Scenes From The Battleground

I can now be found on Facebook. Please “friend” me.

There is now a “community” for this blog at MyBloglog. You will need a yahoo ID to log in but once you do you that this should enable you to appear in the red “recent readers” box in this blog’s sidebar.

And just in case you’ve forgotten, the world’s quietest teaching forum still exists here. You only need an edublogs account to contribute.

I often find myself defending what I write here, often from people who just don’t get it. It is particularly noticeable when I am told that what I see as the almost universal experience in tough schools is just a fluke, something that I must have stumbled upon that is actually very rare. Often it will be claimed that their own experience as part-time SENCO in a very challenging private Church Of England primary school in the home counties proves me wrong.

So, for the benefit of those who have never set foot in a tough secondary school classroom (or those who have but didn’t notice what was going on because they were a member of SMT), here is my list of ten things that you can’t have missed after a single term of teaching in a tough school, yet some people will still swear aren’t true:

1. Kids don’t behave just because your lesson is interesting or well-planned, or because you are nice to them.
2. Top sets, particularly in Key Stage 4, often behave badly.
3. Punishment does work on 99% of kids. If you look closely at the kids who supposedly don’t respond to being punished, it almost always turns out they haven’t actually been punished very much.
4. IEPs and other SEN information tell you nothing useful at all.
5. When SMT say “come and see me if you have a problem with that” about something they’ve told you to do, they don’t mean it.
6. Discipline has got worse since you were at school. By a factor of about 3000%.
7. The kids don’t know things that they are meant to know.
8. It is a lot easier to teach a class that has been set than a mixed ability one.
9. The paperwork cannot possibly be done. No task is worth doing until somebody reminds you to do it.
10. Some very stupid people are teachers.

Please feel free to suggest additions to the list.

A new Year 7 intake usually includes a large proportion of children who are intending to learn and behave. It’s a bit of a shock to stand in front of a shiny, fresh Year 7 class and see the attentive faces of The Good Kids all around the room. The proportion of Good Kids falls throughout their time in secondary school, until it is a tiny minority by the first term of year 11, when it may pick up again as the real world bears down on them and some of the worst students stop attending.

The process by which The Good Kids are weeded out begins almost immediately. Students are establishing themselves in a hierarchy almost as soon as they arrive. They quickly want to establish themselves as the coolest. In the first few weeks they may be under the impression that it might be cool to be the most academically successful child; to be captain of the football team; or to have a fifteen year old girlfriend and a Playstation 3. Soon it becomes clear that the coolest thing to be is an outlaw: somebody who wrecks lessons, tells teachers to fuck off and is known to all the adults in the school. Once this has become clear the alpha-males, and most of the alpha-females are lost from the ranks of The Good Kids, along with their followers. That’s not to say they all reach the extremes of poor behaviour, but they are desperate to avoid getting caught being good.

By year 8 they have firmly established their roles. Many may still want to learn, but only the chronically uncool respect authority. Their classes are still controllable, but the attitude within them is often negative, and teachers have to work to maintain a good working atmosphere, even in top sets. It is here that we get to see the Good Kid Glare. When a teacher spends time in a class re-establishing control The Good Kids who want to learn are left waiting. They won’t complain about waiting, but they will sit glaring at the teacher, the clear expression on their faces saying: “Why are we having to wait? Why can’t you just teach us?”

As hormones take effect on students and they move into Years 9 and 10, they become more and more preoccupied with how they are seen by their peers, and less concerned about how they are seen by their families and teachers. Even those who are committed to learning begin to change perspective. Some just become “one of the gang”, learning only secretly when the true authorities in the school won’t notice. Others decide that simply sitting glaring while waiting to be taught is not enough. They begin to see their willingness to learn to be something special, something to be rewarded. It will be withdrawn if they aren’t adequately praised or if they aren’t allowed to sit near their friends. Unfortunately when sat near their friends their interest in learning diminishes. They also become bored waiting to be taught and are more demanding of their teachers. They develop the expectation that if they are going to work then they should be sat at the front, they shouldn’t have to wait for the rest of the class to be cooperative, and if, every so often, they don’t feel like working then they might as well have a day off, as they are still doing a lot more than many of their peers. And every so often becomes more and more frequent.

