1556: Your Regular Reminder to Not Be a Dick

It saddens me to occasionally have to write posts like this, but today has been One of Those Days when you just want to pick significant portions of the Internet up by its collar and shake it about a bit.

Put simply: don’t be a dick.

Put more specifically: don’t make sweeping generalisations that might upset or hurt people.

This is good advice for interacting with the rest of the human race in general, and it applies to numerous situations on the Internet, the most common of which is the increasingly frequent discussions surrounding gender — and rightly so.

But that’s not the only place where these sweeping generalisations can hurt people. Those who have found solace in certain forms of entertainment and/or subcultures should not be ridiculed for the things they enjoy, so long as they’re not hurting anyone. Those who sport a particular type of headgear should not be automatically assumed to be sex pests. And on the rare occasions when someone from a particular subculture does step out of line or do something stupid, for heaven’s sake don’t get on your high horse and start painting the entire subculture as some sort of disgusting deviant cult.

Those who have been following me for a while will now that I identify as being on the periphery of the “brony” subculture — that is, adult-age fans of the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I count myself in this collective due to the simple fact that it’s an excellent show, and the extent of my fandom is that my desk is adorned with a few figures, my wall is adorned with a giant Rainbow Dash picture that Andie bought me for Christmas, and Andie and I enjoy playing the My Little Pony collectible card game, which is actually a really solid and enjoyable little two-player game. I don’t really engage with the rest of the community any more than that; I had a brief stint posting on a pony forum, but that shut down temporarily and I never went back after the relaunch. I don’t make videos, I don’t write fanfic, I don’t make pony-related art, and I’m not into “rule 34” stuff. (If you don’t know, for heaven’s sake don’t Google it.)

Which is why I was so upset earlier on to be greeted by a tweet from someone I follow that simply read “destroy all bronies” (in that slightly annoying, all lower-case, unpunctuated sort of way that a lot of people seem to be favouring these days) without any sort of context. It turned out that the tweet in question was to do with an unpleasant (and, it turned out, seemingly debunked) story that had been circulating regarding a recent pony convention: a Tumblr user had claimed that an unaccompanied 11 year old girl was being stalked by an older dude (oh, and he was a fat guy, too; how convenient!) and this subsequently degenerated into a discussion of how bronies were the scum of the Earth, how they were corrupting something “meant for little girls” and all manner of other nonsense that assumed everyone in the entire fandom behaved in exactly the same unpleasant manner.

I’m not going to deny there are some aspects of the fandom that delve into territories I’m not interested in exploring — see the aforementioned “rule 34” — but the fact is that the fandom as a whole is a large and diverse one made up of both men and women, and the creed it holds itself to, on the whole, is “love and tolerate”. Which, in my experience, it does. Tarring the whole lot with the same brush is completely unhelpful, and of course people are going to get defensive if you start lumping them in with perverts, deviants and outright criminals.

The irony of today’s few “bronies should just leave My Little Pony for the little girls” discussions is that also in circulation today was an article, video or some other piece of “viral” media explaining how men shouldn’t be “gatekeepers of culture” for women and girls; if that’s the case, it works both ways, surely. Just don’t gate off aspects of culture at all, regardless of gender or age. Girls can be geeks. Boys can like My Little Pony. And, as one post I read earlier pointed out, it’s actually kind of cool for kids and adults to have something they can both engage with and enjoy together rather than deliberately segregating themselves from one another.

All this happens with anime, too. You only have to mention something vaguely moe for the “anime fans are paedophiles” crowd to come out and start making wild assumptions and accusations. I had a brief but interesting discussion with a Japanese otaku on Twitter the other night who was surprised, confused and disappointed to see that Western mainstream media discussion of the moe side of anime culture largely seemed to paint it as some sort of sexual deviance for perverts rather than simply what it is: an aesthetic designed to elicit an emotional reaction, and not necessarily sexual at all. (This isn’t to deny that there is sometimes a sexual aspect to moe, but to make it all about that is a gross oversimplification.)

