One A Day, Day 22: Haven’t Thought This Through

See title. It’s 11:26pm and I haven’t thought of something to write about. I did write a lengthy post extolling the virtues of Star Trek Online over at BitMob earlier, so at least I have written something. Still, not thinking things through sometimes leads to some entertaining ramblings of the nonsensical variety. Or sometimes not.

Let’s start by talking about today. That’s always a good opening.

Well, today was another day at work. Same old moans. Stupid children behaving in an annoying manner. Not wanting to be there. And, because it’s Monday, that means Meeting Day! Hooray!

Today’s meeting was about special needs provision. Specifically, and hold tight here, it was about IEPs, IBMPs, SA children, SA+ children and all manner of other nonsense that would cause your brain to melt if I explained it. The one thing that struck me, though, as I was sitting bored stiff in this meeting was this: why is one person expected to do all this shit?

I mean seriously. Think about it for a minute. A teacher is in charge of thirty kids. Their primary role is to teach them. That should be their role. But instead, they also find themselves keeping extensive and boring records of every single little mark, every single little bit of behaviour, every single time the kid looks at them funny – all to use for “evidence”. Exactly what it is to be used as “evidence” for is never made explicit. Perhaps there’s a global conspiracy involving children, and the UK’s teachers are actually secret agents attempting to get to the bottom of it. But somehow I doubt it.

To get back on the point – yes, a teacher is in charge of thirty kids. But compare this to someone who’s in charge of a team of people at work – it tends not to be just one person who is in charge of everything. Say what you like about overmanagement, at least delegating responsibility between several people means that there isn’t one person constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown because they discover they forgot to fill out a form PQX-65-A which was due in yesterday.

It’s bollocks, is what it is. I’m glad I’m leaving.

What else? Hmm. I took a bunch of photos from my little trip to the forest the other day and finally stuck them on my computer. I’m currently booted into Windows, though, and they’re stored on the Mac side. I’ll upload them tomorrow if I remember. There are lots of pictures of wild ponies, which look like a cross between a pony and a yak.

Anything else? Err… I downloaded an iPhone app that purports to analyse your sleep patterns and wake you up when you’re in “light sleep”. I tried it out this morning and I certainly did wake up gently, though actually getting out of bed was somewhat difficult. I don’t think that was anything to do with how I woke up though – more to do with the fact that I knew as soon as I got out of bed, I would be on the way to another horrible day at work. Boo.

Still, tomorrow is my quiet day at work. Oh! That reminds me. More observations coming up. YAY. Not until the start of March (i.e. just before I finish, making them utterly useless to me) but they’re there, waiting on the peripheries of my awareness like a fetid old tramp. That and parent’s evening coming up soon, which I really can’t be bothered with. “Your child acts like a dick on a daily basis. Next!”

I think that’ll do for now. I’ll try and write something more interesting tomorrow. For now, I bid you good night.

One A Day, Day 21: Fantasy Feedback

So, that was the weekend. It went by far too quickly for my liking, but at least it was calm, relaxing and completely stress-free. If only things could be like that all the time, it would be lovely.

Of course, I haven’t “achieved” very much this weekend (unless you count my promotion to Lieutenant Commander in Star Trek Online) but sometimes it’s nice to not think about whether or not you should be doing something more important. There is plenty of time for stress in the week, because believe me, it always finds you.

I have one more week until the week-long half-term vacation from school. After that, it really is counting down the weeks and days until my escape. Once I get to that point, I will be past caring. If the school inspectors turn up to judge me inadequate during those last few weeks, they will get a piece of my mind.

They probably won’t, of course, because I’m far too much of a pussy to stand up to people in most cases, but it’s the thought that counts.

Or maybe I should say something. As I’ve said in a number of previous entries, teachers suffer in silence all the time. They nod and smile when another item is put on their personal “To-Do” lists without their permission, they grin and bear it when new “initiatives” are launched (and inevitably prove to be completely useless), they fill out their stupid pointless paperwork and then they go and moan in the staffroom. It’s the way of things. But I find myself wondering exactly what would happen if someone were to break that barrier and answer back to an OfSTED inspector.

Maybe it might go something like this:

INSPECTOR: Would you like some feedback from that lesson?