In their own heads they still remain the Good Kids. Unfortunately, as you stand in front of them establishing order in the class they no longer glare at you in impatience. They stare at you in disbelief:

“Why is this teacher trying to get the whole class to learn? Doesn’t he realise we are the special ones? Why waste his time on those who don’t care? Why does he criticise us when we chat, or take a break? Doesn’t he realise we will do some of the work he gives us? What more does he want from us, other than a bit of neat work in most lessons? Does he actually expect us to listen? Why should we? Nobody else will. Why does he tell us to stop talking and listen? Why doesn’t he just set some work we already know how to do, and let us do it while we continue our conversation?”

And they will become as aggressive as any other child in their efforts to establish that the teacher has no right to expect anything more from the class than occasional bursts of effort by those who want to please. They chat continually; they often sulk when challenged, and they very often don’t work. And you stand at the front and you look from Good Kid to Bad Kid, and from Bad to Good and from Good to Bad again; but already it’s impossible to say which is which.

Almost the last week of term. Almost the end. Year 11 have left. Year 10 are on work experience. The only cloud on the horizon is the redesign of the behaviour database. It’s new and improved but:

• It doesn’t yet print out detention letters.
• All the detentions in the old database have been cancelled.

Not surprisingly the kids have reacted by going a bit mad. Several year 7s I was teaching (in a class that is normally taken by another teacher) seemed determined to be removed from the classroom by refusing to stay in their seats or stop talking. According to the school rules I am obliged to give them several warnings and then email the Call-Out Staff (the people who patrol the corridors at the school) to have the students removed from the class. I did so and the Call-Out Staff didn’t respond (very unusual). After half an hour of waiting, and having had several subsequent emails also ignored, I sent an “all-staff” email:

Can somebody please check the Call-Out Staff, they don’t seem to be responding to emails.

There was no reply. I muddled through. At the end of the lesson a member of Call-Out Staff emailed apologising for having been unable to answer. I recalled my email so that anybody who hadn’t already read it wouldn’t receive it. Five minutes later, Duncan Brown, the Assistant Head in charge of inclusion emailed a reply to my email, carbon copied to SMT:

Mr Old

Why please have you sent this to “All staff”?

Additionally the “Call-Out team” do respond to emails but at present they are three members of staff down out of five. In future if you have a serious issue about a poor reaction time will you please contact me. If you are then unhappy about my response then please contact the Deputy Head in the first instance.

A little shocked, a little stressed, I replied:

I was not complaining about the reaction time, I was asking for help with a pressing problem.
I am used to Call-Out being too busy to collect. I am not used to having no response from Call-Out, no warning that there would be no response, and no response to emails to Call-Out asking about the problem. Therefore I hoped to contact any member of staff for immediate help with removing the students.

I have, of course, recalled the message now that I’ve had a response (although that did indeed take until the end of the lesson), but at the time I was being utterly prevented from teaching my lesson and the support that is normally provided and was urgently needed was not only unavailable, but nobody had even acknowledged to me the fact that it was unavailable. Moreover the complete lack of response to my all staff email would indicate that it was not widely known that Call-Out was unavailable either.

I am sorry if you interpret a member of staff calling for urgent help as a criticism. I suggest that any future incident can be avoided by informing staff in advance that they will not be able to use Call-Out, not 44 minutes after they request assistance.

The following day there was more from Duncan:

Mr Old

I take note of your comments but still insist that you contact me in the first instance if you perceive that there is a problem.

For your information the difficulty was that Paul Michelle was put onto the team at the last minute to man the “Call-out” room but having logged onto the computer, obviously as himself, was not part of the “Call-Out” distribution list and therefore was not receiving any “Call-Out” emails, either from you or any other members of staff.

As for “avoiding” this situation occurring again, it might still occur, because we are all affected by human error.

Can I again emphasize my earlier comments that you contact me if you have a problem in future. Can I suggest as an immediate solution that if you are faced with a similar difficult you might speak to a colleague in an adjoining room who might be able to support you immediately or send a messenger to student services or please contact me by on my mobile.

I replied:

I do not have a phone in my room. There are no adjoining classrooms and the only teacher on this floor of the building would have been a supply teacher.

I could, of course, contact reception or you, which I did by sending an All-Staff email. Given that neither you nor reception responded to my email (except in your case to criticise me for sending it) I fail to see what good this would have done. Given that contacting all logged-on members of staff yesterday resulted in no help at all I’m a little mystified how contacting less people would have made the situation any better. It wouldn’t have even lessened the amount of emails collecting in people’s inboxes because, of course, I recalled my email at the end of the lesson.

