One A Day, Day 9: All Wound Up

All wound up, on the edge, terrified. Sleep disturbed, restless mind, petrified. Bouts of fear permeate all I see. Heightening nervousness threatens me.

That’s the opening to Dream Theater’s Panic Attack, a song I adore both for its Castlevania-esque piano/orchestra/choir breaks every so often but also for its blunt, honest portrayal of what it feels like to have a mind that’s so stressed out it feels like you might explode.

Feeling that right now. The pounding inside my head isn’t helping the feeling, as I have a headache from the very depths of R’lyeh to contend with at the moment and I am holding the annoying children I have to endure for my day job personally responsible. Tuesday is supposed to be my “quiet day”, with the morning spent doing planning for the upcoming week, but the kids I teach more than made up for me not having the morning with them by not shutting up for the whole bloody afternoon. It didn’t help that our Maths lesson was interrupted by having to line up, go downstairs and watch twenty minutes of Indian dancing before going back to finish off a task which they didn’t understand not because it was too difficult for them but because they didn’t fucking listen the first time and the second time and the third time I explained what the little shits were supposed to be doing.

Arrrrgh! How annoying!

*breathes*

So how are you, reader? I hope my misfortune is either entertaining, eye-opening or both to you. The main reason today didn’t give me a complete nervous breakdown is the knowledge that it’s not forever. The only thing I wish I didn’t have to deal with is the fact that the school I work at is in “special measures”, which means that government inspectors (who have probably never spent even a single hour at the chalkface) came around to look at it (before I arrived, I might add) and judged it as “failing”. Like I said in the last post I mentioned this in, the fact that we can get any work at all out of some of these horrendous children is a minor miracle. Still, the government judges the school as “failing”, which means extra stress for everyone involved as the inspectors return every so often at very short notice to come and see how things are improving. This also means we have people from the local education authority coming at short notice to see how things are doing. This means we have lesson observations at incredibly inconvenient times, like next week. At least whatever outcome this observation has no longer matters for me, though I feel for my poor colleague in the classroom next door who not only has a lesson observation but also has to spend a protracted amount of time in the company of The Most Miserable Woman In The World talking about assessments we haven’t done yet.

I am clearly making the right decision to escape from this as early as possible. There will be no regrets. At least when I look back on the three years and one term that I’ve spent as a teacher, I have enough experience to say 1) “I’m never doing that again!” and 2) “Thinking about teaching? DON’T BE AN IDIOT.”

Now there’s something they don’t say in their patronising, unrealistic adverts.

One A Day, Day 8: Success!

I have successfully managed to arrange my escape from my job! Went to see my boss today and, as it turns out, I was only obliged to give one week’s notice to quit. As tempting as it was to say “Well, I’ll bugger off next week then. Ta-ra!” I decided against it so I can actually have a bit of money on hand in order to go to PAX.

Because this exciting news means that I will definitely be going! I’m stoked. The last time I went to a big industry event was when they still did them in Europe. I attended ECTS (the European Computer Trade Show, if I remember rightly) with my bro, and that was a long time back now. I’ve heard my buddies in the Squadron of Shame wax lyrical about PAX in the past and have been incredibly jealous. Now I get to join in the fun. It’s going to be an awesome time, and I can’t wait to finally meet some of the guys I’ve only ever spoken to on Skype before… or in some cases (Mr Bowlissimo!) only ever typed things to.

Also, my Bayonetta article got promoted to the front page on BitMob. People dig the IF thing, so I wrote another one. I also downloaded the Inform interactive fiction toolset to have a play with. Inform is bizarre – it’s a programming language that works very similarly to plain English. I’m going to knuckle down and have a good go with it this week – probably at the weekend.

So – two good things in one day. It’s a nice change. It even managed to distract me from the fact that the kids in my class were being stupid noisy bastards all day and the meeting we had after school was beyond pointless. Now I have a countdown (which I haven’t calculated yet) I can relax a bit more. Except for the fact I don’t have a new job to go to yet. Still, I have a couple of applications in for some exciting jobs, the closing date for one of which is this Friday, so I’ll have to wait and see if anything comes of that.

