#oneaday Day 29: Dream Education

I had one of those dreams that it’s difficult to wake up from this morning. It was a variation on a dream I quite commonly have, which involves being back in some form of education, knowing that I’m not doing something I should be doing, and not being able to make myself sort that situation out.

The most common form this dream takes sees me back at secondary school, knowing that the school’s music groups (typically the orchestra and concert band) are rehearsing and that I should be there, but I am not going. My old music teacher Mr. Murrall is standing outside the music block looking disapprovingly at me standing some distance away, often with my friends from the time, but I can’t bring myself to admit that I’ve made a mistake, and that I should go along and resolve the situation.

Last night was a little bit different, as it revolved around university. I had just moved into a new flat — not any of the flats I actually lived in during my time at university, but something my mind dreamed up — and was settling in, but I realised I had no idea when term started or if I should have been going to any lectures. Any time I thought “I should look up when term starts”, I was distracted from doing so, and I became more and more convinced over time that I was missing significant parts of my course. But, again, I couldn’t correct the situation.

Education-related dreams are, unsurprisingly, usually interpreted as being something to do with learning, and variations on the theme such as those which I describe above are usually tied to various forms of anxiety — often imposter syndrome.

If I’m being honest, I can tell where some of those thoughts are probably coming from. The recurring dream about not showing up to orchestra rehearsals is likely due to how I’m aware I don’t make nearly enough time to practice music these days, and should probably do something about that. I think I want a new piano, though; our current one is fine apart from a few seriously dodgy notes in the octave below middle C, and unfortunately those notes appear to be some of the most frequently occurring in almost everything I want to play! New pianos are expensive, though, so you can probably see where some of that anxiety comes from.

As for the imposter syndrome side of things, I’ve definitely felt that before. I’m not sure I’m feeling it a lot right now, because in my current position I feel like I’m valued and that I contribute something meaningful — although thinking about it, there are still aspects of the daily work life that do cause me anxiety, such as having to deal with the social media side of things. But I’ve definitely felt it in the past; feelings that I “don’t deserve” to be where I am, or that I’m worried someone will “find out” something about me that I don’t want to be found out — exactly what, I’m never sure, because I don’t have anything particularly shameful to hide.

I suspect, as someone with a natural undercurrent of anxiety flowing through me at most times, I will never be completely free of these dreams. I actually don’t mind them all that much, as they sometimes have an interesting, nostalgic element to them. I do wish my dream self could break free of whatever is holding him down and resolve the problems at the core of those situations, though… that way I could just enjoy being back at school or university!

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.

2094: The New School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1869: Back at the Chalkface

I’m doing something tomorrow that I’ve sworn a number of times I’d never do: I’m going back into a Music classroom in a school.

Things are a little different this time around, though. For starters, I’m not there as a regular teacher; I’m instead doing some work (my first, in fact) for the local music service covering an illness absence. It’s also only for a couple of hours, so even if it ends up being an absolutely hellish experience (which I sincerely hope it won’t!) then it won’t be long before I can escape.

But let’s be positive. I’m actually quite curious to see how this school is doing things, because it’s the first time I’ve come across a school giving instrumental lessons to a whole class at once — in this case, year 3 and 4 children playing clarinet. My past experience in the Music classroom has been limited to schools with a budget of about £5 a year for the arts, and an equipment cupboard full of little more than horrible ’90s keyboards, broken percussion instruments and perhaps a couple of recorders if you’re lucky. 30 kids having the opportunity to learn a “proper” (for want of a better word) instrument like the clarinet is a new one on me, and I’m all for it.

Music was one of my defining “things” growing up. I started learning the piano from an early age and did pretty well. I got through exams without too much difficulty, often performed in public, participated in local music festivals (including the unusual experiences of piano duets and trios, which I kind of miss the bizarreness of) and eventually started teaching before I left for university. I picked up the clarinet and the saxophone while I was at secondary school, and these opened the door to more social music-making occasions such as the school orchestra and bands, and the county concert band (which, although fun, was one of my first real experiences with social anxiety, particularly when I overheard someone I thought was my friend taking the piss out of me behind my back). It was often hard work, but it was enjoyable, and I made a lot of good friends at university through music, too.

It was something that, as I was growing up, you had to make a specific effort to do, though. Music to me was “special” — something a bit outside of the norm — and I liked it for that. I liked that it gave me a skill that a lot of other people around me didn’t have. I liked being able to play a piece on the piano and people who normally wouldn’t give me the time of day would suddenly (and, usually, temporarily) think I was cool and talented. I find myself wondering whether I’d feel the same way if I’d “had” to study my instruments, rather than wanting to.