The only downside I can see to my email is that more members of staff found out that Call-out wasn’t functioning yesterday than was strictly necessary. Personally I find it useful to be informed when this is the case and am surprised that you consider it a priority to keep this from staff.

In future, however, when Call-Out fail to acknowledge my emails for 29 minutes I will send my requests for help to you, my faculty and the Deputy Head in the first instance. If this results in no resolution to the problem then I will assume that you would prefer it if I send an all staff email rather than leave the room myself, unless you wish to tell me differently.

I hope this has resolved the matter.

He hasn’t replied yet.

I don’t think my replies have done me any favours, but I do not want to stay at a school where you get blamed when you ask for help.

Another observation: For most of my time here Call-Out has been run by non-teaching staff and has worked really well. It is noticeable that its ineffectiveness, and attempts to conceal this ineffectiveness, began this month, when a member of SMT took over responsibility for running it.

A recurring topic here is that of The Appeasers, those who believe that the best way to get bad kids to behave is to treat them better than other kids.

Here I intend to discuss the beliefs that underlie this course of action. These beliefs are theological in nature, dedicated as they are to describing their God: an object of worship and obedience known as The Child. These are the key doctrines of Child-Worshippers:

Dogma 1: The Child is born without sin. Unlike teachers, who are clearly tainted by Original Sin, all children are basically good. To suggest otherwise, particularly to suggest that there are bad kids out there, is to commit a form of blasphemy known as “labelling”. Because all children are good then all rewards provided for children are inherently deserved no matter what conventional morality might say.

Dogma 2: Anything The Child does that appears to be wrong is not His fault. This is a corollary of Dogma 1. Because children are inherently good, they cannot be responsible for anything bad that happens. Because of this it makes no sense to punish a child and anyone attempting to do so is guilty of sacrilege. Deities do not have to follow the normal laws of cause and effect. Therefore, bad behaviour can be caused by how adults react to it. For instance children might be badly behaved because a teacher shouted at them, even if it might appear to infidels that the children were shouted at because they were badly behaved.

Dogma 3: The Child is always the victim. Whatever happens, the fundamental truth is that any child is actually in the right and suffering for our sins. They may be suffering from poverty, discrimination or bad teaching. They are suffering at all times. They cannot have brought any problem on themselves and anyone who they don’t like must have been unfair to them.

Dogma 4: The Child has needs that must be met. If an apostate falls away from this faith and suggests that actually some children are perfectly fine, thank you very much, and should perhaps stop behaving like animals, then this indicates that their lack of faith has caused them to fail to diagnose the children’s needs. These are not like the needs of mortals. Normally people only need things for a particular purpose. These needs on the other hand are actually divine rights to attention and sympathy. The more unreasonable and unpleasant children are then the greater their needs.

Dogma 5: The wrath of The Child is always righteous. If a child verbally abuses you, hits you, or disrupts your lesson, it is what you deserved for your sins. You have failed to worship them sufficiently or appreciate their divine authority (probably because you failed to appreciate their victim status). All such wrath is a divine judgement on your impiety. If you were just nicer to children then you would be among the saved.

Dogma 6: The Child is not subject to normal moral reasoning. You might be aware that you personally can be tempted by evil. Children never are, and you can never assume that anything a child does has a questionable motive. It is your duty to excuse children’s behaviour for reasons, like poverty, being in a bad mood, or a lack of self-esteem that would never be an excuse in normal moral life.

Dogma 7: These Dogmas are psychological facts. Like other modern religions the beliefs of the Child-Worshippers are not just compatible with science, they are proved by them. All these beliefs correspond to psychological theories. These theories must be held to be true even if they have since been discredited or have no empirical basis. Insight into the true nature of children cannot be gained through any other domain of human experience, such as philosophy, history, literature, common sense, religion or even other types of psychology that have reached different conclusions.

Dogma 8: The infidels must be punished. Anybody who doubts these dogmas is a bad teacher. It is “scary“ that they might be let near children. They must be motivated only by hatred. Their inability to realise that all badly behaved children are disabled and poor suggests that they hate the disabled and poor, and probably black people too. All the things that you must never do to children, like judge them, label them, or punish them, can be done to these infidels. Indeed a belief that there are no bad children requires a belief that there are plenty of bad teachers.

