2475: Necessary Evil

I’ve grown to hate money.

Well, that’s not quite true. I like money when I have it. I hate the feeling of anxiety it gives me when I don’t have it, however, especially in situations like I’m in at the moment where I’m owed a considerable amount of money (like, over £1,000) in outstanding invoices from freelance work I undertook nearly two months ago.

It’s not character-building to have no money through no fault of your own; it doesn’t teach important life lessons; it just plain sucks balls.

It’s exceedingly demoralising to be strapped for cash when you know you’ve been working hard for your pay, and said pay is nowhere to be seen for one reason or another. It makes all the effort you’ve put in feel like a waste. Meanwhile salaried employees waste time on a daily basis fucking around with Fantasy Football and other such shit, secure in the knowledge that they’ll get their paycheck at the same time every month, come hell or high water — particularly if they’re an established employee with a decent enough track record to be considered a fixture.

I already struggle with anxiety and depression, but when money is tight, too, I just want to bury myself in a dark place and not wake up. It makes an already difficult situation feel all the more hopeless and desperate, and I’m running out of ways to cope with it.

I quit the job I described yesterday that didn’t feel like its benefits outweighed its many drawbacks — this is not the job that owes me over £1,000, I should add; rather, it was the part-time courier work I mentioned in passing a few times recently (which subsequently ballooned to an underpaid 7-day working week). I calculated that any money I would earn from it would immediately be eaten up by expenses incurred working that job, so it’s simply not worth the hassle, stress and physical discomfort it causes, particularly without any opportunity for a break.

I feel bad turning down a source of income, but if the net profit is negligible, I’m better off staying at home, saving the wear and tear on my car, not having to pay up for fuel and having the time and energy to pursue other opportunities. That’s how I’m rationalising it, anyway.

Just have to hope one of these opportunities I currently have an application in for and my fingers crossed for actually comes to something, but it’s frankly rather difficult to feel hopeful right now. I guess that at least means it will be a nice surprise if anything does happen.

2365: If I Had a Million Quid

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An awful lot of my anxieties come down to money issues. I’ve always found financial matters to be inordinately stressful, largely because there haven’t been that many periods of my life where I’ve felt particularly “secure” in this regard.

There have been a few, admittedly. When I was teaching, the pay was great, whatever other teachers might say, but unfortunately it was not worth the life-crippling stress that the rest of the job gave me. So that was out.

One of the retail jobs I had actually paid very well, too, which is unusual for retail, but probably not surprising for the company in question, who I won’t name for the moment (at least partly because I wouldn’t mind them hiring me again, please) and also perhaps not surprising given that my role wasn’t exactly traditional “sales assistant” stuff.

Then there was my work for GamePro and USgamer, which to date have been my favourite jobs, not to mention the ones I think I’ve been best at. Unfortunately, neither of those were to last; GamePro because it folded, and USgamer because of general behind the scenes assholery.

Then there was SSE, which I will name because it was a health and safety-obsessed shithole staffed with some of the most odious people I’ve ever had the misfortune to work with. Again, pay good, but the working environment — very much a culture of fearmongering and whistleblowing — was horrible.

The freelance work I’m doing at the moment also pays pretty well, but unfortunately it’s very sporadic; at the time of writing I haven’t had any for a while, so pennies are running a bit short. Andie is at least back to work now so our household will have some income again, but I am very much in need of a regular source of income.

Money anxieties naturally lead me to fantasising about what I’d do if I won the lottery, because that would take away a considerable number of the things that stress me the fuck out each and every day. It’s almost certainly never going to happen, of course, but it’s nice to dream.

If I won the lottery, I wouldn’t do anything outrageously huge. I have a few things in mind that I’d definitely do immediately: I’d pay off the mortgage on our house, I’d pay off my car and I’d clear my credit card. Then I’d probably buy an HTC Vive VR headset. And from there? Well, I wouldn’t really do anything else. I’d just live my life in the house I’m in, safe in the knowledge that I won’t have to worry about money again. I’d do the things I want to do rather than feel like I have to do; I’d write, I’d make music, I’d make games, I’d play games. I wouldn’t feel that crushing sense of guilt any time I do any of those things now because I wouldn’t be under any sort of pressure to do something more “productive” and “useful” (i.e. something that pays money) with my time.

