A nasty incident

Last week a boy in my class of Nutters took a penny out of his pocket and, in a quiet lull, rolled it across the floor of the room and said aloud: "Let's see if there's any Jews in the room."

The mutterers among the Nutters shut up. Those doing their work looked up and fell silent. I couldn't help but hear him. "That's not acceptable," I said, "Get up, go and stand outside, you cannot stay in my classroom and I need to speak to you." 

The boy stood up and walked out, face flushing red as he realised that he was in trouble. 

But then, as he walked out he pointed at the penny and said to me, "Don't worry, Sir, it's for you. The penny is for you."

His racism is horrible, but unfortunately it is something that he has picked up from his peers. He is an immature boy who does not have many boundaries. I get on well with him outside of lessons, although he can prove a handful at times. In this instance, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I'm not sure that he was aware of how insulting his behaviour was. He was probably just trying to be disruptive and funny. But that in itself is a damning indictment of the casual racism, and especially antisemitism, bandied about the school.

He's being made an example of now, but something else needs to be done, something more systemic, to address what is a creeping malaise among the children.

Video lessons...yay!

I showed my Form La haine yesterday and today. I teach them on Mondays and Tuesdays. They used to be my most dreaded lessons, but now the Nutters on Thursdays and Fridays have taken on that mantle. I was so tired from the trip to Paris and the sponsored walk that dominated my weekend, that I decided it would be admissible to spend a day showing videos. For anyone who hasn't seen it, La haine is a wonderful film, made in 1995 by Mathieu Kassovitz in response to the heavy rioting that took place in the suburbs of large French cities between unemployed youths of immigrant decent and the French police force. It was a hard-hitting, controversial film that portrayed the police as occasional torturers guilty of malicious brutality, the bourgeoisie as insensitive and out of touch, and the youths of the banlieue as disenfranchised, geographically and emotionally 'on edge', and stuck in a vicious cycle of violence and a constant struggle for respect. My students who have seen this film (not only the Form, but Year 10 as well) seem to relate to the three characters at the centre of the drama and I think they enjoy finding out that France is not necessarily defined and limited to their textbooks: they discover another side to the country whose language they have been studying that they did not know existed.

In general, teachers are obviously advised not to do "video lessons." They are a cop out - a lazy way of teaching. This advice is, of course, true. But a well-used video can have an impact that few media can rival. In my own education, for instance, I remember very well the Religious Studies lessons when we were discussing medical ethics while watching Gattaca, and the added impact that a storyline, emotional involvement with characters and moving images bring to a point of discussion.

---

I think that I have finally found something that F, from the Form, is actually good at: every morning I have a weekly volunteer check the other form members for correct uniform and equipment. F, a pupil whose (single) mother works two jobs, is often unsupervised in his spare time. This, coupled with a presumably absent father and an older brother whose main hobby is pursuing girls, means that F lacks self discipline of any sort. He is prone to being late, messing about in nearly all lessons, fighting and rudeness, but this week he is my volunteer and he has put his heart and soul into enforcing the dress code, into verifying whether the class have the correct equipment for the school day and, what is more, is far more effective than me in doing so! He puts on his "teacher voice" and mimics me in the process, but it seems to work so I'm happy!

---

Three boys from Year 7 were suspended from school for 5 days for bringing a knife into school yesterday. I teach them all and know that they were just being silly, but the very fact that they thought it would be funny to do that is worrying. It suggests that aged eleven they are already steeped in what they perceive to be "street life", this stupid urban culture that thinks it's cool/tough/necessary to carry a weapon. I hope that they will learn their lesson, but since one of them lives with his teenage sister and 14 year-old brother while his parents are living in Angola, I wonder where the 'damn good thrashing' is going to come from.

On reputation

There are two main problems for me a term and a half into my initial teaching year. Firstly, I have to live with the mistakes of my first term and secondly I still care too much. Let me explain.

Those qualifying as teachers on the PGCE program will change their placement school half-way through the academic year. This is ostensibly to grant them a wider experience and broaden their approach to education. Practically, however, it is a handy opportunity for the PGCE student to run away from certain unavoidable failures that they will have inevitably experienced as they led their first few lessons; failures of discipline, planning, structure from which they will now have learned a lot, but which had already left the students with a strong first impression of a perhaps incompetent, somewhat unconfident, stressed or nervy teacher. In their second placement school the PGCE teacher walks into his or her first lesson with a smile, a firm but fair disciplinary code that is enforced consistently and impartially, a well-prepared lesson that might even contain elements of something that had been taught at his or her first placement school and he or she will give the impression of a confident, calm, business-like teacher which will subsequently create a more positive impression on their pupils.

