Venn Diagram

Sometimes you realise that a teacher, and school in general, is only one of a series of influences on a child.

AOB came to my class a week ago - last lesson on the Friday. He is the school's most notorious 12 year old. A year ago the school received a phone call that he had been chucked out of a pub down the road. He was found with the keys to a stolen car and a bag full of new mobile phones. One day he'd missed school and when a teacher rang home to check up on him, his mother retorted with something along the lines of "oh yeah, I've not seen him for a couple of days either." He smokes and hangs out with criminals. I was determined that he should not get wind of the fact that I'd heard all about him and that I was wary of him, but instead should have the opportunity for seeing his new French teacher as a fresh start.

I was not hoping for the best, however, when as he came in he announced that "I only went to one French lesson last year, Sir. I'm shit!" Usually when students think they're bad at something they don't bother trying. Others make it their mission to ruin the lessons for everyone else as well. But to my surprise AOB was polite and enthusiastic for the whole 100 minutes. He put his hand up and gave everything a go, gave me the opportunity to reward him, listened to others and moved seat when asked.

What's the problem? This teaching lark is a piece of piss. Even the criminals respond to me now that I'm in my second year and a seasoned pro.

I left a message on his mother's answer-phone praising her son, and wrote an email to the Learning Support teacher who has spent the most time with him and knows him best. She replied asking me to come up and see her.

It turned out that AOB had earlier that day been suspended for five days for threatening to stab a teacher, that it had been presumed that he had run out of school at lunch time and that he had been expressly forbidden by the Principal from attending any lessons. His good behaviour and attendance in my class had not only been against the express instructions of the Principal and her Deputies, but had also been a carefully calculated 100 minutes of excellent behaviour.

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!

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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)