This is why I’m intrigued to see this whole-class approach to instrumental teaching. I’m not convinced it’s going to be ideal, since an instrument like the clarinet in particular isn’t suited to everyone. It’s an opportunity for these kids to make music together, though, and using an instrument that’s eminently more relatable than the usual “school music” mainstays of tambourines, tambours and guiros. And a bit more practical than getting everyone playing the piano — although I do know of some schools that take similar approaches with keyboard tuition.

Anyway. That’s my day tomorrow; hopefully it will lead on to new and exciting things.

1701: The Lunchbox

I don’t miss many things about going to school, either as a pupil or as a teacher, but one thing I do sort of miss about the former aspect is having a packed lunch.

There was always an air of mystery about a packed lunch that someone else had prepared, particularly in primary school, where it tended to be safely stored in a vibrant, colourful plastic lunchbox well away from one’s desk, with its contents not to be revealed until, well, lunchtime. And then it was always a tense moment as sandwiches were unwrapped and fillings surveyed. Would it be cheese and brown sauce? (My “compromise cheese and pickle”; I don’t like Branston Pickle) Would it be ham? Would it be Bovril? Or would it be something surprising and exotic like… err, egg and salad cream?

Then there was the remaining content to go through. What would accompany the sandwich? Would it be a packet of crisps that I liked, or something “boring” like ready salted? (I remember vividly getting into a rage and crushing a packet of ready salted crisps when I was about 8 years old; I was quite an angry child, for reasons that were at least semi-justifiable — though the crisps didn’t really deserve to receive the brunt of my ire.) Would there be a chocolate biscuit like a Penguin, or something else? Would there be some form of fruit? What would the drink be? (I doubt many of the lunchboxes of my youth would have passed the stringent inspections that some schools apparently now insist upon, incidentally.)

It was all oddly exciting in the most boring way possible, and I’ve been gratified to rediscover this dubious joy now that I’m going out to work every day — although sadly without a gaudy plastic lunchbox containing a Thermos full of squash. On days where I remember to pack a lunch, obviously I know what I’ve put in there, but there’s still that joy of being able to finally devour the things that have been waiting in your drawer all morning; on days where Andie is good enough to prepare a lunch for me (and herself as well, I might add) there’s that element of mystery back again… what might be in the sandwiches today? Which one of the biscuit bars is in there? What kind of drink might be waiting for me?

You have to take pleasure in the small things in life because the big, exciting things don’t come around that often. (At least, I don’t think they do.) And a fine way to start appreciating those small things is with something as simple as a lunchbox. If you’re the sort of person who habitually wanders out to Tesco of a lunchtime to purchase a cardboardy prepacked sandwich, make yourself a packed lunch one day, and you, too, can discover this dubious joy which I’ve been rediscovering recently.

Or perhaps I’m just a weirdo. That, let’s face it, is a very distinct possibility.

1456: The Bigger…

There are certain types of people in this world for whom the bigger the audience they have, the more of a colossal tool they become.

It happens in all walks of life and all occupations, and conveniently explains the existence of Piers Morgan, though it by no means excuses it.

In my own personal experience, I’ve encountered this phenomenon in several disparate environments.

Firstly, when I was a teacher, we have “the problem child”. Rare is the class that doesn’t have at least one of these little horrors; unfortunate is the teacher who has to deal with more than one simultaneously.

The “problem child” is often an interesting case because his or her dickish behaviour is usually a ploy to get attention, whether positive or negative. If this is disruptive to what other people are doing, they don’t care. It is consequently easy to assume that this type of child in a classroom simply wants to be a dick and annoy everyone as much as possible, when in fact all they want is everyone to pay attention to them. This is amply proven by the fact that if you get one of these children by themselves to talk about their behaviour, they’ll often appear to be completely reasonable and open to your requests. But as soon as there’s a class full of other children in front of them, off they go again, and so the whole hideous cycle continues again and again and again.

Secondly, it happens in the workplace. The more power and prominence certain types of individual have, the more dickish they become, flaunting their new-found power over you and pissing everyone else off in the process. Grab them one-on-one and, again, they’ll often appear to be reasonable, only to undermine you at the next opportunity when they have an audience.

I suffered the effects of not one but several of these types during a job a few years back. They all seemed to feel like they had something to prove, and I — and several other members of the staff who generally did nothing but keep our heads down and got on with our jobs as best we could — were caught in the firing line as they attempted to prove… whatever it was they were trying to prove.