To be honest, the dream of just living normally, only without having to worry about money — that’s far more appealing and exciting to me than any grand designs to buy a country manor or a sports car or a holiday home in exotic climes that other people often claim will be their lottery dream. Perhaps it says something about me that the only real “ambition” I have is to be comfortable and secure; opulence would be fun, I’m sure, but security is what’s going to keep you happy in the long term.

2136: Dark World

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I am having a rough time, I don’t mind admitting. I was pretty open and honest about one of the things that was bothering me a few days ago, but it’s just one of several things that have been mounting up and causing me a not-inconsiderable degree of grief and stress just recently.

I would like it all to stop, please.

The person I care most about in the world is suffering with pain that won’t go away and that no-one seems to know how to fix. It’s at a point where it’s impacting both of our lives fairly significantly, but I don’t know what to do about it. Well, I sort of do: there isn’t really anything I can do about it myself, save for hanging in there and offering support when and how I can. I don’t resent having to do that, of course, but it is exhausting.

Alongside that, I find myself worrying about doing the right thing with regard to working. I’m enjoying my current seasonal temp position in retail, but at the back of my mind is always the knowledge that I’m underpaid, overworked and overqualified; a little voice in the back of my mind reminding me that I am 34 years old and should probably have done something a little more with my life by now.

The thing is, I’ve tried doing more with my life. I’ve tried being a teacher, and failed. I’ve tried having a “normal” office job, and failed. I’ve tried being a games journalist, and failed. In each and every instance, I’ve been pushed out by some combination of me being unable to stand up to people being assholes, my own declining mental health, my own lack of self-confidence and, on several occasions, events that were completely beyond my control.

It really, really blows to feel like you’ve wasted so many years of your life, and that you’re stuck on the “bottom rung” of the career ladder. It makes me feel guilty for enjoying the work I’m doing, because I “should” be doing more. But the thing is, I don’t really feel like I want to be doing more, nor do I feel like I’m entirely capable of doing more. My experiences since leaving university have proven to be such repeated and violent blows to my own sense of belief in my own abilities that I just want to be able to get on with things and let progress happen naturally if it’s warranted.

I really don’t know what to do any more. I guess I just have to ride this particular mental storm out, just as I’ve ridden out all the previous ones I’ve suffered over the years. This one feels like quite a bad one, but I can’t give up; I mustn’t give up. Giving up will simply make everything worse.

Forgive the self-pity, but as you can probably tell, I’m not in a great place right now. You will, dear reader, hopefully understand if I am somewhat out of sorts and in need of venting a bit of steam over the next few days, weeks, months…

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.

1850: All Wound Up

The last couple of weeks have been shit. And they are likely to continue being shit. Particularly tomorrow which, without going into details, promises to be a real humdinger of a never-ending, toilet bowl-splattering, sloppy half-digested poo of a day.

I shan’t go into details for various reasons, but suffice to say I am Not Having a Good Time. I feel marginally better now than I did earlier today — more on that in a moment — but for the most part I am reaching one of those “troughs” with regard to my emotional state and mental health. And oh boy, it’s a deep one. I’d go so far as to say that there have been times in the last couple of weeks when I have been feeling pretty much as bad as I did when I hit my previous lowest ever ebb back in 2010 when my then-wife and I parted ways. That’s not a record I particularly want to try and beat.

There was one positive amid all the crap, though, and that was that at Slimming World this evening I had successfully shed another 3lbs, even amid all the stress, anxiety and depression that the last couple of weeks have caused me. I candidly admitted during the group session that my ongoing success — I’ve now lost over a stone in total — was one much-needed positive thing in the middle of a horrible period in my life, and that I was thankful for the support the group sessions — and the overall structure and targets of the programme — were providing me in this difficult time. I walked away with the “Slimmer of the Week” award, which was somewhat unexpected, and which netted me a bag full of (healthy, “Free Food”) goodies. So that’s good.

Almost everything else is shit though. And it looks like continuing to be shit for the foreseeable future right now.

I could be pleasantly surprised. But I’m not holding my breath.