Then there’s the possibility of doing some freelance work. This would be ideal, especially if I could combine it with some music teaching work. I like music teaching. People pay you and you work with them on an individual basis. You don’t have thirty annoying children all talking to each other and not listening in front of you. Much more pleasant and less inclined to make you want to throw things.

That’s that for today. I’m going to go play some Star Trek now.

One A Day, Day 3: Why Teaching Sucks

Those of you who follow me on Twitter or know me in general will be aware that my loathing for the teaching profession is well-documented. That, of course, didn’t stop me making an ill-advised move back into it after successfully escaping for two years. But I wonder how many of you know why?

Let me tell you.

Teaching sucks. There are many reasons for this – the chief among which is that in many, many schools the possibility of actually undertaking the activity for which the profession is named – you know, “teaching” – is rendered impossible. This happens in lots of ways.

First of all, there is the declining standard of behaviour in the classroom. I have a Year 4 class – 8 and 9 year olds. These kids are already well-versed in backchat to teachers, violence towards each other, swearing, refusing to do work and taking advantage of supposed “special needs” to their own advantage. (This isn’t, of course, to put down those kids that do have genuine difficulties learning things, but rather to put down those kids who use their supposed “condition” as an excuse to behave like a twat.)

When asking for support with children like this from senior staff, the inevitable response to the poor teacher is “you need to develop some strategies”. Well, fine. Give me some. Some that work. Oh, wait, none actually do work? Right. Let’s do some nonsense with traffic lights that they’ll ignore then.

“Keep at it. Be consistent,” they’ll say. And fine, fair enough, you should be consistent in your rewards and punishments. But I am distinctly old-fashioned in the opinion that I feel children should know their place. It is not their place to question their teacher. It is not their place to refuse to do work. It is not their place to get up out of their seat and wander around the classroom. I remember the “naughty children” in my class at primary school well (largely because they were also the ones who would bully the meeker kids such as myself), and while they were silly and could be outright nasty at playtime, in the classroom there was never any wandering around or backchat. Now, it’s not an exaggeration to say it’s a daily occurrence.

Second among the reasons that teaching is impossible is everyone’s favourite friend, bureaucracy. By the end of a single day, my desk will be covered with useless pieces of paper – notes, memos, charts, tables, percentages, requests for information. All of it is meaningless, and I don’t know where it all comes from. Why do we need to know so much information? Why is the school I’m teaching at considered a “failing” school because of some of these figures? Yes, many pupils are making slow progress but that’s because, frankly, many of them came in pretty low, don’t get much support at home and don’t have the slightest clue how to behave in the classroom, even when this is pointed out by their teacher. The fact that these children are learning anything at all should be considered a success.

Another stupid thing: the excessively celebratory nature of most schools these days. It reaches a level where it is utterly meaningless. Celebration of achievement is an important part of motivation, but when children are getting certificates in assembly for “sitting quietly all day” or “always being cheerful”, I think we may be taking things a little far. (That travesty of an “awards” ceremony happens on a weekly basis, by the way.)

The theory runs that children respond better to praise and encouragement than punishments. Well, I am yet to see any evidence of that in the three schools I have taught in, amongst children aged anywhere between 8 and 16. Children respond to things that are “unpleasant” for them. They don’t want to miss out on fun things, and they definitely don’t want to look stupid in front of their friends. So why don’t we have a weekly “anti-celebration assembly” where the naughtiest children of the week are brought up to the front of the school and admonished by the headmaster? Parents could be invited. It’d be fun.

The answer to that is, of course, that it’s not politically correct to be negative. There’s even a “golden ratio”. There should be three times as much praise as there should be punishment. I don’t know who came up with that statistic, but they probably had a clipboard.

Then there’s the Tories’ bright idea to bring in “superteachers”. This is never going to work, because the profession has such a high turnover anyway – mostly for the reasons outlined above along with the stress and the health problems that causes – that limiting access to it smacks of stupidity. In fact, this article from the Daily Mash sums it up beautifully.