TEACHER: No. No I wouldn’t. Goodbye.

INSPECTOR: I really think you should have some feedback from that lesson.

TEACHER: I, on the other hand, do not. Don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out.

INSPECTOR: Your starter was satisfactory and had the children enga-

TEACHER: Are you deaf as well as stupid? I said no.

INSPECTOR: …the children were engaged. However, during your input-

TEACHER: Oh, we’re going to do this, are we? All right then. Input? It’s called “teaching”. Or even “talking”. Have you forgotten?

INSPECTOR: During your input, I would have liked to see more being taught.

TEACHER: Oh. Sorry. There I was thinking I was singing a song. Not… what’s that word for that thing I do when I’m standing at the front… Oh right, teaching.

INSPECTOR: However, there was a lot of you talking. It would have been nice to-

TEACHER: So I didn’t teach enough, but I talked too much. Right. Do carry on. This is fascinating.

INSPECTOR: It would have been nice to see the children say a little more on the subject.

TEACHER: They don’t know anything about the subject. That’s why I said it was a “new topic”. They seemed to understand that. Didn’t you?

INSPECTOR: As a result, the children didn’t make enough progress in that lesson.

TEACHER: Not enough progress? All right. How are you measuring that? Where is your magic “progress-o-meter” that measures how far the children progressed in the twenty minutes out of the hour you came and observed? I bet you have one. I bet it produces charts and graphs and syncs with Microsoft Excel, doesn’t it? Mmmm, Excel. You love Excel, don’t you? With its charts and its numbers and its ABJECT FUCKING TEDIUM. Just like you really.

INSPECTOR: So therefore, I am going to have to rate that lesson as inadequate.

TEACHER: Will it still be inadequate if I punch you in the neck?

INSPECTOR: What? Yes!

TEACHER: Well, it doesn’t matter, then. (punches Inspector in the neck) This is my most inadequate punch, bitch! You wouldn’t want to see my Outstanding one, or even my Good one!

Oh, what a wonderful experience that would be.

The sad thing about that fantasy exchange is that the things I quoted the Inspector as saying are the exact things they do say. Utter nonsense, non?

One A Day, Day 20: >LOOK

Hill Top

You stand atop a gently-rolling hill that is fairly featureless aside from a few bramble bushes, some small, dead-looking trees and, just next to you, a small stone monument.

There is a wooden bench here.

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I’m in the Great Outdoors, specifically the New Forest, though the bit I’m in right now isn’t very foresty. After the week that was, the peace and solitude is just lovely. There are very few people here, and the ones that are here are the type of people who politely say “hello” to you as you pass, even though you’ve never met them before. They also have dogs with names like Gladstone and Horatio.

It’s striking to me, sitting here now, just as it was when I went to Lepe Beach to take those photos the other day, that there isn’t a game out there yet which has got “the great outdoors” right. Games like Oblivion, World of Warcraft and numerous other open-world adventures and RPGs have tried, but none quite capture this feeling of peace and solitude. (Perhaps because wherever you are in an RPG world, you’re only ever a stone’s throw from something that wants to kill you.)

Actually, to say that no games have pulled this off is inaccurate. The games that do it best are interactive fiction titles, they of the complete lack of graphics and the only minimum system requirement being an imagination that still works.

Up here, I’m particularly reminded of Andrew Plotkin’s “A Change In The Weather”, the only game I know of where your final confrontation is with a thunderstorm. Of course, right now it doesn’t look like I’m going to have to race against time to prevent a rickety old bridge from being washed away, but the atmosphere is the same. Peace. Quiet. No-one but you. And definitely no needy, whining, squabbling children, stick-up-their-arse inspectors or faux-concern headteachers.

Sitting here, you can say “sod off” to the world, and no-one can do a damn thing about it.

One A Day, Day 19: The Worst Week

After midnight again… But I haven’t gone to sleep yet. Although I will be very shortly.

This week has been utterly terrible. Not just for me, but for, it seems, most people. Both my wife and I noticed an alarmingly high number of despairing status updates from our respective Facebook and Twitter friends this week, yesterday in particular.

February’s always bad. I don’t know what it is about it. But it’s always shit. And no-one ever does anything about it.

Of course, that’s a stupid statement. What CAN anyone do about it? Nothing. Except maybe declare the whole month a national holiday.