Perhaps I should. Shit stinks, after all.

1536: Looking for the Calm Lands

I’m having one of those occasional periods where I don’t feel my mental health is in a great place. I’m feeling a bit stressed out (for no specific reason), I’ve been feeling wracked by anxiety before I go to sleep for the last few nights and I find myself occasionally lapsing into depressed feelings during the day, particularly if I stay in working for the whole day.

I think part of the cause is the working from home aspect. It may sound like a dream situation to be able to sit in your pants all day every day tapping away at a computer without fear of interruption from man or beast (well, occasionally from beast if I hear the rats causing mischief in the other room) but in actuality, it’s a ticket to Stir Crazy-Town, and thus every so often I just feel the need to get out of the flat and go work at the coffee shop or something. Somewhere. Anywhere but here.

It’s an underacknowledged aspect of working from home, this stir crazy business. And I think it’s particularly apparent if you live in a fairly small environment such as a flat. In our flat, my study is just one wall away from the bedroom, which in turn is just one wall away from the living room. The temptation is always there to just wander into the living room, flop down on the sofa and stare at the TV for a few hours — or, on particularly bad days, to just go back and lie in bed for a bit. But, as I’ve established pretty firmly for myself, that’s a terrible idea, because if I don’t get up as soon as I wake up, I’ll fall asleep, wake up five minutes before I need to work and make the whole anxiety-depression-stress thing a whole lot worse.

Going out to work at the coffee shop, like I did today, helps largely from the “change of scenery” aspect, and also helps remove a lot of distractions from the immediate vicinity. While distractions can sometimes be helpful motivators — “I’ll do this, then reward myself with [distraction]” — they can also be… well, distractions. You know how it is. Today I felt like I got a lot more done than usual for sitting down, focusing and concentrating on what I was doing, even if sitting on one of Costa’s arse-numbing chairs for most of the day hunched over my laptop isn’t quite as comfortable as working on the big screen of my Mac in my rapidly-disintegrating-but-still-quite-comfy office chair. But at least I can break to get a coffee or a cake or a sandwich when I want to. (I know I can do this at home, too. But I have to make them myself.)

It doesn’t really help that I feel like I have a lot on my plate at the moment. There’s a lot of games I need to cover, and my inbox is full to bursting every day with PR pitch after PR pitch that I just don’t have time to contemplate in the depth they deserve. Pro-tip to anyone eyeing a career in the games journalism biz: reviewing games is the worst part of the job, despite the freebies. Review commitments make it very difficult to play the things you want to play, and in many cases they even make it difficult to explore the review titles in as much depth as you want. At the same time, I feel it is important to give consideration to a lot of the titles I end up reviewing, as many of them are often dismissed outright or treated somewhat unfairly by other critics, so it’s a tough balancing act at times.

Oh, and the air quality around here is shit at the minute thanks to a combination of a Saudi Arabian dust storm (apparently) and a big fire just down the road from us earlier today. This isn’t helping me recover from the plague that laid me low recently.

I don’t know. I’m just having a complain. Things aren’t too bad really, I guess. They’ve certainly been worse. Like I say, it’s just one of those times when my mental health is getting the better of me. I should probably just go sit in bed and play Steins;Gate until I fall asleep or something. That sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?

1164: Urgh

I’m exhausted. Mentally and physically. It’s one of those times of year where everything seems to be dull, grey and miserable, both literally and metaphorically. It’s cold outside, it’s often raining or snowing, everyone is getting pissy with everyone else and I’d just quite like Existence to be a bit nicer, please.

The thing I think I’m finding most tiresome and exhausting at the moment is how short everyone’s fuse on the Internet seems to be at the moment. I’m not even on Twitter any more and I’m still seeing stupid, ill-informed, pointless arguments erupting all the time. I’m deliberately avoiding all of them because I know from past experience attempting to provide some sort of rational viewpoint on any even vaguely “hot-button” issue will just get everyone yelling at you for no apparent reason. If they want to yell at each other, fine; it’s just frustrating to see it happening, and Facebook’s refusal to allow users to take control of their experience so they can insert advertising into mental orifices you didn’t know you had means that it’s all but unavoidable.

