something to be “satisfactory” is somehow satisfied with the thing in question. While something that is “satisfactory” is not the best thing in the world, it’s certainly acceptable and does what it is supposed to.

Not in teaching. “Satisfactory” is somehow seen as a bad thing, despite the standards for branding lessons as “good” or “outstanding” being 1) completely arbitrary and largely down to the opinion of the inspector rather than specific, measurable criteria and 2) extremely difficult to attain, even for the most talented teachers. And if you’re in a difficult school teaching a difficult class, God help you.

New head of OfSTED Sir Michael Wilshaw is aiming to do away with the “satisfactory” branding and replacing it with “grade 3”. Not only that, he’s proposing that automatic pay rises for teachers whose work is considered “satisfactory” should cease, instead being reserved for those graded “good” or better.

This would be fine if the grading of a teacher was based on more than a short, not necessarily representative observation of part of a lesson. Actually, would it? If you’re doing your job, wouldn’t you expect a pay rise every so often? It’s been that way in teaching for some time now, with yearly pay rises for your first few years on the job before you have to go through a procedure known as “Threshold” to get on to the upper pay scale. The demands for meeting Threshold are pretty stringent, so some teachers won’t get through anyway — surely that’s enough control on pay rises?

(Note: I haven’t been teaching for a while, so pay systems may have changed since then. The above is how I understood it when I was employed by the system.)

Perhaps most obnoxious, however, is Sir Michael’s quote where he noted that “if anyone says to you that ‘staff morale is at an all-time low’ you will know you are doing something right.”

Sorry, Sir Michael, but this is where you lost any credibility with me whatsoever. You should not be actively trying to sap morale — an OfSTED inspection is already an incredibly stressful experience. I know — I’ve been through two, including one whose result caused the school to go in to Special Measures (essentially meaning that it gets re-inspected on a much more regular basis than normal, and is at serious risk of closure). They weren’t pleasant experiences, so to imply that your staff should be encouraging a lack of morale among struggling teachers is pretty shameful.

Teaching is the most stressful job I’ve ever had. It drove me to a nervous breakdown, such was the stress of everything I had to think about at once coupled with torrents of abuse from hormonal, uncooperative teenagers. Sometimes you can use all the “strategies” in the book and nothing works with a difficult class or a particularly uncooperative child. Sometimes the behaviour of a pupil does disrupt the flow of a lesson. Should that be blamed on the teacher if the teacher in question does everything they’re allowed to do to prevent the situation from escalating further? If the teacher in question is having difficulty dealing with particular pupils, should that teacher be supported or vilified?

I think you know the answer to that one.

So in short, then, I’m not sorry I left teaching. And if this is the way that the regulatory body for teaching is going, then I want absolutely no part of it whatsoever. Teaching should be about inspiring children to do great things; to teach them about the world; to encourage them to try new things, and to expand their knowledge of the things they know. It shouldn’t be about meeting arbitrary criteria and being judged by people with no sense of context. And it certainly shouldn’t be about being deliberately demoralised by the people supposedly regulating the profession.

Good luck to anyone entering the educational system at the moment. You’re going to need it, from the sound of things.