They should declare the whole month a national holiday!

All this aside, the week is now effectively over, so I am looking forward to a quiet and pointless weekend.

What about today? After my inadequacy was made official yesterday, the headteacher came to see me after school. To – get this – “check I’m still on board”. Well, no, I resigned, remember? I had to bite my tongue a bit, otherwise I would have exploded at her. I’m in two minds as to whether or not I should have given her a piece of my mind about the utter meaninglessness of those stupid judgements. I’m coming down on the “don’t rock the boat” side of things at the moment. Maybe I can tear shit up a bit a little closer to the end.

One thing I do want to do, though, is write up all the things that I’ve said are dumb about education as an article and send it somewhere like <a href="TES or even a full-on newspaper. People need to hear about the plight of teachers as so many of them – including myself – suffer in silence and don’t stand up to what is effectively bullying from people who have as much value to education as a lump of steaming turd. Actually, the turd is more valuable, as at least it could be discussed in a rather unpleasant Science lesson.

Anyway. Enough of that for now. It’s the weekend. I’m off for some well-earned sleep. Next week is the last week before the week-long half term vacation, then it’s the home straight from there.

G’night.

One A Day, Day 18: Another Education Rant

Today I was told by someone I’d never met before that I was “inadequate”. Of course, this is nothing unusual to me, as my romantic history prior to meeting my wife will attest, but for someone to come in, watch you doing your job for twenty minutes and then make a summary judgement about your competence (or lack thereof) smacks of… well, bollocks, frankly.

This is one of the (many) things that is wrong with the education system. Ticklists of criteria that need to be followed. Nonsense feedback that doesn’t help in the slightest (I “didn’t teach enough” but I “talked too much”, apparently – gee, thanks, that really clears that up). The fact that you are deemed to be a terrible person if you forget to give the children a formulaic ticklist of their own to copy into their books on the board.

Today’s lesson was the first session of a new topic on poetry. The children hadn’t done much on poetry previously, and what little they had done was some time ago. So the plan which the Year 4 team (two other teachers and me) had come up with was to give them an opportunity to look at a poem and give their immediate responses, and demonstrate those responses through drawings, movement and drama. Bullshit, I know, but apparently reading a poem and talking about the language in it isn’t enough for children these days. Or maybe it is, given that not only I, but also my colleague who taught the same lesson at the same time was also judged to be “inadequate”.

Still, fuck those ratings. Doubly so because just a month or so back I was judged as “satisfactory with some good elements”. Don’t let that faint praise hit you in the ass on the way out, Ms Inspector.

I can’t have changed that much in that time. I’ll tell you what can change, though – the behaviour of children. I briefed the kids before the observer arrived today that I was expecting their best behaviour and they still decided to be little fucks and whinge and moan and complain even when trying to do the simplest possible thing.

As always, there was absolutely no helpful advice given whatsoever to deal with this sort of thing. The usual advice is “you need to develop some strategies”. Thanks. Those would be…? “Develop some strategies. Build an action plan.” Fuck off.

I may be ranting about this, but I’m actually less pissed off about this than I would have been before I’d put in my resignation. Now I know that these sort of ridiculous judgements don’t mean anything to me I can shrug them off. It doesn’t make the education system any better, however, because these same judgements are applied to all schools, whether they’re the posh school in the country village that is filled with nothing but children who have been able to read, write and add up since the age of 3, or a school with a largely transient population like where I am now. You can’t compare the two things. You can’t compare the amount of progress an upper-middle class child with a perfect home life and parental support makes with that of a Nepalese immigrant whose parent(s) don’t speak English, or that of the kid whose Dad beats the crap out of his Mum on a regular basis.

These backgrounds don’t excuse behaviour, as I’ve said previously, but they do affect how good their work is going to be. Kids develop with parental support. It’s not just the teachers’ job to instill knowledge and discipline in them – lots of that needs to come from the parents, too – and it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, guess who gets blamed? That’s right, the teachers.

So fuck teaching. If you’re considering going into it, just don’t, unless you particularly enjoy someone you’ve never met calling you “inadequate” to your face and expecting you not to punch them very hard in the neck.