What I find infuriating about a lot of the times you see ridiculous discussions like today — whether they’re about the creepiness of bronies, the paedo factor of anime fans, the rapey nature of men who choose to wear hats or whatever else Tumblr is angry about today — is that they often stem from people who are the first to jump atop the soapbox the moment there’s a perceived injustice against women, or people from non-white ethnic backgrounds, or transgender people, or those with a disability, or any number of other groups. It’s important to fight for justice in these areas, but doing so doesn’t give you “social justice credit” to be spent on being a dick towards groups of people who gather together based on something they enjoy or something they have in common. It’s a different situation, of course — you can choose what you’re a fan of, but you can’t choose your gender, race or all manner of other aspects about yourself — but the principles of love and tolerance still apply. People are different and diverse, both in terms of their non-negotiable characteristics and the things they choose to identify with, and that’s wonderful. Celebrate this diversity rather than trying to tear it down.

To put it another way: don’t be a dick, and I hope I never have to write a post like this again.

#oneaday, Day 24: Your Over Their

The T-shirt in the comic above actually exists. So we’ve arrived at a situation where people don’t even proofread clothing.

Actually, I remember a friend who works in the printing business telling me a while back that it’s not the responsibility of the printing company to proofread or correct things like this; it’s the original designer’s fault. And it’s true—it is the original designer’s fault and they should be ridiculed for producing it (especially as it’s a pretty shitty design anyway), not to mention the idiots who pay money for it. I know for a fact if I was asked to print the T-shirt above I’d find it incredibly difficult to not correct it, though.

The reason? I believe in the sanctity of language. That’s a pretentious way of saying that I believe strongly that we should continue to spell things “correctly”. I know, I know, language changes over time and all that. But the reason we have certain rules in place with today’s modern form of English is to aid understanding.

Take “your” vs. “you’re”. We have two forms of “your/you’re” to prevent ambiguity. “You’re”, as everyone knows* is short for “you are”, with the apostrophe denoting that at least one letter has been removed to form a contraction. “Your”, on the other hand, is simply a possessive pronoun used as a an attributive adjective showing when something belongs to “you”. “If your single, so am I” doesn’t make any grammatical sense because, assuming that “single” is being used as a noun (which it should be if it’s following the word “your”) it needs a verb, otherwise the response to the T-shirt’s slogan is “If my single is what?”. “If you’re single, so am I” does make sense, however, because it’s saying “If you are single, so am I”. Which is a stupid and somewhat sluttish statement to make, but grammatically correct.

Unless, of course, they were going for a very heavily-buried programming joke. You know, like when you’re programming in C or something similar and instead of saying “if (single = true) { haveSexWithMe(); };” you can instead say “if (single) { haveSexWithMe(); };”. Essentially, then, suggesting that the full slogan is in fact “If your single status is firmly confirmed without any possibility of you being a cheating skank-basket, you can assume I am also single, even if I am not in reality”, but shortened to fit across someone’s boobies. I somehow think this scenario is unlikely, however.

Some accuse people who get riled about this sort of thing of being snobs. And perhaps we are; but to my mind, there’s not really a good excuse for using the wrong “your”. It’s two extra keystrokes to type “you’re”, a couple more flicks of the pen. We’re taught how to use “your” and “you’re” in primary school. I know plenty of people who have difficulties such as dyslexia who still know how to use the correct form of “your” and do so.

The only explanation I can come up with, then, is either laziness, ignorance or both. In an environment such as the Internet, your (yes, YOUR) written words are how you make your first impression. In reality you don’t walk into crowded rooms shouting “HERP DERP HERP”, belming and masturbating furiously, do you? So make sure you use the right word once in a while, hmm?**

* Well… apparently not.

** I am not for a second saying that using “your” instead of “you’re” means that you’re the sort of person who enters a room belming, masturbating furiously and shouting “HERP DERP HERP”. Although you might be. In which case you quite possibly deserve everything you get.