Dogma 9: Any failure to find the promised land is due to apostasy. If after accepting all the dogmas, following the every whim of children and diagnosing their needs hasn’t led us out of the wilderness, then this can only be due to a lack of faith. Two signs of the apostasy of the people are most common and to be most roundly condemned. The first is “traditional teaching” which covers any practice that suggests a belief in discipline or academic rigour. The second is “a lack of resources” and is a failure to spend enough money on children, even though the money that had already been spent did no good at all.

Dogma 10: These dogmas do not apply to the priesthood. The high priests of appeasement reserve the right to withdraw all their own dogmas if it might affect themselves or their own children. A belief in the inclusion of badly behaved children does not mean you can’t send your children to a private school or demand severe punishments for any child who bullies one of your own offspring. Similarly any child who is a threat to an appeaser’s reputation for having “good relationships” with difficult kids must be punished.

In this entry I expressed my disagreement with Steer’s (2006) claim that behaviour was effectively managed and that it was rarely extreme in nature. This is the usual view of the educational establishment.

However, whenever teachers themselves are asked then the news on behaviour becomes very different:

A survey of 813 ATL members in primary and secondary state schools published in March 2008 found that:

• 51% of teachers were dissatisfied with the behaviour policy of their school or college.
• 64% had considered changing profession because of behaviour, and a similar proportion had seen colleagues leave because of behaviour.
• 100% had dealt with disruptive pupils.
• 29% had dealt with physical aggression.
• 35.3% with physical intimidation.
• 75.3% with verbal abuse or threats
• 94.5% had dealt with disrespect such as “use of mobile phone in class, ignoring teacher’s requests”

A Teacher Support Network survey in March 2007 found that of 433 teachers who responded:

“92 per cent had been verbally abused by pupils and 49 per cent had been physically abused. Of those who had been physically abused, 53 per cent had been assaulted with a thrown object, 26 per cent with a ‘weapon’ such as furniture or equipment, two per cent with a knife and one per cent with a gun. The attacks included stabbing with scissors and nails, strangulation, hands trapped in doors, and one teacher had a fire extinguisher turned on them.”

A 2003 NASUWT survey of 300 schools counted 126 physical assaults, 62 sexual insults or threats and nine cases of racist verbal abuse in a ten day period.

A 2008 NUT survey found evidence of how frequently poor behaviour was encountered. The following percentages reported the following behaviour:

This data appears far more shocking when you realise that it will not be evenly distributed. There will be schools that have far more than their fair share, and skills where this behaviour is rare. Certain types of behaviour will be far more common in secondary schools than primary school. For a large proportion of teachers in tough schools the disruption to teaching, and the stress and strain caused by poor behaviour is the core demand of being a teacher. All other priorities are secondary to protecting yourself, your students, and their learning from the consequences of their behaviour.

References:

Alan Steer (chair), Learning Behaviour: The Report of The Practitioners’ Group on School Behaviour and Discipline, DFES

Education has long been enough of an ideological battleground for there to have been philosophies which have developed their own mythologies. A further factor in the promotion of myths for teachers is the fact that before the internet much false information was transmitted through photocopied sheets and teaching had particularly good access to copiers and printing machines. As a result there are many teaching myths repeated to students by education lecturers, transmitted around the internet, or simply quoted as fact by teachers who should know better.

Here’s three of them trawled from the internet. I’d be interested to hear if you have been told any of these myths, whether you thought they were true, and whether you can suggest any others I could add to the list.

Myth 1: The following are rules for teachers from 1872:

1. Teachers each day will fill lamps, trim the wicks and clean chimneys.

2. Each morning the teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.

3. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual taste of the pupils.

4. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they attend church regularly.

5. After ten hours in school, the teachers may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or any other good books.

6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.

7. Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years so that he will not become a burden on society.

8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.

9. The teacher who performs his labours faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five pence per week in his pay, providing the Board of Education approves.

From http://heathhill.blogspot.com/2005/12/rules-for-teachers-1872-style.html

Actually, many variants of these rules exist, from many countries. We can safely assume that it is fake simply because there is no consistency in any version about where it is meant to be from. I was first shown them on my PGCE course by a lecturer who seemed convinced they were genuine.