Thirdly, of course, you have certain people in the media, such as the aforementioned Piers Morgan, but also people who specialise in comedy of various types. Certain comedians deliberately favour the “being a dick” approach to comedy, and it works for them, so fair enough; again, though, take that supportive audience away, and they crumble.

Fourthly, it happens in online games, and this is the reason I bring this up at all this evening thanks to reliable old blog topic Final Fantasy XIV.

Simply put, the more people you’re together with at once in an online game, the greater the chance that one or two “alpha” types will try and fight it out to determine who has the biggest e-peen of them all.

Compare and contrast, if you will, the experience of running a 4-player dungeon in Final Fantasy XIV with the 24-player Labyrinth of the Ancients raid added in the most recent patch. I did both this evening: true to form, Labyrinth of the Ancients provided the rest of the group with a few loudmouths who liked nothing more than swearing at one another and passing blame for things that went wrong; conversely, when I ran Pharos Sirius — regarded as probably the hardest four-player dungeon in the game — with a group of three randomly-matched players from the Duty Finder, I had a very pleasant experience in which everyone was helpful, communicated well and was polite to one another.

In this instance, I wonder how much of it is due to the fact that managing communication between 24 people who are supposed to be working together is a lot more challenging than managing communication between just 4 people. Someone has to take the lead when there are that many people milling around, and it just so happens that those with the loudest voices often seem to become the de facto leaders — or at least think they’re in charge anyway.

There are exceptions to all of the above, of course; the second time I ran Labyrinth of the Ancients this evening, it was a perfectly smooth run with no disagreements, yelling or willy-waving, for example — and for every “problem child” in a class, there are usually 29 kids who are quite-to-very nice.

It’s just a shame that the few dicks out there have to spoil things, isn’t it?

#oneaday Day 946: Things I Actually Miss About School

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

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

The Rough Book

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

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

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

Music Concerts

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

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

Learning Shit

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

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

The Canteen

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

The Teachers

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

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

#oneaday Day 841: Badass Teacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#oneaday Day 801: Long-Term Memory

It’s funny what sticks in your mind and what you subconsciously decide to purge on the grounds that it’s completely unimportant. It’s not always a case of big life events staying in your mind and the day-to-day stuff disappearing, either — often the strongest memories are those from seemingly irrelevant happenings.

For example, I can think back to my own primary school days and have vivid memories of doing shoulderstands on the field with my then-best friend because we thought it would allow us to make ourselves fart. (It didn’t. And to this day I’m too scared to try and make myself fart on the grounds I might shit myself instead.)

I also remember the fact I used to get very angry with one of the dinnerladies and regularly kicked the bin that stood in the corner of the playground. I do not, however, remember the reason I got so angry with her — though it was probably an attempt to exorcise the pent-up frustration I felt from being pretty ruthlessly bullied throughout most of primary school.

Or how about the time I discovered the word “shit” was a swear? I must have been about six or seven at the time (I was in “Class 2”, anyway) and I was sitting on the “Blue” table with the other clever people, most of whom were rather fickle about who they were friends with — some days they’d accept me, others they’d specifically exclude me. We were doing some sort of spelling exercise, and Natalya Forrester (all names in this post have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent) was spelling out the words out loud as she wrote them down. “Ship… S-H-I-T…” she said. “Shit?” I responded. “UMMMMMM.” replied my compatriots, who promptly reported me to the supply teacher covering the class, who in turn threatened to wash out my mouth with soap and water.

Once we’d left primary school and were going to our secondary school, which was seven miles away, we had to wait for the bus outside our old stomping grounds, which suddenly looked very small. Oddly enough these occasions of waiting for the bus provide some of my most vivid memories from the time. It was during these periods that I learned how to make myself burp under the expert tutelage of Dave Oyster, who could sustain an ejaculation of oral flatulence for an impressive ten seconds or more at a time — loud, too.

Other secondary school memories include sitting in our tutor room and my then-best friend (the same one I’d been attempting to fart with some years previously) sneezing all over his hand and spraying stringy snot all over himself — and then eating it. Urgh. It was also at this point that I decided that my then-best friend might not be best friend material any more. The final breaking point was when he inexplicably sat in his seat miming masturbation and muttering “I’m a wanker! I’m a wanker!” at me, presumably hoping I’d find it funny. I didn’t. Next registration, I went and sat next to my new friend Ed and never looked back. The thunderous look I got from my former best friend burned like fire, but then I remembered that he thought he was a wanker, so I silently agreed with him and moved on with my life.