#oneaday, Day 348: End of the Year Show

So, 2010. Here we are. Your last day with us. You have a lot to answer for.

Actually, let me start.

Fuck you. I remember at the start of 2010 thinking “2009 sucked. 2010 will kick ass.” I can’t even remember why 2009 sucked so much now, such was the order of magnitude that your suckiness dwarfed it by.

Let’s keep score, shall we?

I started the year in a job that I wasn’t sure I wanted to do—an ill-advised return to school teaching on the suggestion of several people who thought I’d be good at primary school teaching, and that it might be less stressful than the horrors of secondary education.

They were wrong.

Given that the school I worked at was in what can politely be termed a “difficult area”, there were plenty of what can politely be termed “challenging pupils”. Most notable among them were a child who decided to spend one early morning Guided Reading session lying face-down on the floor screaming “PLEASE STOP THE PAKISTANI INVASION! PLEASE STOP THE PAKISTANI INVASION!” in a school that was probably made up of a good 60-70% of ethnic minority children, and the kid who liked to tear down wall displays, run out of the classroom and climb trees. It’s amusing now. It was less amusing at the time, and it should be pretty obvious that those kids have no place in mainstream education.

Also at the school, I went through an OfSTED inspection, where the school was judged to be “failing”. This is because it was judged on the same criteria as schools in affluent areas and therefore, unsurprisingly, came up somewhat short. I was referred to as “inadequate” by a person who had spent approximately ten minutes watching me teach, and I knew that I had to get out.

Fortunately, an ideal excuse for getting out came along in the form of PAX East in Boston, MA. I had never been to Boston, and I had never been to a video game convention. This was also going to be an opportunity to meet a huge number of the Squadron of Shame members face-to-face for the first time. I wasn’t about to pass that up, so I bought a ticket even before I’d quit my job.

I quit said job just in time to avoid having to go on a residential trip with the kids I’d come to resent so much and spent a blissful few days amongst my fellow nerds at PAX East and can honestly say that there are few occasions that I’ve ever felt happier than when I was there with my “people”. I wished it could go on forever, but sadly it couldn’t. And things were only going to get worse from hereon.

I worked for a few scattered days doing supply teaching, but wasn’t enjoying it at all, least of all the whole “get up early just in case there’s any work” arrangement, where every day led to the weighing up of emotional wellbeing and financial stability.

In late April, I turned 29. I was not in a good place mentally, so I didn’t feel much like celebrating at the time. I still don’t. Then in early May, everything changed. The one thing I thought I could count on—my home life, my marriage, the love I had—went away. There were many reasons for this and at this point it doesn’t do anyone any good to assign “blame” either way because things on both sides led to this point. I wish they hadn’t, but it seems that some things are supposed to happen, however painful they are.

And painful it was. The experience damn near destroyed me. I had whole days where I was completely unable to function. I had plenty of times when I wished everything would just go away, that I wouldn’t have to face these things any more. I went through all the however-many-stages-of-grief-there-are several times and am still jumping back and forth between them now. I resented everyone who told me that it would “just make me stronger” and put on a brave face for the public (and this blog, which I kept plugging away at even through those dark times) but appreciated those people who showed themselves to be true friends more than they could ever realise.

And all through this I was no closer to finding a job. I interviewed for a job I didn’t want and did well (though didn’t get it) and for a job I really did want and didn’t get that either. Eventually, the money ran out and I found myself having to move back home, an act which however you dress it to me and however necessary it was still feels like a punch in the face every time I wake up of a morning.

The holiday season came, and I spent it in the States with my brother and the rest of my family. This turned out to be a positive move, as I had the opportunity to meet up with a bunch of people and do what is commonly referred to as “professional networking”. I scored some freelance work out of the whole arrangement—freelance work that pays money, even.

Then I came home to discover a huge bill from the taxman thanks to some uncompleted self-assessment forms which I had no idea I was supposed to do and a podcast to edit whose audio files were ruined beyond repair. A final slap in the face from a shitty year? Let’s hope so.

