Must Try Harder: prologue

Life at the chalk-face

If reality upsets you, please read disclaimer - here:

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Prologue:

‘You’re a fucking spaka,’ Brandon told me.

‘How do you spell spaka?’ I asked. ‘I’ll need to spell it correctly for the statement I’m going to write about your behaviour.’

‘Anyway you fucking like,’ he sniggered. ‘Retard. Mong. Dil. Spas. Dick.’

‘You’ve got a broad vocabulary of insults,’ I told him.

‘Fuck off,’ he replied.

‘Would you like to leave the class?’ I suggested. ‘The rest of us have a lesson to complete.’

‘No,’ he said.

And so, instead, the class itself had to move to a different room.

At this point you might reasonably ask why I didn’t follow the new advice on classroom management and simply take firm hold of Brandon’s collar and escort him from the room. My reply would be that, notwithstanding the new guidelines, I’d get sacked.

For that outstanding display of foul-mouthed misbehavior, of which I’ve recounted only a small, highly censored segment, thirteen-year-old Brandon received a one-day, in-school suspension, and spent all Tuesday drawing pictures with colored pens and A3 paper with the nice ladies who staff the Cuddle Club. They tell me he’s offered to write a note of apology to me. That he’s learned his lesson.

Yeah.

Right.

I was still thinking of Brandon at the staff training session that night, as we were introduced to the new Seven-Point-Star Lesson Structure, complete with its Learning Rays, Hot Core and Spreading Light, and given a brief overview to its wondrous pedagogical potential. Then in anticipation of this new system, which we would discover more about in tomorrow’s staff training day, we spent an hour or so discussing how we could best employ various types of bubble-diagrams and colored pens to represent students’ ‘learning’ in a visual format; we began discussing the many other ways in which we could encourage higher level thinking skills amongst the denizens of William Edward Arnott Learning Village (previously known as West Bognor Technology College, until the old building was demolished/fell down four years ago).

I have no problem with higher level learning skills, or even the old Personal Learning and Thinking malarkey because, after nearly two decades years of spoon-feeding exam passes to increasingly reluctant and apathetic students, it’s about time we started encouraging them to do some of the work for themselves. I just think it’d be better all round if we started off by teaching them the basics.

And I made the schoolboy error of saying so in the meeting: ‘Before we teach the higher learning skills,’ I suggested, ‘can we focus more time on the basics. I’m concerned that in our efforts to encourage universal higher-level lifelong auto-didactism we’re neglecting to do the simple stuff.’ I probably didn’t say it in quite such poncey terms, but you get the gist.

Noting blank expressions amongst the cut-and-thrusters however, I changed tack, adding, ‘I mean, higher learning skills are great, and teaching students to teach themselves is fine, but don’t we need to teach some content, some stuff? Don’t we need to show them the basics?’

The deafening silence told me that I wasn’t making much headway amongst the mover and shakers in the training session so I ended with a lame, ‘I’ve got students who still don’t really know when to use capital letters or full-stops but I’m supposed to introduce them to the higher reaches of Bloom’s Taxonomy?’

At this point, Princess, a high flyer with three years teaching experience and now the newly promoted Assistant Head of Accelerated Learning, leaned forward, smiled at me indulgently and in the tone of someone speaking kindly to an elderly imbecile relative said, ‘But don’t you see, Daniel, if we give them the learning skills, they can discover how to use capital letters and full-stops for themselves.’

There was a long moment of complete silence. I tried to move my lips but no sound came out.

And no-one else spoke.

I looked around the room and realised that none of the experienced staff could be arsed to argue the obvious point that if they didn’t know what a full stop was no amount of higher-level thinking would tell them where to shove it. I also realised also that four of the five middle managers present had been teaching less than four years. In fact two of them had only been teaching for a year. After an appropriate, funereal silence, just long enough to allow the tumbleweed to drift across the polished imitation hardwood floor, the meeting moved on and Lance, the Team Leader for Statistics & Progress, stood up to take us through the new excel formula ‘for calculating success.’  

I mused that West Bognor, or as it was locally known, Bog Standard, Technology College, had been chronically short of managerial staff over the last four or five years because anyone with any sort of experience had either retired, changed school, left the business completely or just downgraded back to main-scale to avoid exactly the sort of empirically-challenged industrial-scale bullshit they were doling out here.  

But now, after a £150 million new build we were the William Edward Arnott Learning Village and this was the new reality: we didn’t need to teach the basics to students because they’d teach it to themselves. All we had to do was believe in the system, combine PowerPoint presentations with the mooted seven-part lesson structure, get them to sit in groups and teach each other, and then measure their success using Lance’s latest magic formula.

At the dark recesses of my mind something cracked, something gave way; walls tumbled. I sat back in my chair as everything suddenly, finally, made sense. I was aware of the reality, the awful clarity, the terrible logic of the education system, in a way that I’d never fully grasped before but that young Brandon had sussed immediately and on an instinctive level, treating it with the contempt it deserved. Education wasn’t about learning; it was about the appearance of learning.

‘We’ll be splitting into groups tomorrow, to go through the new lesson structure in more detail,’ Princess announced. ‘We’ve got a specialist team coming in to enable our learning. Then we can cascade down the skills to the students. Eventually we’ll be able to simply stand to one side as they teach themselves. None of that didactic nonsense here,’ she gave a little laugh, ‘When we’ve completed this programme all our students will be getting A stars!’  

People shuffled in their seats.  I looked up as the clock struck thirteen and the meeting ended.

The purpose of Newspeak, I thought as I made my way to the car park, is to make all other modes of thought impossible. The purpose of the New Learning Speak was to hit every target, no matter that it made actual learning impossible. I’m not employed to teach: I’m employed to create the appearance of teaching. I’m employed to produce statistics that indicate learning has taken place, even if it hasn’t. Even if the obsessive gathering of statistics actually sabotaged the learning process it was created to measure. I’m employed to create, as Blake might say, the lineaments of gratified desire.  I broke into a broad smile and was still smiling all the way home as I imagined a boot stamping on a pile of textbooks, forever. 

Do it to Julia, I wanted to shout.

Do it to Julia. Not me!  

I arrived home feeling lighter, cleansed. I’d finally got with the programme.

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Must Try Harder is available to buy, here:

Chapter 1 will arrive on Thursday.