PeriodOne

I think that the critical establishment has an irrational dislike for the band Athlete. Beyond the Neighbourhood is their third album and I don’t see how it can generate such hatred. Especially as non-music-critics actually DO like it: Athlete have shifted units without heavy promotion or tabloid bluster. But their reviews are terrible: have a look at review compiler Metacritic’s rating. I suppose my soft spot for Athlete could be equally irrational: I drive through their area in Deptford each morning and can’t help but admire them for sticking around and building their studio there rather than following every other successful London musician to cosy Primrose Hill or cooler-than-thou Camden. The fact remains that these are tunes which offer interesting and unassuming little sketches of the hopes, fears and jolts of happiness everyone round here feels. They just don’t write it on the album cover like Keane did. And something about Joel Potts’ delivery makes repetition of lines like, “I’m away with the fairies” or “I wanna take you home with me tonight” forgiveable and endearing. The songs reliably make you smile. I’ll pay eight quid for that any day.

I’m terrified of the moment when my form slips from their current halo-wearing status. To this end I’ve been instigating a Friday afternoon ritual where we sit in a circle and do some kind of activity vaguely aiming to instil a sense pride and responsibility for what we have achieved so far as 7B. Last week was bullying. Yesterday, the more prickly issue of reacting appropriately to the achievements of others and ourselves.

In pairs they were given a set of possible sentences they would (honestly) like to say to a friend whose test result was better than theirs. Each pair then screwed up their chosen statement, threw it into the middle of the circle and grabbed another from a different pair. The statements ranged from ‘Well done – you deserved it’ to ‘It’s not fair, I’m better than you!’, and – luckily – 7B were generally honest and most pairs chose statements closer to the latter than the former. We repeated the process imaging that this time WE had scored highest and thinking about what we would say to the unlucky runner-up. With a similar range of statements available, every pair but one admitted that they would console the unhappy loser with a sensitive: ‘WHO THE MAN!!!’

As well as the amusing experience of 22 eleven-year-olds reveled in the unveiling of their collective inner b******d, the more serious goal of this enterprise was to acknowledge how difficult it is to deal with disappointment, especially when that disappointment can be directly correlated to another’s success. To my mind, the only way to prevent the inevitable baiting of high-achievers in a form is to accept that none of us are immune to feeling resentment towards others, or to the urge to crow about our achievements from the roof-tops. The problem is, kids are too often told that they shouldn’t have these feelings; that the feelings themselves are wrong.

As I tried to emphasise to my form, the stuff they feel is OK. In fact, it’s good insofar that it demonstrates ambition and determination. But the trick is to manage their emotions in a way which shows respect for others and respect for themselves. Having all seen each other’s secret thoughts about achievement, I hope they found this easier to understand. Time to get back to polishing those halos …

I remember catching a glimpse of my teacher’s timetable when I was at school and being amazed at how little he actually taught. There were mysterious free periods all over the place, sometimes two or three in one day. It made me quite indignant when I compared it with my own non-negotiable full-time commitments as a pupil. Now, on the other side of the teacher’s desk, I see things differently. Once a week I teach a full day and it is a back-breaking enterprise. For a start, six hours of teaching means probably two hours of planning and maybe an hour of marking (if you’re lucky). Plus there are all the things you don’t get done – responding to emails, keeping up with admin, liaising with colleagues, planning the other 15-odd lessons to be taught that week. These things impinge upon the days before and after the big sixer like tremors indicating the approach of an earthquake and the aftershocks experienced in its wake. Nevertheless, in the middle of a six period day, you actually tend to feel pretty good. The body’s adrenaline pump is on permanent full throttle, and you know that behaviour incidents cannot be allowed to happen, as the necessary administrative follow-up would have to be put off until the following day, which will undoubtedly bring its own fresh challenges. So I think many teachers produce their best work on these hectic full days. When it’s all over however, you hit the ground like a stone. After accompanying 7B down to the main gates at the end of the day (they’re still brilliant, God love ‘em) I found myself slumped at my desk desperately trying to put together lessons for tomorrow, and unable to complete the most basic tasks. And this will affect the quality of my teaching tomorrow, making it more strenuous, making me more tired, and so on. The key is to approach these full days with an unflinching acceptance of one’s fate, together with an acceptance that they must be planned well in advance. It’s too easy not to think about them until the night before, and therein lies the trap. Of course, I would have done that on Friday had I not been sat with colleagues moderating media coursework for over five hours. As one newly qualified colleague who used to work in advertising has confirmed, the notion that teaching is an easy option is one you believe at your peril.

The summer holidays, now a distant memory, have already taken on the patina of old, worn film in my head. The sepia-tinted, yellow haziness lends the memories a nostalgic air (though surely nostalgia normally takes more than a fortnight to kick in?) Now we’re back to weekends as islands of slightly bewildered calm in an ocean of action, reaction, planning, evaluation, communication and all the things that make a teacher’s week what it is.

After a honeymoon period of two and a half days, what teachers euphemistically term ‘behaviour’ has returned with a vengeance. For the three newly qualified teachers (a term universally shortened to ‘NQT’) in my department, it came as a shock. And I found myself in a situation I’d privately (and embarrassingly) been looking forward to for some time: finally NOT being the least experienced in the department, and being approached for advice rather than desperately seeking it. Having awaited this moment with some anticipation, and having myself so often sought the advice I was about to dole out, I was disappointed that the stuff I heard myself saying was all deeply pedestrian. Anyone with any teaching experience will know the drill: “Clearly state your expectations!” “Consistently apply sanctions!” “Chunk up lesson content so the kids don’t have time to misbehave!” And the old chestnut: “Catch them being good!” All effective strategies of course. But at the moment of truth, embattled NQTs will often discover to their horror that these supposedly devastating pedagogic weapons are just plastic toy replicas of the real thing. As the experienced teacher down the corridor blasts any ‘behaviour’ firmly into submission with a dazzling array of measures designed to shock and awe, the NQT rolls out the big guns only to find that though they produce vaguely realistic gun sounds, they only actually fire elastic bands. And there’ll probably be plenty of those flying around already. Shock and awe? More like duck and cover.

