Must Try Harder: 2
Timetable
Staff notice:
When planning lessons, the term Learning Objective is to be replaced with Learning Outcome.
Monday. 7.56 am - Staffroom
The first couple of days of the new academic year were always a bit chaotic. You spent a lot of time doing admin, gathering class lists, choosing appropriate schemes of work, and discovering what joys your new timetable held, your energy source provided by copious amounts of machine-made hot beverages. The staffroom was welcomingly quiet, in an eye-of-the-hurricane sort of way, as I put my money into the machine and watched it pour some liquid-comfort, also known as hot chocolate, into a plastic cup that burned my fingers when I carried it over to a table. I sat down, took a bunch of felt-tip pens from my regulation teacher’s battered briefcase, took out the timetable I’d received through the post only three days earlier, and began to colour-code my working week: yellow for Year 7, pale green for Year 8 and so on, so that I could see at a glance the shape and rhythm of each day. I paused, puzzling over three lessons, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday before lunch that simply said U.
‘Struggling?’
I looked up to see the bullet-headed, silver-goateed form of Jimmy Elves. ‘Hey Jim,’ I said, ‘Welcome back.’
He took my hand in a bone-crunching shake and sat down, ‘Back in the trenches, huh?’
‘See this?’ I said. ‘What do you think U means?’
‘Under-employed?’ he said. ‘Unemployed?’
‘Unimpressed,’ I ventured.
’Unlikely to succeed?’ he countered.
‘Me, or the kids?’
He chuckled as he took out his own timetable and looked for a similar entry. There was none. ‘Whatever it is, they don’t want RE doing it.’
‘Thought you were PSRE?’
‘Then we became PHSRE. Currently we’re SCMS. Who knows? There was even a rumour we were doing philosophy this year,’ he said, ‘Though seeing as my timetable is mainly blank spaces at the moment, I’ll just stand at my door and wait to see who arrives.’ He stood, yawned and stretched, ‘But whatever we are asked to do, I’m sure it’ll be a winner.’ Seeing me still poring over my timetable, he patted me on the shoulder saying, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
I nodded at his retreating back. Watched as the door closed behind him. Jimmy is Head of RE. An ex-soldier who served in Northern Ireland, a committed if slightly off-beat Christian, now approaching the end of his teaching career. A couple of years ago, when the school was being rebuilt, we were offered a large chunk of sponsorship by a well-known multinational company that amongst other things, makes coffee, a company with an unsavoury reputation for ruthless exploitation of third-world workforces, natural resources and unscrupulous tax havens, and Jim went straight to Godot, and threatened to resign if they accepted the funding. Godot said he was going to accept the sponsorship and, therefore, Jimmy’s resignation too. The next day however, having realised the powerful negative publicity that could be associated with having the Head of RE resign over the morality of accepting a sponsorship deal, or perhaps because they actually agreed with Jim, who knows, the school withdrew from the sponsorship deal and gave him his contract back.
So when people talked about ‘lefty-teachers’ I think of Jim. Principled, committed to education, and a brilliant communicator. He once let it slip that he’d only been working these last four or five years to help someone he knew pay off their debts. He’s a gem. He walks the talk. I asked him one time about Northern Ireland and he told me about the fear, out on patrol with the sweat running down your back, never knowing if you’d be next to die at the hands of some unseen sniper, but knowing that the bullet would kill you before you ever heard it, and talking about picking up pieces of his comrades who’d been killed in explosions. ‘What I hated,’ he said, ‘Was raiding the houses of suspects,’ he explained, ‘and we would roust the guys from their beds and bundle them down into the Land Rover, and we’d strip the wives naked, tear off their nightdresses, or else they’d follow us down the street spitting and swearing. One time, a woman spotted my crucifix, and she clocked I was of the same religion as them, a Catholic, and a group of them singled me out for special verbal abuse. Called me a traitor. It all ended badly,’ he said. ‘In Colchester army prison.’
‘What happened there?’
He shook his head. ‘Bad things.’
And now he was head of RE in a state school, teaching eleven-to-sixteen year-olds his own pressure-tested brand of ethics and compassion. In the summer he and his wife Anne would go to Africa and do a month’s voluntary work.