Myth 2: As every SENCO knows; Einstein was dyslexic

With proper recognition and intervention, dyslexics and individuals with ADD become successful individuals using their talents and skills to enrich our society. They may take their place alongside other dyslexics/ADDs, such as Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Nelson Rockefeller.

From http://www.dyslexia-add.org/

Einstein suffered from dyslexia. He is a clear example of a person who would be labelled as learning disabled in today’s educational system. With the right approach to education, these labels cannot prevent great accomplishments, as proven by Einstein and others.

From http://www.einsteinmontessori.com/ems.php?category=about_albert_einstein

Albert Einstein - He could not talk until the age of four. He did not learn to read until he was nine. His teachers considered him slow, unsociable and a dreamer. He failed the entrance examinations to college but finally passed them after an additional year of preparation.

From http://bodineschoolideaexchange.blogspot.com/2007/09/great-dyslexicalbert-einstein.html

There are also variants of this about many other historical figures.

Actually, Einstein’s biographers, e.g. Pais (1982), do not confirm these stories and his academic success leaves very little grounds for thinking he had any form of learning disorder, let alone one severe enough that it could be diagnosed posthumously.

Myth 3: Ancient Writers show that kids were always this badly behaved and that adults were always just as worried about behaviour.

Have you ever heard the following quotations? They all seek to indicate that any modern concern about the young is misplaced by suggesting that similar concerns have been expressed in other eras:

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

From Socrates (470BC-490BC) according to http://www.zerosharednickels.com/wordpress/?p=263 and http://onemansblog.com/2007/04/23/socrates-and-the-problem-with-children/

Or alternatively Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) according to http://beautifulbeacon.blogspot.com/2008/01/generational-divide.html

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

From Cicero (106BC-43BC) according to http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/662 and http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2007/11/children-no-lon.html

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.

From Hesiod (circa 700BC) according to http://thinkexist.com/quotation/i_see_no_hope_for_the_future_of_our_people_if/13669.html and http://www.laughlin.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123036815

The world is passing through troubled times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behaviour and dress.

Peter the Hermit (died 1115AD) according to http://www.lifeway.com/understanding/youth/article_temp.asp?ArticleID=3 or “Peter the Monk” [sic], according to http://rivergirlie.wordpress.com/2006/11/

What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?

Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) according to http://blogs.osltraining.co.uk/classroom_management/2007/12/what-is-happeni.html

Actually, a quick search will reveal that although these quotes appear many, many times in many, many places, you will soon notice that no source includes the text in the original language or a reference to any academic text where it can be found. All of them appear to be twentieth century inventions.

References

Pais, Abraham, Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, 1982

A couple of friends have drawn my attention to these discussions, and yes I couldn’t avoid getting involved:

Schools today, good kid, bad kid

How does he know?

The first link is probably best described as a site for liberal Christians. The second is a political blog by a prominent Hackney councillor.

I wrote before about how I support the strike because, although pay isn’t that bad (well not unless you are in a shortage subject) teachers are discontented and should start kicking up a fuss.

However, my school will be remaining open with only a minimal number of us on strike. Overwhelmingly, my fellow NUT members would rather be scabs than rock the boat, even though some of are a lot unhappier at work than I am. It was not an option I considered, even as I began to feel more and more exposed on the issue. I suppose I have personal reasons for this. My grandfather worked on the railways before the war and used to tell me stories about how workers would be maimed at work, then sacked for being disabled (even though they could still work), and the only way to stop that was for the rest of the workers to down tools. Apart from the belief that effective trade unions are a fundamental part of workers’ right, a fundamental part of decent working conditions and absolutely indispensably for anybody engaged in a difficult or stressful job, this has also left me with the unavoidable feeling my grandfather would be spinning in his grave if I ever turned scab, and so I doubt I ever will. Discovering that many teachers don’t realise why they should support their union, or, more seriously, that many teachers don’t have the vaguest clue what a trade union is for has been a surprise, so I thought I’d better write a quick reply to what I’ve been hearing from the scabs:

I’m not bothered about striking. Unions negotiate for their members. If they are perceived as weak then they have a weaker negotiating position. Union members who ignore their own unions are undermining their own unions. They certainly have forfeited the right to complain about their own working conditions. If you tell the bosses you won’t fight you deserve what you get.