The current thing that seems to be getting everyone riled up is the current gay marriage Supreme Court thing that’s going on in the States. Not being American, I don’t know all the details of what’s happening but I know my feelings on gay marriage, which are as follows: if you love each other and would both like to get married, you should be able to get married, whoever you are. Simple as that.

But this isn’t about my views on gay marriage or indeed anyone else’s views on gay marriage; rather, it’s about one of those “Internet solidarity” things where everyone changes their avatar to the same thing to show support for a cause, “get people talking” and “raise awareness”. I personally think that this is an idea that never works properly (I wrote about it when it happened for a different issue here) and sparks more arguments than it raises awareness — particularly when people don’t explain what their sudden change to an abstract avatar is all about — but ultimately it’s something that people are going to do if they think it helps, and I’ve learned it’s really not worth arguing over.

Why? Because no-one on the Internet actually listens to anyone else. (That’s a generalisation. There are exceptions. But check out any comments thread on a hot-button issue like this and you’ll see.) People stick staunchly to their viewpoint and refuse to entertain the possibility of acknowledging (let alone embracing) an alternative outlook. And because people on both sides are so resolute that Their Way is the Right Way, tempers inevitably flare, people start calling each other hypocrites and trawling back over old social media posts to find that one post they know where their opponent did something that doesn’t match up with the viewpoint they’re advocating now.

I’m tired of it. Really tired. And I feel selfish saying that, but I’m saying it anyway. I’m tired of feeling like the exhausted teacher sitting at the front of the room powerless to do anything while a classroom full of children fight over silly “he said, she said” quarrels that aren’t really addressing anything at all. (I speak from experience.)

I remember in the early days of the Internet, when communication with like-minded strangers was exciting. I remember spending hours on CompuServe’s “CB Simulator” chat room talking to people — I even made some actual friends through it. I remember being polite and treating strangers with respect, and I remember them doing likewise. I remember being excited about this awesome-seeming future whereby anyone in the world could communicate with anyone else at the touch of a button.

Fast forward fifteen years or so and everyone is using this frankly amazing technology to call each other wankers. Good job, world.

1064: First Days

It was Andie’s first day at her new job today. I don’t know how it went yet because she’s not back yet as I type this, but I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing her the best, particularly as it was her getting that job that allowed us to move back to Southampton. Woo!

With Andie out of the way, this means that it’s been my first real day on my own in the new flat getting some work done and it’s gone quite well, even with the many boxes that are still behind me, taunting me to unpack them. (I will do it when I get back here on a more permanent basis later this week!)

In other words, I’m feeling pretty good. I took a drive into town earlier on and got the headlamp bulb replaced on my car before I got pulled over for it — there’s going to be a lot of driving in the dark over the next few days so I figured better safe than sorry — and grabbed a coffee. My car’s decided that it doesn’t like the cold again, so is mocking me with its generic “engine warning light” once again just like it did the last time it got really cold. It’s a little unnerving, as when it’s really cold it gets a bit juddery while sitting still, but once it warms up a bit it runs just fine — it just doesn’t like the cold. I mean, who does?

I’m probably going to get rid of my car once I’m settled in this new place. Now I’m in the middle (ish) of a city, I really don’t need it that much. While I was two hours away from my friends? Yes, it was a necessity, even if I didn’t manage to get away to see them quite as often as I would have liked to. Now, though? It’s a fairly long walk, but I can feasibly walk over to my friend Tim, who lives down near the waterfront, and I can very easily walk to the station and catch a train to go and see my friend Sam, who lives in the next town over. I will probably be quite sorry to give up the freedom a car provides, but I will not miss the constant feeling that “I should probably get that [thing that rattles/broken headlamp/light that keeps coming on/brakes that make funny noises] looked at” which inevitably leads to a significant amount of money being extracted from my bank account. I will also not miss paying exorbitant amounts of money for car insurance and tax — instead, I’ll contribute to the running costs of Andie’s car, which I’m insured to drive and is much nicer than my leaky old banger. (Seriously, sometimes you’ll get in after a particularly wet patch and there’s a puddle of water on the floor in the footwell. I’m yet to determine where it’s actually getting in from, because nothing else seems to be wet.)