Not so for us poor Teach Firsters. (I generalise.) The unconfident, incomptent and stressed lot is ours. It went on for a whole term - give or take a few classes which we started feeling good about earlier on. It is against this residual impression that we have to fight now at this stage of the year; now, when we start feeling like lesson planning isn't the dreaded weight it used to be, when we begin to have vague ideas about jargony things like attainment levels, target grades, behaviour management and differentiation we are continually frustrated in our attempts to have a quiet, cooperative or engaged class. What a misfortune! We feel like we have improved: we have got a handle on what we feel to be key concepts, crucial to our success as a teacher, we feel like progress is just round the corner....but kids like my Nutters, or my Form seem, with their behaviour, to place a trip wire across our path just as we are about to lead them along it in the quest for knowledge, sending us flying, with our differentiated tasks in hand, only to land in a heap, buried under our own scaffolding.

What is stopping them from seeing that I'm not a crap inexperienced teacher any more, but I actually know what I'm doing these days? It's can't be my personality can it? Of course there are students who dislike me, but most of them don't seem to mind me and some I'm sure like me - we can chat quite amicably outside in the corridor or the playground, I know their names, they greet me cheerily sometimes of their own volition. Is it still my lessons perhaps? But no! It cannot be that either: I know my classes very well, I have taken time to get to know their academic habits even better, I have spoken to other teachers who teach them, I have read books and articles on language teaching, on teaching special needs, on behaviour strategies, I have experimented with hugely entertaining activities, with games, with detentions, with phone-calls home, with individual tasks, with class activities, with paired activities. I'm pretty confident that I pitch the work at the correct level for nearly every student in my class.

What is it then that still leaves me with this feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction? I think it's a couple of things. Firstly, and most obviously, I can still improve my planning, delivery, structure and pedagogy in general. But secondly, and most frustratingly, I am still clawing back against those first few weeks in The Deep End, against that residual unconfident, incomptent and stressed impression that they all got of me at the start.

That second problem of 'caring too much' is an odd one. I think maybe what I mean is that I feel like I've let my guard down, dropped the 'veil of mystery' which perhaps a teacher should retain when dealing with students. I definitely don't set out to be the pupils' Friend. That is clearly the weakest and stupidest approach to take with teenagers whom you don't know and who don't know you! But rather I forget sometimes that I'm a figure of authority and I am not obliged to be as friendly as I know I sometimes am. I don't think it's a bad thing at all - it's probably a strength of mine because it means that I do not have to put in a lot of effort into working out how to talk to youngsters since it comes naturally. However, I haven't got the balance quite right yet. I get drawn into their world every now and again and if anything it helps keep alive this residual impression of me being an inexperienced and ultimately 'soft' teacher.

As Cassio puts it:

Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost
my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of
myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation,
Iago, my reputation!

-------------
Completely unrelated, but recently enjoyed:

After Apple-Picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

- Robert Frost (1914)

Reality bites.

The other day my Year 8s, the same Nutters as from the last post, were writing letters to their French pen pals. It's amazing how well they engage as soon as they feel that the work they're doing is real. Some of them were even asking questions about the work!

I'm on the Teach First scheme. In the summer of 2008 we had six weeks training which involved practical exercises, theory, lectures and seminars, socialising, observing and the odd party. At one lecture, a talk was given by an experienced teacher who had taught in tough urban schools for many years. He spoke at some length about students from disadvantaged backgrounds: about their lack of motivation, about their low expectations for themselves and about their background often meaning that a good education was low on their respective priority lists. It was up to the teacher, he said, to reach out and grab the students' attention. To make their subject relevant, real, and convince the pupils that what they were studying was going to help them in "real life". It was the key message of his talk: Make It Real. At the time, with my teaching experience limited to 2 lessons at my placement schools where I had mainly been doing observations, I thought I'd understood what he meant and thought nothing more of it. Instead I focused my energies on copying the gentleman's loud and exuberant speaking style and his Caribbean twang, much to the amusement of One Vowel and The Greek.

After a term and a half, his message finally clicked for me in this lesson. The Nutters were using their French to write to a 'real life' person, living in a 'real' country, actually speaking, reading and writing in the language that they had been cooped up in school for a year and a half trying to learn! The questions were flying in from all parts of the room:
"Monsieur, how do I start a letter in French?"
"Sir, will they actually understand all this French?"
"Sir, how do I say 'if you are a fit bird, send me your MSN'?"
There's nothing quite like the euphoria experienced by a struggling teacher when suddenly, often unpredictably, it all comes together: you've somehow tricked the bloody kids into doing the bloody work. And enjoying it?! Well let's not get ahead of ourselves, I still had a scuffle or two to sort out, and a few of the pupils logged onto their computers and decided to play computer games, but they all did what they had to do!

Kids say the darndest things: I told B that in French his name was "Guillaume". He looked at me quizzicly, asked me to write it down on paper, scratched his head then shouted out to R:
"Hey R, check this out...I've got some next name in French - Goo-ill-aw-me!"