I only joined for legal cover. Unions are not the AA of the work place. You could buy legal insurance without joining a union. It is no excuse to say “I joined a union but not in order to be part of a union”. That means that you are stupid with your money as well as disloyal to the interests of your profession. It’s particularly daft for teachers who (to my regret) have a large choice of unions including those that never strike.

I’d strike over behaviour or working conditions but not pay. Unions cannot be effective if members pick and choose what issues they will support industrial action over. I’m the first to admit there are more pressing issues than pay, but pay is what the union has voted to strike on, failure to support that strike will undermine teachers on all issues. You either believe in collective action or you don’t, there’s no point believing in it for conditions but not for pay.

The strike will make us unpopular. What good has the popularity of teachers done us? It might not feel like it but teachers have had overwhelming support from the vast majority of the public and the vast majority of parents for a very long time. But this has been based on the sympathy people feel for victims and has done us no good at all. The idea that we should continue to be victims in order to continue to keep the public pitying us is ludicrous. I’d rather not be a doormat, even if it’s a doormat with a good reputation with the public.

A day’s strike might be ineffective. You can never be sure what it will achieve. But scabs are only making it more ineffective.

I can’t afford to strike. This would be merely pitiful if the strike wasn’t over pay. If you are short of money then you need to fight for more, more desperately than those of us who won’t miss a day’s pay. Yes, it might require sacrifice, but you hardly have a right to complain about your pay when you were unwilling to fight for more.

The kids can’t pass their exams without me being in today. Get over yourself.

I’ve been getting more money anyway due to promotion. There’s a parody of the red flag includes the lyrics: “The working class can kiss my arse, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last”. Declaring “I’m alright, Jack” is just selfishness. You don’t just strike for yourself, you strike for everyone particularly your less fortunate colleagues. Of course, the thought springs to mind that if you really don’t care about your colleagues then no wonder you got promoted.

I said earlier about having been raised to believe in trade unionism as a prerequisite for decent working conditions. There is another side to that. Being a scab is just plain wrong in that culture. I have to assume that many teachers must have had more generations of the middle class in their families and don’t recognise this attitude, and that this is combined with ignorance of why loyalty is required from trade union members. But there is one comment that I am hearing from scabs that winds me up. It can go in front of any of the reasons above. It is: “I am not a scab but…” Let me make it clear: If you are not turning out when your union requires you to go on strike then you are a scab and that is the end of it. Your self-pitying, selfish excuses for your disloyalty do not make it go away.

Feel free to remind me to write a blog about all the things I hate about the teaching unions. I almost wrote one already during the Easter conferences. But, even when the unions are at their worst, there is no excuse for being a scab and striking over pay at a time when many of our schools are short of qualified teachers, and many children are learning important subjects from people who have no qualification in them, is hardly the worst.

You know how much I hate to be negative. So I thought I’d mention just a few of the things I like about my job:

1. Kids are funny. Well sometimes. But they at least know absurdity when they see it. They are far more likely than adults to try and find out what the crazy fat boy in year 9 looks like when wearing mascara and lipstick, or to walk up to the head and ask “Who the hell are you?”

2. I enjoy my subject. Bizarrely, I enjoy teaching it more than I ever enjoyed learning it. There’s nothing like having to explain something to get you thinking about it in a very fundamental way.

3. I do get to make a difference. In two of the tough schools mentioned in this blog then, in between all the chaos, I got to teach sixth form classes and roughly once every two years I helped prepare a child for getting into Oxbridge, from schools where most students don’t even consider university. Less dramatically, I can usually see progress being made in my lessons.

4. I get to think about philosophy, psychology, history, politics and ethics on a daily basis. I enjoy that sort of thing. A teacher who understands nothing of justice, virtue, the mind, social class, social change and human nature will get very little out of the profession. Except promotion to SMT, of course.

5. I’ve made lots of friends in teaching. Well at least three.

6. Most of the time I’m in charge. It’s great bossing people around. Anybody who says it isn’t is a liar.

7. I never have any shortage of people to tell me if my shirt’s untucked; if my flies are undone; if my hair’s a mess, or if I smell.

8. Whenever anybody claims that children (and by extension all people) are basically good, I get to look at them with a sense of pity and the warm smug satisfaction of knowing that, whatever illusions I hold about the world, at least I will never say anything as stupid as that.

9. It is a genuinely satisfying experience to see somebody learn something particularly if they thought they couldn’t.

10. The holidays.