When I went into teaching, 15 years ago, I came at it from various angles. One was the love of my subject. Genuinely. I definitely believed that I could make people love reading and writing, and make the world a better place. I was old enough not to be so naïve, but still…
The other was a sartorial issue. I did an ill-advised massive spend on tweed. Mostly pink. Should have known better there, too.
I did not go into teaching because ‘I loved kids’. How can you love ‘kids’ any more than you can love octogenarians, or Poles, or pole-dancers, or any other group of people?
I left a good university with a good degree and no one suggested that I should go into teaching. In the 1980s, teachers were thought of as second-rate citizens. If you can’t do it, teach it, that sort of idea. The only people I knew who went on to do PGCEs immediately were those who wanted to be actors and knew they should have a backup plan.
Somehow in the last 30 years something has shifted. Fifteen years ago, when I said I was going to do teacher training, people nervously asked me if I was sure. ‘Think of the other teachers,’ they said with a curl of the lip. ‘Think of the staff room.’ But now there is a new attitude. ‘A teacher!’ they cry. ‘How marvellous! How brave! Is it frightening? Is it terrible? Tell me some stories… .’ It’s as good as being a prison officer or a doctor in A&E as far as dinner party response goes.
I have to admit that it is tempting to suck up the nation’s gratitude and begin to think that I and my colleagues are national heroes, new Joans of Arc suffering all for the state (not God, of course, he has no look-in in most of our schools). As a nation crumbles around us, parents cease to parent (and since when was that a verb, anyway? Since it stopped happening?) and hoodied youths roam the streets in search of elderly people to mug, we alone stand proudly at the stake.
But this is crazy. And it leads to one of the two main crimes committed by my noble profession. Teachers must watch themselves; they are smug and they moan. And now that I have mastered the art of the four-part lesson and have a vague understanding of the endless data we are sent, I must address the problem of not falling into either of those traps.
The difficulty is that when people ask you for the ‘stories’, you tell the most interesting. No one wants to hear about the quiet rows of children getting on with their work; no one wants to be read extracts from your prize pupils’ essays. So you tell them about the time a child threw a desk at your head, or the boy whom you saved from drug addiction and coaxed into passing his GCSEs. And their eyes grow ever wider and you cannot help but feel a bit pleased with yourself.
What we must remember is that this is a job. It is a worthwhile job; but so are many others. Without dustbin men we would all ultimately die of cholera. We deal with sometimes dirty children; they deal with often dirty bins. The bins are roughly the same every week; the children are different all the time. I would rather deal with the children.
And as for the moaning, yes, we put up with a lot of rubbish (like the dustmen). We put up with fashions changing in ever decreasing circles. Some of my older colleagues say they are seeing ‘new initiatives’ for the third time. When I trained, ‘differentiation’ was the key word: giving harder work to cleverer — sorry, ‘more able’ — students. Then it disappeared and now it’s back. It’s irritating, but does it really matter? It’s fashionable to hate Gove, but I’m not joining in. He wants children to learn a poem in primary school. Why moan? Children love noise and rhythm and chants. They learn the skipping chants without thinking about it. He wants children to learn a language. Of course they should. But then the MFL department moans that they’ll have to teach everyone now, rather than just the motivated. Isn’t that what they’re there for? We complain that we’re made to teach to the test, and then moan when promised ‘freedom’. We moan that we’re tired, just before several weeks of holiday. We moan that we’re taken for granted and then go out with our shining faces telling anyone who will listen how hard life is and how wonderful we are.
Do you know what? Some of us are good, some of us are excellent, some of us are appalling. Some care about the children, some don’t really, some care about their subject, some never engage with it outside the classroom. We, the teachers, are no more universally noble than the pole-dancers are universally sluts. (Climbs down sadly from stake.)