During 2010, despite all this, I made some great friends through the #oneaday initiative, through Kombo.com, through The Big Pixels and through Twitter. I also successfully completed the Couch 2 5K running challenge, and have posted every day since the 19th of January on this blog. Those parts of the year I wouldn’t change. The rest can go F itself in the B.

2011 has a lot for me to look forward to. More freelance work, which I really enjoy, even the rewrites. The all-new One A Day Project, which I’m doing my best to co-ordinate. Hopefully a full-time job. And I’m praying for a lift out of the black pit that I’ve been sporadically stuck in since May. Can you be sporadically stuck in something?

Tonight I’m going down to Southampton to spend New Year’s Eve with one of those true friends I mentioned earlier. 2010, I shan’t be sorry to see you leave. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Actually, do. I’ve installed a spike on it, at just about ass-level. I hope you enjoy it. You cunt.

#oneaday, Day 319: Report This Post, It Contains Opinion

There is an increasingly popular—and increasingly worrying—tendency for games journalism and writing about games (which some people are keen to point out are two different things) to be judged as “broken” or “lame”.

On paper, you can perhaps understand why this is. Gaming is one of the most popular subjects for wannabe writers to pebble-dash the Internet with, and there are so many people out there who want to do it “professionally” that a good 90% (I made that up) of gaming-focused sites out there can’t even pay their writers, however awesome they are. As such, there is a lot of crap out there, but it’s generally quite easy to spot, and there’s certainly no need for sites like this.

Fellow #oneaday-er and all-round lovely grumpy chap Ian Dransfield of Play Magazine wrote an impassioned rant on this subject. I highly recommend you go and read it. Now. Go on.

I agree with the Dransfield. No kind of journalism should be homogenised, automaton-written garbage. It should have scope for individual opinion and comment, and certain outlets should have the opportunity to develop distinctive “voices” on the matter. It’s worked for our newspapers for years, after all—for all the shit everyone gives the Daily Mail about their bizarre and often misguided opinions, at least they stick to their guns. Similarly, were the Daily Express ever to write about anything other than Princess Diana, the nation would be in uproar.

One of the things that bugs me most about today’s games journalism is the plague that is N4G. For the uninitiated, N4G is a community-driven news-aggregation service. Community members may post articles to a “pending” queue, and they then have to get ten “approvals” in order to show up in the main news feed.

Fair enough, you might say. It separates the wheat from the chaff, surely. And surely the people who have approval rights must all be published professionals, right?

Wrong. Anyone can submit any page to N4G with no requirement that the article be your own. Get three articles approved by the community (a simple case of rounding up ten Twitter/Facebook friends to help you) and voila—approval rights. This then means that your opinion has as much weight as someone who’s been doing the job for fifteen years.

This may still not sound unreasonable. So let me show you the drop-down menu of options available for “reporting” an article if you believe it to be “inappropriate”:

Yes, you have read that correctly; one of the options for reporting an article as unworthy of appearing in the N4G news feed is that it is “lame”.

N4G is seen as a primary means of promoting games-related articles, and sure enough, it does seem to generate a lot of hits for sites, so I can’t fault those people who do take advantage of it to get more readers to their sites—fair play to you. I can say with some honesty, though, that I have never used it as a place to go to find out the latest news. The whole thing is too chaotic, too run by people who write comments after reading only the headline and not the article and—ugh—it makes me mad, I tellsya. I can’t take it seriously in the slightest.

My main issue with it is one of the things Dransfield points out in his article: who are these people to say what is and is not “relevant”? What gives them the right to brand something as “lame” simply because it doesn’t have “HALO IS A REALLY COOL GUY” in the headline? What gives them the right to ignore a supposed “duplicate article” on a subject which offers some opinion or additional facts over and above what has already been written first, in haste?