I don’t remember a great deal about specific lessons at secondary school, though I do have oddly fond memories of GCSE Maths class — not because I liked the subject (I fucking hated it) but because of the various ways we used to mock our possibly-an-alcoholic teacher. His first initial was A — to this date, I don’t know what that stood for — and we decided that this must stand for “Abraham” because that would be funny. There was also a group of three girls whom he often called on to answer questions (also I fancied two of them) who became known as “Abe’s Babes”. Also he liked to add context to the mathematical problems we were working out, so often referred to himself doing unimaginable things for his age and demeanour, such as windsurfing and hang-gliding.

There are plenty more memories lurking in there, too — both good and bad. And I have no doubt that these bizarre, seemingly irrelevant mental snapshots will continue to stay with me for a long time to come. I can’t help feeling that maintaining these memories in my mind is what helps me call upon “childishness” or “immaturity” (for want of a better word) if the occasion demands it — for contrary to the way the world works these days, seemingly requiring kids to “grow up” at younger and younger ages, being able to draw on your “childish” side lets you enjoy life in a way that stuffy old adults can’t. In my case, it’s the side of me that lets me enjoy My Little Pony and colourful Japanese role-playing games; the side that lets me fantasise and come up with amazing stories that I rarely finish (or, in some cases, start); the side of me that lets me sit around with friends and casually insult them for a whole evening without anyone getting upset.

Of course, it’s also the side of me that doesn’t really understand what insurance is, how economics work and what the fuck the stock exchange is for, and the side of me that always forgets whether cream-coloured clothes with small bits of colour on them go in the “white” or “coloured” laundry load. But I think I can live with that.

#oneaday Day 764: Sports Day

Sports and me have never really got on. There are a variety of reasons for this but the long and the short of it is that said antipathy towards each other meant that 1) I was usually picked last for the teams in PE (when I wasn’t, it was usually Steven Finnegan instead) and 2) my body isn’t exactly a rippling temple of man-beef.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to get involved with sports over the years. I was in my Cub Scout football team, for example, a team so terrible we were sponsored by a junkyard. Our best result ever was 1-0 to us. Our worst result was 20-0 to them. No, that’s not a typo. Twenty-nil.

Despite my ambivalence towards sport, I do also have some fond memories of various school sports days, particularly if it happened to be a nice day out at the time. I can’t remember a lot about primary school sports days, but secondary school sports days tended to be a pretty big deal, bringing most of the school to a standstill for a wide variety of track and field events.

My tutor group (the erstwhile 7FMQ, later 8QU, 9QU, 10QU and 11QU) were the very souls of apathy for the most part. There were certain events that people just plain didn’t want to enter, which would have put us at a significant disadvantage on the leaderboards (yes, this was in the day when it was still acceptable for school sports days to have “winners” and “losers”) had I not stepped in.

I’m not sure why I stepped in, given that I knew full well I was crap at sports, was not very good at running and wasn’t particularly agile. Therefore, you may be thinking, it would be somewhat foolhardy for me to enter both the 800m race and the high jump, but enter them I did, and I learned a number of things. Firstly, that I was surprisingly quite good at high jump, and secondly, that I was very poor at pacing myself when running — something which I still struggle somewhat with today.

The problem stemmed from the fact that I had never even considered running a long(ish)-distance race before, so I didn’t really know how they worked. As such, I was off the starting blocks like a fucking rocket and exhausted by the end of the first lap. This gave the rest of the pack, who had been pacing themselves somewhat more modestly, ample opportunity to catch up. I don’t think I finished last, to my credit, but it certainly wasn’t very far off. After the race ended, I went back to my tutor group’s area of the field, lay on the floor and didn’t move for a very long time.

The thing that sticks in my memory about that race, though, is not the fact that I ballsed it up so spectacularly. It’s the fact that for once, the rest of my tutor group was rooting for me. I spent a lot of my school days feeling like something of an outsider thanks to my awkward social skills, my weird accent, my crap hair and my forehead and nose’s tendencies to flare up with greasy zits. I was a geek and someone who did well, too, which made me pretty much the polar opposite of “cool”. Thankfully, barring a few exceptions, I was mostly left to my own devices to hang out with my equally geeky friends (most of whom had better hair than me) but this meant I didn’t feel a particularly strong sense of camaraderie with the rest of my tutor group.

Until that day. I heard them cheering for me as I ran past them on the first lap, and staggered past them on the second. And when I finished, far from being admonished for my poor pacing, I was congratulated and praised for getting out there and giving it a shot. It was a surprisingly special moment that’s stuck with me over the years. And while in short order things went back to being the way they had always been, for those few short minutes when I was on that track, I meant something. I was cool.