One A Day, Day 17: Desk

Never one to shy away from a good meme (with #oneaday itself being something of a meme anyway – and with “desk” being something of an unintentional one from the looks of things), here we are.

In front of me is my 24 inch iMac, white plastic model, the generation before they went all metallic and shiny. It has a new-style Apple keyboard and a Logitech mouse because I loathe and detest the Mighty Mouse. To the right of the mouse, laying on its side is an iPod Shuffle 1GB that I got out the other day with the intention of putting some music on for exercise purposes… then didn’t.

To the left of the iMac is a stack of three blank DVD/CD spindles. One of them only has a couple of discs left, but the other two are full. In front of the DVD spindles are four pens – a green whiteboard marker, a green biro, a black Berol handwriting pen and an interactive whiteboard pen. There’s also a pair of metal scissors, a roll of Sellotape and a bottle of Niceday knockoff Tippex. Sorry, “correction fluid”.

Further left still, there’s a Sony CRT Trinitron KV-1440UB TV-monitor which has been in good working order ever since the late 80s and early 90s. Sitting on top of the Sony screen is an Atari 800XL, a Zipstik and a Quickshot joystick.

Underneath the desk is a semi-transparent plastic tote containing an assortment of PC games that I haven’t played for years. On top of that is a brown leather document wallet containing my passport, marriage certificate, university degree and teaching qualification and Criminal Records Bureau Enhanced Disclosure paperwork proving I am not a criminal. There is also an expanding sectioned file thing with a broken clasp so it won’t close. This contains everything from bills to strange bits of forgotten-purpose paper to TV licenses to paperwork from houses I don’t live in any more.

There are some shelves under the desk. On one of the shelves sits an Atari 1050 floppy disk drive, a few more PC games and some cardboard document folders.

The drawers to the left of my desk are broken. Try and pull one out and the front simply falls off.

In summary: I need a new desk that is bigger than this cluttered shitheap.

One A Day, Day 16: Set a Better Example

I’ve ranted about kids’ behaviour before, and probably will do so again, especially as it’s coming up to the half-term holidays and behaviour takes an inevitable hit at those times as excitement builds. Of course, at this school, behaviour is on the decline anyway, so that’s small consolation.

But what about the rest of us? How are we behaving? Well, when you think about it, there are a lot of parallels between the poor behaviour of children and the way adults act around each other. And it’s not a good thing in many cases.

Look at something as simple as lining up – an activity which my class (and most of the others in the school) seem to have tremendous difficulty with. It should be a case of the teacher saying “line up” and then the kids… well, lining up. It’s not, as they say, rocket science. However, watch these kids attempting to do this simple activity and you’ll see pushing, shoving, kids changing places, pushing in, shoving people around and generally not doing the whole “respectful” thing.

Now think back to the last time you drove on a motorway. One of several things probably happened – firstly, you may well have been driving along in the fast lane, overtaking cars that were going slower than you and possibly (naughty naughty) breaking the speed limit of 70mph a little bit yourself. The longer you stay in the fast lane, the closer the probability of someone driving either a BMW, a Mercedes, an Audi or a 4×4 behemoth coming up behind you at twice the speed you’re doing, flashing their lights and getting pissy if you don’t move, possibly weaving unsafely around the other slower cars in the other lanes just to get past you. There are, in many cases, kids in the back of these cars.

Secondly, if you’ve been stuck in a traffic jam recently (and thanks to whateverthefuck Winchester’s town planners have done to the route to the motorway, I get stuck in one every bastard day) you’ll inevitably see at least five douchebags changing lanes every three second in an attempt to get to the “front” (and I use the term loosely, since I don’t believe there ever is a “front” to a traffic jam on a motorway) and irritate everyone else. Again, there are, in many cases, kids in the back of these cars.

Pushing. Shoving. Being aggressive. See the parallels?

Then there’s violence. Kids thump each other all the time. But why? It could be violent video games (which they shouldn’t be playing). It could be violent TV (which they shouldn’t be watching). Or it could be violent parents or older siblings setting that example.

The list goes on. Alcohol abuse. Drug abuse. Treating people as sex objects rather than, you know, people. I could go on. But I won’t. At least not right now.

My point, then, is this:

Grown-ups. Children are watching, so grow the fuck up.