Those who find success and fulfilment in the teaching profession are either very brave, very resilient or very stupid. Whatever it is, they have my eternal respect, because I’m not one of them. At the first opportunity to arise, I will be out of that door, never to return.

And this time I mean it!

Chasing Stardust

Caution: Self-indulgence and self-pitying ahead. You have been forewarned.

Ever had the feeling that you’re just chasing something that doesn’t quite exist? Something intangible, that you know you want, but struggle to even describe, let alone put your hands on? And you just know that if you got your hands on it, you’d be that much happier?

I got a new job recently. I’m a primary school teacher – a return to classroom teaching after two years’ break, and a shift from my original profession as secondary school teacher. Now, I like teaching. I’m even good at it. I’ve been told so by many people. But the frustrating thing about teaching – and so many other things – is the other shit you have to put up with at the same time. Behaviour, for example. I lost count of the number of times I had to stop and “give warnings” today simply for kids being stupid, or talking when I’d asked them to listen, or getting up and wandering around the room, or… You get the idea. Kids will be kids, you may say. Well, yes, they will – but it’s frustrating. I remember being a kid and being terrified to step out of line. I was (and still am) a bit of a goody-two-shoes, of course, but you know what? I’d rather be that than a dick.

Then there’s the other stuff. I’m new to primary teaching, so I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed with new things to learn. The year group team that I’ve joined are very supportive, though, which is good – it means I can bug them with questions when I don’t know what something means, or don’t understand a procedure, or, more to the point, haven’t had a procedure explained to me.

Ah, procedures. Close friend of paperwork. Both of them largely pointless in nine situations out of ten. All they have succeeded in doing so far is 1) messing up my desk within five minutes of me taking possession of it 2) overwhelming me with unnecessary paperwork and 3) making me feel inadequate. And I can do without feeling inadequate right now.

Everyone gets the jitters when they start a new job. I’m hoping this feeling of being overwhelmed and unsure of myself passes. I’m still in two minds as to whether I’m doing the right thing. Lots of people have told me that they thought I’d make a good primary school teacher. I agree – at least that I would be good at teaching primary-age children. It’s the other bits that I worry about not being able to hack. I am neither the most assertive person in the world nor the most organised person in the world, so the twin evils of “behaviour management” and paperwork together form a giant super-nemesis for me. It also doesn’t help that previously, having found a job that I genuinely did enjoy, like, even love for a while, it was taken away by an inconsiderate management team who succeeded in destroying my self-confidence by caring more about the bottom line than the welfare of their staff. So a big “fuck you” to them, if you please.

Of course, I have only been working there for three days so far, so it is highly likely that I am being premature in my judgement of myself as borderline-incompetent. That’s that pesky tattered and torn self-confidence talking.

This is the rub though. I find myself struggling to think what else I can do. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. I find myself struggling to think what else I can do that will pay the bills in a reliable manner. There are loads of things that I love doing – things that I’d much rather do than be cooped up in a classroom with thirty kids – but they’re either unpaid or erratic work. Writing, for example. I love writing. I love blogging. I love writing fiction. I love writing about games, and about music. I love writing semi-incoherent rants that people somehow find entertaining while the big vein in my head pops. I love tweeting and commenting on things. I’d love to be able to sit and write all day and be paid for it, but realistically that’s highly unlikely to happen. Of course, a glass-half-empty approach doesn’t get anywhere, but it’s – yes – frustrating. It doesn’t have to stop me enjoying doing it when I have the chance, though – hence this blog, and hence my entry in this year’s NaNoWriMo.

There are so many things I love doing – teaching, music, writing, gaming, podcasting, production, film – so why is it so damn hard to find something to settle on and just enjoy? Why does everything have barriers to entry – and yet more barriers to negotiate once you get inside?

I guess I should be more positive. But I can’t help but think that I’m getting that “I’m nearly 30” feeling and wondering where on Earth I’m going. One day I might find an answer. Until then, I’m just chasing stardust.