Absolutely nothing. Traditional news outlets and even longer-established specialist press (such as publications for music and films) aren’t held to account in the same way. But games journalism, being a younger industry, seems to be held to entirely different standards, and judged unnecessarily harshly. There is a lot of negativity surrounding the games press, and not enough positivity. Trolling and flame wars are particularly prevalent on articles about games, and platform-specific articles seem to bring out the very worst in the community.

Here’s food for thought then: in a world where we’re so concerned about free speech a goodly proportion of the Twitter population in the UK (and beyond) is supporting the legal fees of someone they’ve never met, why are we so harsh on this particular breed of writers? Why shouldn’t they be able to write what they feel, rather than what will “get hits”?

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One A Day, Day 24: Any Other Day

There goes another day. There are now two days remaining until the half-term vacation and a well-earned week off for me. I can’t wait. I wish I didn’t have to go back after said holiday, but at least there isn’t that long to survive after it – and then the joy of PAX.

Naturally, since I’m nearing the end of one of the more unpleasant chapters of my life, now is the time for the shit to hit the fan. The school is expecting a “progress inspection” from the inspectors who judged it “shit” in the first place (I’m paraphrasing, of course) and that will inevitably involve yet more lesson observations. I’m half tempted to not even try, and let them get a real look at what the kids in that school are like. Why should I put myself out preparing a full-on fancy lesson plan when it only gets judged as “inadequate” by the local authority anyway?

I forgot to mention about the previous one – the super-ironic thing about that “inadequate” lesson (which my colleague also taught and got judged similarly, remember) is that we were following the guidelines on the National Strategy Framework Bollocks Primary Policy Full Of Shit site, or whatever it’s called, to the letter. The lesson we delivered was straight out of the National Framework. And it was “inadequate”.

Stupid.

On a side note, I have absolutely no idea why that site gives you the opportunity to 1) comment on 2) rate and 3) share its contents on Facebook. It’s a huge pile of shit all round, so I urge you all to go there forthwith and troll the comments sections for each page as only the Internet can.

So what else is going to happen? Well, there’s assessments to give in (which I’ve nearly finished, but not quite – late evening tomorrow… gah) and then there’s a parents’ evening to look forward to at the beginning of March, at which point I will be counting down the days until I escape so I really have little to no interest in talking to those who spawned the mini-chavs in my care. Actually, there’s the potential opportunity for some fun there. There are plenty of kids in that class who need a good bollocking and don’t listen when I give it to them, so hopefully the parents will sort them out.

Or perhaps not; since I’ve only had four reply slips back so far (and inevitably, all of them want to come in the latest possible time slot, meaning I have to sit twiddling my thumbs for about four hours) there might not be much opportunity to discuss it, particularly as all the parents who have signed up so far are the parents of the few actually nice children in the class.

Boo! Rubbish.

One day I’ll stop ranting about this. Hopefully it will be the day I leave (or shortly thereafter).

For now, it’s survival. Nearly there, though it was touch and go today for a while – though I did apply for another job that I actually want (as opposed to when I applied for the job I’m currently stuck in, which I applied for because I had to – at the time, I thought I wanted to do this, and there wasn’t much else available) so hopefully that will come to something. I currently have three applications pending for different jobs, all of which I very much want. Hopefully one or more of them will find me sufficiently intriguing to interview and/or hire me. Time will tell.

Now I’m off to play some video games. Ta-ta.

One A Day, Day 22: Haven’t Thought This Through

See title. It’s 11:26pm and I haven’t thought of something to write about. I did write a lengthy post extolling the virtues of Star Trek Online over at BitMob earlier, so at least I have written something. Still, not thinking things through sometimes leads to some entertaining ramblings of the nonsensical variety. Or sometimes not.

Let’s start by talking about today. That’s always a good opening.

Well, today was another day at work. Same old moans. Stupid children behaving in an annoying manner. Not wanting to be there. And, because it’s Monday, that means Meeting Day! Hooray!