The best teacher in the world isn’t going to change a child’s behaviour if there isn’t the backup from the parental side of things. And I know there are parents out there who do set good examples, take an interest in their children and make an effort not to turn them into douchebags. But there are just as many – and it’s a growing number – who don’t give a toss, or worse, think it’s somehow funny or endearing that their children act like thugs.

In unrelated news, Mass Effect 2 is frickin’ amazing.

One A Day, Day 15: Blips

Blips today. Nothing that interesting to say, so I’ll go with the snippet approach.

Back to work today. Boo. But at least I could get away with making them all do a writing test this morning, so I didn’t have to do very much for the first hour or so. Hooray! I also tidied my classroom and filed the bajillion bits of paper that were littering the top of my desk… some (well, most) into the bin and others into actual files with dividers and everything. Suddenly, by doing that, I feel a bit less incompetent. Still doesn’t make me want to carry on though – teaching’s had its chance.

Took me two hours to get to work this morning. It’s usually an hour’s drive. The last hour was taken up by the last three miles of the journey. It was one of those annoying traffic jams where it wasn’t at all obvious what the problem was – and there probably wasn’t anything at the front of it. It had snowed a little bit, but not enough to make the roads perilous, so I’m not sure that could be an excuse. I could be wrong though.

Currently installing Mass Effect 2. I’ve been replaying the prequel as a Renegade (went as a Paragon on my first playthrough) but overenthusiastic tweets from friends have made me want to jump on board and import my old Paragon character.

Also found one of the best apps out there for iPhone 1st gen/3G owners – iVideoCamera. It’s 59p and is a fully-functional video camera with export to camera roll, Twitter, YouTube and Wi-Fi. The quality isn’t quite as good as with a proper 3GS, but it’s certainly acceptable. You can use it in either 160xsomething mode at full frame rate for unlimited recording, or 320xsomething at 10fps for “high quality” mode. Both look just fine, and are certainly enough to shoot a quick video and post to Twitter or something. So if you still have a 3G like me, then it’s a great app. And cheap.

Well, that’s about that for today. Sorry I don’t have more to say. But the whole thing with “one a day” is that not every day is vastly interesting. Go and look at my photos from yesterday if you haven’t already. The low-level pebbly beach shot with the nice depth of field is currently my desktop background.

One A Day, Day 14: CLICK.

Well, we took our photography trip. So, without further ado, here’s a selection. These haven’t been adjusted or fiddled around with yet, so some of them are a bit dark and the white balance is a bit wonky on some of them as Sam and I were experimenting with settings. Still, I thought I’d share anyway.

These were taken at Lepe Country Park, which is here. It’s a relatively unremarkable beach, but it has a few hidden interesting bits, and some D-Day remains if you’re willing to walk far enough. Plus, of course, pebbles, sand and seaweed. Apparently between April and September part of it is a bathing beach but I can’t imagine dipping myself into that grotty water and coming out alive.

One A Day, Day 13: Round Midnight

Yes, I’m aware it’s after midnight. But the official One A Day rules clearly state (somewhere… possibly not on that page, but I can’t be bothered to look it up right now) that the “day” is from when you get up until when you go to bed. And I’m not in bed yet. So there.

It is, however, late, so this entry is going to be somewhat phoned in. Fortunately, there’s not a great deal to talk about today. Got up, played some Mass Effect in preparation for the sequel, played some Star Trek Online (which the official Head Start has now begun for) and went to my buddy Sam’s for some board games, Chinese and booze. We played Power Grid. I lost. Then we played Carcassonne, and I also lost. Still, never mind. It’s the taking part that counts, and all that.

We did rediscover the wonder of gin and tonic though. In recent years, I’ve found that a lot of booze leaves me with an unpleasant feeling of heartburn very quickly, meaning I can’t drink much of a lot of things and when I do, I don’t enjoy them that much. The G&Ts we had tonight went down rather too smoothly if anything, and made the already-lengthy game of Power Grid last even longer than usual. That’s no bad thing, though, since it’s a fun game that taxes your brain.

Tomorrow I may be taking a trip with Sam to take some photos. Haven’t got my camera out to take some proper photos for ages, so if we do go it’ll be good to get back into it. Interesting ones will, of course, be shared here.

Right. Now it’s time for bed. G’nite.