I wondered what Ofsted boxes that ticked?
None, probably.
Musing on Jimmy Elves took my mind off the U on my timetable for a while but then Paul Cain came in and reminded me. ‘You got a U on your timetable?’ he asked, looming over me.
I nodded, ‘Yes.’
‘Great. You’re with me up in the Unit.’
‘What Unit?’
‘The school’s had funding for a Unit for the daft lads who’d otherwise be permanently excluded. They’re using the old music block. It’s been renovated over the summer.’
‘Oh,’ was all I could manage.
The music block was the only building that survived the rebuild a few years ago, being built in the 1950s, it was a relatively new building compared to the original school. Now it was being turned into a ‘Unit’. And I’d be teaching the bad lads.
‘Do we get body armour?’ I asked.
‘You’ve got a thick skin,’ Paul laughed, ‘So you’ll manage. Just keep it simple, don’t take anything personally, and remember to ignore whatever is the first thing that comes out of their mouths. Plus you’ll have loads of support.’
‘From who?’ I asked, only half joking, ‘The TSG?’
Paul left me there as I coloured in the three squares in my timetable with a U using a bright pink pen. I’d worked with the nurture kids in the past (though the word ‘nurture’ has since been banned – we call them Supported Provision now), those students who were vulnerable or disabled or, for whatever reason, it was felt would struggle to survive in the bear-pit that was a typical secondary classroom environment. And now I’d been given the bad lads too. The only good thing about teaching in The Unit would be, I predicted, the less than overwhelming amount of marking.
I used to dream of lessons spent sitting with a class of rapt ‘A’ Level students as we grappled with the intricacies of Orlando, enjoyed the social mores of Pride and Prejudice, pored over the dirty majesty of Lady in the Lake. Instead, nowadays I tended to work with kids who, for whatever reason, could barely read and mostly didn’t want to. But I enjoyed working with the nurture classes, if I’m honest, they were the nearest a secondary teacher got to primary-school type teaching; they were friendly, naïve and inexplicably enthusiastic. The Unit, on the other hand, would be like a preparatory version of a Young Offenders Institution. But though I didn’t read as much literature in school as I’d like, and probably wouldn’t do much reading at all, up at the Unit, I still managed to read quality authors during the holidays. If by quality you meant Lee Childs or Elmore Leonard.
So it was all good.
Five minutes later, having organized coloured-in my timetable and organized my days in my mind I walked back to my classroom to start preparing for the next classes, the staffroom was getting busy, the buzz was rising. The patter and chatter of tiny feet and not-so-tiny mouths as the students arrived and began to mill around the corridor, sort of like Wildebeest looking for somewhere to ford a crocodile-infested river. We teachers being the crocs, of course.
One bit of pointless admin I had to do, amongst the reams of pointless admin, was copying up all the names from the excel sheets on the computer and into my planner. It took three or four hours to get all the relevant information from PC to paper, names, tutor groups, national curriculum levels, plus information such as whether a child is ‘looked-after’ or was born abroad or has dyslexia, ADHD or some other sort of special need. About a third of our students would have special needs of one sort or another. Special needs brought us extra funding.
It’s a growth industry.
My email inbox gave a ping.
It was an urgent request from Lance to email him my ‘working at’ grades for my Year 11 class. This is an estimate of where the students are at this time, academically speaking, giving us an idea of what needs doing to improve the grades the next time they sit their GCSE examination. They’ve already sat it once, and will probably do so twice more before we finish with them. I hadn’t actually taught the class since the last academic year so I emailed him back and suggested he used the actual GCSE grades they received about three weeks earlier. A couple of minutes later he emailed back and asked me if I could input those GCSE grades into the attached Excel file and return it to him Asap. I emailed him to ask if he had a copy of the GCSE exam grades and, if so, would he email it to me.
Asap.
He did.
I received an email with an attached file containing the GCSE results. On receipt of this file I copied the information manually into the other Excel file he’d sent me, then closed the GCSE file and returned the ‘working at’ Excel file to him. I’d just experienced the joys of bureaucratic Ping-Pong. Sighing, I logged off my email and went back to copying student information from the computer to my planner.
Must Try Harder is updated every Thursday
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