#oneaday Day 547: School books

I've been thinking about school again. I do that a lot for some reason. Nostalgia for happier days in the past, perhaps. A melancholy reflection on a failed career. Or an earnest desire to go back. It doesn't really matter. I do it a lot, regardless.

One of the things that my brain has decided to fixate on today is the concept of "school books" — specifically, exercise books. I don't know why, but I really liked having a book for each subject's work.

Obviously, from a practical, logistical perspective, it makes sense to have one book per subject, particularly in secondary school, because pupils tend to have different teachers for different subjects. But it also makes sense in primary school to a certain degree, as it allows the teacher to clearly demarcate different subjects' work — which is taught at different times in the week — and for the pupils to easily compartmentalise the various things they've been learning.

I don't know. There was something inherently pleasing about every subject having its own colour, and I bet a lot of schools around the country used a similar colour scheme. We had red for English Language, green for English Literature, grey for Maths, orange for Science, blue for Languages, a different green for the subjects grouped under "Humanities" at our school (Geography, History, R.E.), and your Journal would be a different colour according to what year you were in.

That Journal was a handy little thing, too. It was essentially a weekly planner where we could record any homework we got from our subjects and the date it was due; it was then, of course, up to us to check it regularly and ensure we actually did that homework. This was before any sort of handheld electronic devices with reminders on them — pre-"smart" mobile phones didn't become particularly widespread among me and my peers until we were into sixth form. It was a good and healthy thing to do, I think; it helped teach us matters of personal responsibility — and also occasional bullshitting on the inevitable occasions when we had forgotten to check it properly.

The Journal was treated like some sort of holy book, though. Every single week, we had to get it signed by our parents to prove that they had seen we had been recording our homework, and every week, our form tutor had to sign it to confirm that our parents had signed it. A space on each week's spread was also set aside for any communications between our form tutor and parents — for more serious infractions, of course, you got a Letter Home from the school office, but for minor things (and not necessarily problems!) there was this space in the Journal.

Heaven help you if you doodled anywhere on your Journal, though. Defacing it in any way was an immediate ticket to having to buy — yes, buy — a new one. As you might expect, the end of term rolling around was an immediate signal to many of us to immediately deface the crap out of the Journal for the term just gone. These defaced Journals became companions to "The Rough Book" among me and my friends — there was something about the neatly laid out tables in the Journal that made it ripe for customising with ridiculous doodles. My favourites were ones where we absolutely covered the page with tiny stick figures, all standing on the various lines of the table, flinging themselves off the edge and getting up to no good. I kind of wish I still had some of those.

It was the same for your subject exercise books, of course. Some teachers insisted that, as our inaugural piece of homework for a new term, we should cover our exercise book as a means of discouraging and/or preventing any doodling on the cover. Most people went the "wrapping paper" route, but there was a fun degree of self-expression among us all, and there was always some posh git who would laminate the cover of their book at their Dad's office or whatever.

I realise, of course, that the relative strictness with which we were taught to treat our school equipment can be looked on, from some perspectives, as being stifling to creativity and borderline authoritarian. School in general has always been designed as a means of, among other things, socialising us into becoming "good citizens" — and part of that, at least when I was at school, involved treating things with respect — whether they were the things that had been given to you by the school, the things you had brought in from home, or the things your peers were using.

It didn't always happen, of course, but there was a certain degree of pride that pretty much everyone had in their school possessions. Outside of covering books, one of the best ways to express one's individuality was through the stationery you brought to school — and the pencil case in which you kept that stationery. Some folks had cool, branded, zippered pencil cases; others had little tins. I remember my proudest pencil case at school was a Nintendo-branded tin with Super Mario Bros. pixel art on the front; it was also one of my least practical pencil cases due to its size, but I loved it nonetheless.

Anyway, you'd think I'd have a point about all this but I really don't. Something just got me thinking about the colour of school books, so that's what I've talked about today. Hey! They can't all be winners. Or perhaps you found this absolutely fascinating, in which case I am happy to have served.

Either way, at 20 past midnight I think it's probably time to go to bed.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 541: Back to school

I often think about my time at school and, while there were certainly elements of my experiences as a teenager I am very glad to have left behind, there's a lot I miss — to such a degree that I often find myself wondering if there is any sort of way one can get oneself into a situation, as an adult, that works similarly to school. A situation that isn't, like, prison or something.

I thrived in school — particularly secondary school. For the most part, I dealt well with the inherently predictable nature of a timetable — though I have recurring quasi-nightmares about being back at school and not having a clue what my weekly schedule is — and I didn't even mind having homework all that much. I did well in lessons, though I tended to be fairly quiet rather than the sort of person who was always the first to answer teachers' questions, and I ended up with good grades. Not perfect grades, mind, but good grades, nonetheless.

I'm not really sure what it is about the school experience — as opposed to, say, university — that I find so particularly appealing. Perhaps it's the inherent variety of things that you study, at least up until you start choosing "Options" for Years 10-11 and, if you're going on to do them, Years 12 and 13. There's definitely an element of that, because when I think back on some of my fondest memories of time at school, the visual part of the memories is very much associated with my "lower school" experience — Years 7-9.

That was the time when you study all sorts of things, with multiple subjects every day, and each and every day was packed with things to do. Sure, you didn't always like every one of those things you had to do each day — for me, Maths and P.E. were my particular bugbears — but you endured them, along with the things you actually liked, and sometimes you'd even surprise yourself with how well you ended up performing. I have zero achievements of note in P.E., but I did get an "A" in Maths at GCSE, which was pleasing.

Early secondary school is a time you get exposed to a lot of things you wouldn't have thought about studying, too. I remember being surprised how much I enjoyed language lessons — particularly German, which I liked more than French — and Science, although not a subject I had any intention of pursuing beyond a passing interest, was always full of interesting and unusual situations.

