Scenes From The Battleground

This November will mark the 45th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Much has been written about this event, and experts from many disciplines have attempted to find out exactly who was responsible for the death of the President.

However, one area of expertise has been sadly neglected, that of the Headteacher. In the interview below Jim Bulmer, Headteacher of Stafford Grove school gives us his insights into the matter:

So tell me, do you think Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin? Or do you think there may have been a conspiracy?

I think we have to believe Oswald when said he didn’t shoot the President.

But the FBI and the Warren Commission concluded that he did.

Well, I’m sure there were faults on both sides.

Both sides?

Yes, both sides. Even if Oswald did shoot Kennedy then I think we should at least look at what Kennedy did to provoke it.

I’m sorry, are you blaming Kennedy for his own murder?

Yes. I don’t think we can hide from the fact that plenty of other people drive through Dallas and don’t get shot in the head. At the very least he must have had a poor relationship with the assassin.

What do you mean by “a poor relationship”?

Well, he clearly didn’t make an effort to get to know his assassin on a one-to-one basis, to build the kind of relationship that encourages people not to shoot you.

Surely that wouldn’t have been possible? A president can hardly be expected to go out and befriend all possible assassins.

If he wasn’t doing that then I don’t think he was a suitable person to be president. Being president is all about relationships. It’s not rocket science. You have to establish solid routines for assassin management. You can’t just complain about other people shooting you.

I think people will have trouble accepting this point of view. If Oswald was the assassin then he was to blame for his actions, not Kennedy?

I don’t see why anyone would think that. There were three other presidents during Oswald’s lifetime and he didn’t assassinate any of the others. I think it’s obvious that President Kennedy lacked the appropriate skills in this area. He failed to make his presidency interesting enough. It’s not like it was twenty years earlier when a president could just sit in the Oval Office making decisions. Psychotic assassins need more than that. He should have made his presidency more interactive.

I see. And does the Kennedy Assassination tell us anything about American society?

Yes, it does. Part of the problem here is that nobody else was allowed to be president of the United States. You can’t just let a handful of people each century become president of the united States and write off everybody else as failures. If you are going to tell people that they aren’t president then it’s no wonder they go around shooting other people. It’s not rocket science.

Well what do you suggest?

We should make everybody President. If everyone had full presidential powers then nobody would feel left out.

Wouldn’t that create complete chaos? If everyone was president, who would actually be in charge?

Well I hear that sort of argument all the time. There wouldn’t be any problems if people just kept an eye on things, coming out of their rooms more often, taking the time to build relationships.

Surely you can’t just blame a victim and claim that anything that anybody does wrong is a result of some people being more successful that others?

Of course we can. That’s how we’ve been running education for decades.

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I’ve just seen a television advert encouraging viewers to take out a bank loan in which a voiceover asks us “wouldn’t it be nice if you could make last night’s dream today’s reality?” I have an answer to this question. The answer is “no”. This is partly because last night I had a very vivid dream about having chronic diarrhoea, but it is an opinion I’d hold generally.

Since I became a teacher my work has frequently invaded my dreams. Sometimes I dream that I am at school and I am suffering from some medical affliction such as losing my voice, or my teeth, or my fingers. Or I have forgotten to get dressed and am still in my pyjamas.

However, there is one type of dream that is always very similar and occurs at the end of almost every holiday. I dream that I have a class that simply won’t respond to anything I do to control them, or even to quieten them down. I talk a lot about challenging behaviour on here because I think it is unacceptable and because I believe it is a problem that has been made worse through incompetence and ideology within the education system. Despite this I have rarely been in the situation where I can do nothing to teach my lesson. I think this has only happened once to me outside of a cover lesson or my NQT year. Somehow, it manages to happen all the time in my dreams. The class, which is sometimes a real one that I will have on the next school day and sometimes a composite of many classes I have known, will not be quiet and often will not sit down. None of my routines work; all warnings are ignored; no amount of shouting makes a difference. (In fact, I often lose my voice in these dreams. Or my fingers fall off.)

I awake from the dream in a state of distress and wondering what the hell I am doing to myself by being teacher. The frequency and intensity of the dream often reflects just how unpleasant, stressful or just uncertain my working life is at that given point in time. At the worst times I can be having a dream about something else entirely, for instance that I am going for a walk in the countryside with friends, when suddenly from the middle of nowhere Jordan from year 11 appears and won’t stop shouting, jumping up and down and pulling down posters that have appeared on the scenery and I’m shouting and nothing’s happening and there go my fingers.

As a teacher I feel obliged to blame senior management and the Government for my nightmares. Immediate political action needs to be taken to change teaching to the point where it will allow me a good night’s sleep even on the last day of the holidays.

Alternatively, I could just stop eating cheese before I go to bed.

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