Meanwhile, over on Side 2…

Today spent the most enjoyable three school-based hours of recent years with a trainee teacher and a subject specialist tutor discussing teaching and learning in My Specialist Subject. On reflection, discovered several things:

1. After three decades of practice it turns out I have A Lot Of Experience that Other People seem to value. This may seem blindingly obvious but is something we too often actually blind ourselves to. Or perhaps let the Other Pressures of the job blind us to. It is good to be reminded of this.
2. I love my area of subject specialism and on reflection as a profession we do not value this highly enough. In the delicate balancing act between teaching and being an active participant in the subject(s) we teach, it seems to me that the balance too often tips in favour of the Practice Of Teaching.
3. Talking to other adults about area of subject specialism and/or practice of teaching immeasurably more rewarding than hours spent telling eleven year olds to stop eating glue sticks.
4. Point number 3 is now really All I Want To Do.

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If you tolerate this your children will be next

January is the cruelest month or so I understand from various Northern hemisphere cultures where the winter starts to bite and the bitter desolation of Blue Monday (or Blue Week, Blue Month, Blue Lifetime…) blows down unsightly corridors and chills our very souls. Or perhaps that is just the case in my particular provincial high school. Certainly feels more energy-sappingly unpleasant than ever in 2020, but willing to concede this may be symptom of age withering all aspects of body and soul.

However certainly feels as though Behaviour In School has wilted further in recent weeks and feel temptation to lay blame firmly at feet of mainstream media and results of unwelcome General Election in December for firmly establishing notion that Bullying Is Good and that Hate Is Acceptable. Narrative appears to be that people (students and parents) feel empowered to defy rules and expectations that are set by anyone in authority. Time in school now feels like it is spent lurching from one confrontation to another, each one driven simply by the fact that individuals (again, students, parents) seem to think that they are in charge of making rules that are specific to their own personal whim and/or standards. The notion that we might have some kind of universally agreed notion of decency and respect seems to have been firmly rejected. Never felt more like retreating to Cabin In The Woods to meditate on… well, to meditate on ANYTHING that is not this day to day grind of bleakness and misery.