Today’s meeting was about special needs provision. Specifically, and hold tight here, it was about IEPs, IBMPs, SA children, SA+ children and all manner of other nonsense that would cause your brain to melt if I explained it. The one thing that struck me, though, as I was sitting bored stiff in this meeting was this: why is one person expected to do all this shit?

I mean seriously. Think about it for a minute. A teacher is in charge of thirty kids. Their primary role is to teach them. That should be their role. But instead, they also find themselves keeping extensive and boring records of every single little mark, every single little bit of behaviour, every single time the kid looks at them funny – all to use for “evidence”. Exactly what it is to be used as “evidence” for is never made explicit. Perhaps there’s a global conspiracy involving children, and the UK’s teachers are actually secret agents attempting to get to the bottom of it. But somehow I doubt it.

To get back on the point – yes, a teacher is in charge of thirty kids. But compare this to someone who’s in charge of a team of people at work – it tends not to be just one person who is in charge of everything. Say what you like about overmanagement, at least delegating responsibility between several people means that there isn’t one person constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown because they discover they forgot to fill out a form PQX-65-A which was due in yesterday.

It’s bollocks, is what it is. I’m glad I’m leaving.

What else? Hmm. I took a bunch of photos from my little trip to the forest the other day and finally stuck them on my computer. I’m currently booted into Windows, though, and they’re stored on the Mac side. I’ll upload them tomorrow if I remember. There are lots of pictures of wild ponies, which look like a cross between a pony and a yak.

Anything else? Err… I downloaded an iPhone app that purports to analyse your sleep patterns and wake you up when you’re in “light sleep”. I tried it out this morning and I certainly did wake up gently, though actually getting out of bed was somewhat difficult. I don’t think that was anything to do with how I woke up though – more to do with the fact that I knew as soon as I got out of bed, I would be on the way to another horrible day at work. Boo.

Still, tomorrow is my quiet day at work. Oh! That reminds me. More observations coming up. YAY. Not until the start of March (i.e. just before I finish, making them utterly useless to me) but they’re there, waiting on the peripheries of my awareness like a fetid old tramp. That and parent’s evening coming up soon, which I really can’t be bothered with. “Your child acts like a dick on a daily basis. Next!”

I think that’ll do for now. I’ll try and write something more interesting tomorrow. For now, I bid you good night.

One A Day, Day 19: The Worst Week

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

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

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

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

They should declare the whole month a national holiday!

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

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

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

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

G’night.

One A Day, Day 18: Another Education Rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One A Day, Day 10: On The Edge

Part the First

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right. Starting to see the problem here.

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

Part the Second

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

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

Part the Third

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

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

Good night.

One A Day, Day 5: It’s the Weekend!

Yes, it’s the weekend, assuming you’ve finished work.

As much as a love the end of a working week, I find something profoundly irritating about people who talk about the weekend as if it’s some sort of magical entity capable of curing all evils and making the world a better place. It’s not magical. It’s two days off, after which you’ll have to go back to your stultifyingly boring and depressing job, coming just to the borderline of seriously contemplating slitting your wrists by Friday, before you get to go home, get some actual sleep, spend two days wanking and crying then start the whole hideous process over again.

The worst culprit for weekend-hype is Annie Mac‘s show on BBC Radio 1. Radio 1 is irritating at the best of times, but Mac’s show takes the biscuit. Her jingles seem to consist entirely of either airhorn noises (the use of which seems to be growing in popularity, annoyingly) or special needs people yelling “It’s FRIDAY!” then giggling like they’ve got a wasp in their Jap’s-eye and don’t know whether it tickles or really fucking hurts. Take a listen if you can stomach it. The thing is, some of the music she plays is actually quite good for a Friday night drive home. But as soon as she starts talking or pressing the magic noise-making buttons on her console, I want to throw smelly things through my radio into her stupid face.

Still. The weekend is good in that you can sleep in and then get things done that you’ve been intending to do all week. Or, indeed, spend two continuous days wanking and crying, as intimated earlier. Both are perfectly acceptable uses of your time. The choice is yours.

I know what I’m planning to do.