I’m off to a hotel later this evening so I can sleep in a proper bed ahead of having to spend the day in sunny Swindon tomorrow — as opposed to sleeping on the floor of my empty previous residence. Then there’s things to pack up and load up and pick up to ensure the house is clean and empty and ready for us to give our keys back and everything on Friday. Hopefully my accursed civic duties will be done with by then — if they’re not, I literally have no idea what I’m supposed to do. More nights in a hotel, I guess. That or vagrancy in Swindon town centre.

Anyway, as I’ve said already, once this week is over and done with I can relax. Hopefully. That will be nice. For you lot, too, as it means you won’t have to read me moaning about how stressful these last couple of weeks have been.

#oneaday Day 803: Why Teaching Sucks Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you read all that, thanks for listening.

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

#oneaday, Day 233: Keep On Movin’

I hate moving house. I really hate moving house. And yet it’s one of those things that becomes necessary at least several times during your life. Still, I feel like I have done it more than many people, largely due to the fact I moved pretty much every year since starting university, until I ended up in this current place, which I actually lasted about two years in.

I didn’t move every year through choice in most cases. Most of the time there were extenuating circumstances which caused the move. I moved after my first year at university because I wanted to live in a house, not a hall of residence. I moved after my second year because the flat I was in was a shithole and the cheeky bastard landlord put the rent, which was already expensive, up. I moved after my third year because my housemate was leaving town because she’d finished university and I was staying on to do my teacher training. I moved after my fourth year because I was no longer a student. I moved after that year because the beautiful, lovely flat I was living in was reclaimed by its landlord for her daughter. I moved after the next year because my housemate was, again, moving and also the house we were in had damp, mould and smelled slightly of gas. I moved after the next year because I was in Aldershot and was hunting down a job back in Southampton. Also, Aldershot is a shithole. I moved after the next year because the flat I was staying in had damp and mould. Again. And the circumstances under which I am leaving this particular place have already been well documented elsewhere on this blog.

So I’m pretty tired of it. There are a bunch of things that always, always cause stress to do with moving. First of all is never having enough boxes, and ending up having to spend more on boxes than on anything else you’ve ever spent money on ever. I remember when I was younger, our local supermarket used to have a little “pen” near its cash tills with hundreds of discarded boxes that you could just take for yourself. I haven’t seen a supermarket do this for ages. It’s probably some sort of Health and Safety Hazard. What if someone gets trapped inside a box? What if it’s used to carry a bomb? What if Solid Snake is around?

So boxes have to be acquired via alternative means, be it hassling friends for them, finding them discarded in disgusting places or actually purchasing them for vast expense from packaging stores. I went for the latter option largely for convenience more than anything else, and at least it means I’ve got some decent-quality, new boxes that (hopefully) won’t fall apart when I’m lifting the bastards into a van later.

Then of course there’s the packing process itself. Bundle things into a box, seal it up and then suddenly, inevitably, something catches your eye. Something which should be in that box you just sealed up. Something which could easily fit in that box you just sealed up. But it’s not in the box. It’s sitting there on the side, mocking you quietly. So you swear profusely, bundle the thing into another box, consider writing the fact that you’ve bundled said thing into the “wrong” box onto the side of its new home, figure that nah, you’ll remember where you put it, pack it in there and then six months later when you still haven’t unpacked half your boxes and realise you really need that thing that you put in the wrong box, you discover that you can’t, in fact, remember where you put said thing because you didn’t write it on the box.

As part of the packing process, you also reach the inevitable “small bits” stage. No, this is not a euphemism. This is a reference to the stage in the packing where you’ve pretty much cleared all your bookcases and cupboards and all that is left are hundreds, thousands, of small little bits and pieces, none of which can be justifiably assigned a complete box. So you end up with at least one box marked “JUNK” which contains miscellaneous paraphernalia of such diversity that should you ever dare dip your hand into it, you’ll come out with something completely different and unrelated every time. And inevitably, there’s too much “JUNK” for one box, making you think you should have perhaps organised it a bit better, but it’s too late now.

Then you have to move said boxes and furniture into a van. That’s today’s job. And the van will be arriving shortly. So I’d probably better get on with it.