As you might expect, my biggest strengths were English and Music. In English, I relished the opportunity to write a lengthy essay about something we'd been studying — whether it was on the "language" or "literature" side of the fence — while in Music, I was often quite ambitious with my compositions, and in terms of performance I was considerably ahead of anyone else in my class thanks to the years of private piano lessons I'd had by that point.

It was nice to be good at something, and to have tangible proof that I was good at it in the form of good grades, certificates and, eventually, qualifications. I think that might be one of the things I miss the most in life as an adult — the simple knowledge and confidence that you can do something, and that someone is going to acknowledge that you are good at something, even reward you for it. It didn't have to be a big reward — I was a sucker for the "Merits" and "Commendations" we had at secondary school, and those were just little signatures on a page of our Journal and occasional certificates — but that little bit of acknowledgement that yes, there was something you were good at, and that gave you value as a human being, was pleasant.

I am not, obviously, advocating for modern employers to start implementing systems of "Merits" and "Commendations" for their employees, because I feel that most people would probably find the whole thing incredibly patronising. Interestingly, back during my brief period of time working for the shithole energy company SSE, I found myself thinking that a lot of the way the company did things was like how it was back in school — but in that situation, it was a negative thing. The difference? SSE wasn't interested in celebrating the successes of people and the things they were good at — they were, instead, obsessed with making themselves, as a company, look good, and specifically going looking for things they could reprimand their employees for.

Schools have to have a solid behavioural policy in place, of course, but I always found it pretty easy not to run afoul of it — and on the few occasions when I did, I knew it was a completely fair cop. SSE, meanwhile, would bollock you if you didn't hold the handrail when going up some stairs, for going under your desk to pick up a pen you'd dropped without wearing a "bump cap", and for not reporting the fact that you'd spilled a tiny bit of water from your cup carrying it back from the cooler to your desk — and all that absurdity meant that there was no time left to actually praise anyone for doing a good job.

So you can't just transplant elements of the school structure into a corporate environment without thinking about the things that make school good for those who thrive in that environment. I don't know what the answer is, and at this point I'm not even entirely sure what the question is any more either. I'm rambling. I'm tired. I'm a bit cold. So I think I'll leave that there and go to bed!

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#oneaday Day 436: RIP my sixth form

When I originally went to secondary school, my school was known for having a good sixth form. For those unfamiliar (i.e. not British, I suspect), a sixth form is where you go for "further education" (as opposed to "higher education", which is university) after your compulsory 11 years of school in the UK. It's called sixth form as a hangover from the old method of numbering school years, where primary education didn't really have a fixed method of distinguishing year groups beyond "infants" and "juniors", and then secondary education from 11 onwards started at "first form" all the way up to "fifth form". Today, primary education starts at Reception, then goes from Y1 to Y11 as one continuous run from primary to secondary, with most secondary schools starting with Y7. While some people do refer to sixth form as "Y12 and Y13", the term "sixth form" has, for one reason or another, stuck.

Anyway, none of that is the point. The point is, my school used to be known for having good sixth form provision. It's one of the reasons I went there, as I was a bright child and it was probably a given that I was always going to stay on into post-compulsory education, and indeed I did — two years of sixth form, then four years at university. I was fortunate enough to be in a year group that was the first to take advantage of a brand new sixth form centre built (well, adapted from the former upper school dining hall) on the premises, and it was a really lovely facility. I had a wonderful time there; I enjoyed my studies, I made and solidified a number of friendships, and, as I've remarked a number of times in this blog, I think I count those two years as possibly the happiest, most content of my life.

Every so often, I like to check in on my old school. No real reason, I'm always just curious how it's doing. It never was an amazing school, outside of the sixth form provision, and it's certainly had its challenges over the years. What I was rather surprised to see when I took a Google Street View down to the premises was this:

(Pixelations are mine; I just don't want randos looking up my old school for whatever reason.)

I saw those doors and thought, hang on. That doesn't look right. That building used to be the pride and joy of the school campus, so why haven't they painted the doors for what looks like several decades at this point?

It's because, it seems, the sixth form that was once one of the best things about that school is no more — and, in fact, it has not been a thing since 2015. (The photo above was taken in 2016, which just goes to show how frighteningly quickly a building can start looking dilapidated and shitty.) I found this out from looking at the school's Wikipedia page — I was surprised to discover it even had a Wikipedia page — but there it was, the cold, hard facts. I followed the links to see the news and yes, it seems it's true; the "Post-16 Centre" where I had such amazing, wonderful memories, is no more.

Now, I suspect the school today has made use of this building rather than just leaving it there; there's no way for me to know short of actually going to visit it, and I haven't been there in person for probably more than 30 years at this point. I see from its prospectus and willingness to book out its various large "venues" to the community — something the school had always done, making it a true "community school" — that it has a "performing arts space" that may or may not make use of that old space. Hard to tell, really.

Regardless, I feel a bit sad about this. That sixth form centre opened with such positivity and excitement for the future, and it was genuinely exciting to be part of it. The facilities were good, there were comfortable common areas to relax and socialise, and we felt proud to be part of something new and wonderful. I was surprised and saddened to see that the dream for that space apparently hadn't lasted; the school now has no sixth form provision of its own at all, instead collaborating with another local school (a longstanding "rival" back when I was there, but now part of the same "educational partnership", whatever that means) to provide sixth form provision for both schools' students.

I don't know if all this is because sixth form numbers were on the decline, or the building wasn't cost-effective, or whatever. All I do know is that it's a shame, and I feel a bit sad. You really can't go back, but at least you always have those precious memories, I guess.

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2094: The New School

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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

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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.