I think that our advice to new teachers should focus less on what to do, and more on how to do it. The most effective managers of behaviour at our school do exactly the same things as the NQTs. They just do them with a level of confidence, conviction and belief that is simply undeniable, and that is what makes the difference. Unfortunately, as a piece of advice: “You need more confidence, conviction and belief!” is not particularly helpful. But emphasising that there is no silver bullet, and that inexperienced teachers are doing exactly the right things, and that these things will work if the teacher believes in and cares about the children … well, let’s face it: that’s pretty useless too.

So in the end, the advice I gave was no better than the advice I received: keep trying; it’s going to be OK. It’s not often that the modern, emotionally literate person gets to deliver a platitude of quite such inexcusable meaninglessness, but as I turned and felt the heat of the NQTs’ baleful stares gently drying the back of my shirt (let it be noted that I’m no behaviour hot-shot myself), I didn’t feel that bad. Even in the most supportive department with the best colleagues in the world, you’re on your own as an NQT. Time to sink or swim.

I think every teacher fights to control the urge to interfere. Sitting on the train, the conductor’s phone rang (apparently his better half was called – he had downloaded a humorous ring-tone featuring a klaxon and a voice repeating ‘Warning: It’s the wife!’). As he conducted the conversation at maximum volume I didn’t feel guilty about eavesdropping (it would in any case have been impossible not to), and listened as he reprimanded his daughter who, it emerged, had punched another girl at school. He then spoke to his wife about what to do with their little girl. It was a touching conversation between two clearly loving parents who were doing their best to do the right thing despite the fact that the father figure was on a late shift marshalling people on and off trains in Docklands. And, as always, I had to resist the urge to tell him how impressed I was that he was supporting the efforts of teachers to help his daughter. Absolutely none of my business, quite obviously. And yet you still feel the connection because you have had countless phone calls with parents in exactly the same situation about daughters with exactly the same problems. Teaching connects you with everyone, either directly or indirectly, because wherever they are, kids need their parents and teachers to work together. And when you see this collaboration happening, you know that somewhere a teacher cares enough to make the call and hopefully set in motion a chain of events which might eventually go some way to setting things right. And that matters.

Can the vicarious observation and analysis of experience be effectively substituted for experience itself? Comments on PeriodOne’s experience deficit posting from erudite practitioners would suggest yes, they can. And I agree – after all, this has been going on for some time. I think that the difference now is in the speed at which this observation and evaluation has to be performed, and the critical situations that are at stake. Someone beginning, say, a core head of faculty job with two years’ experience (which is eminently plausible) is not going to have had time to conduct the process of watch, adapt, try out, evaluate, develop. The individual will certainly have learnt a great deal over the previous 6 terms, but she is still starting a job that 6 or 7 years ago would have only been taken on by someone with a least twice the experience. Inevitably, many of the new head of faculty’s decisions, reactions and strategies are going to have to base themselves on something else. Call it a style, a philosophy, a hunch, whatever: the thing motivating the actions of the inexperienced leader is going to be intangible: intellectual, maybe emotional. But not the product of experience, be it real or vicarious or observed. And when questioned on a decision, there’s not going to be any firm answer: no “it worked for me when …” or “I’ve taken it from when …”. I know this because it’s how I feel: my meeting contributions are often justified with a rather weak-sounding, “Actually, it’s my next assignment topic”. Or even, “Er, because we learnt it on the PGCE”. Such explanations don’t go down well. But what guides successful inexperienced leaders when they are faced with a situation they just haven’t seen anyone else deal with is what defines them. And in the ruthlessly pragmatic world of education, having the confidence to develop and nurture a philosophy with which to guide oneself is becoming essential. Without it, the inexperienced leader risks steering a chaotic course plotted using individually valid but mutually incompatible ideas hastily gathered as a newly qualified teacher. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that our philosophies are already guiding us. We just need to figure them out so we can better support each other.

Either my year seven group have entered the school in a rich vein of form, or they’re genuinely lovely young people, as they have so far yet to set a foot wrong. Of course, it’s only been a total of five school days, so we’re hardly out of the woods, but so far 7B are ahead of the curve in terms of their behaviour and their achievement in lessons. Two young gentlemen, under gentle but steady pressure from their form tutor, even took part in auditions for the school musical. Watching them valiantly duke it out with the older, more experienced pupils in the hall, I realised how proud of my form I have already become. I have taken to vainly bathing in the reflected glory of their successes (both pupils will receive small but essential roles) in a manner familiar to competitive and proud parents the world over. And it’s a new and heady experience: seeing your own enthusiasm, beliefs or convictions filtered through the brains of 22 youngsters and presented back to you in the form of merits, excellent pieces of work, or even the surprisingly convincing Nuu Yawk accents of two year sevens auditioning for Bugsey Malone. There’s nothing better in my professional experience to date. But I suppose there’s another side to all of this. I’m clearly willing to attribute every success my tutor group achieves directly to my own input. Fine. But will I be as willing to accept responsibility when one of my form wrecks the learning of others during a lesson? Or viciously bullies another pupil? Or violently assaults a member of staff? Ultimately, our pastoral duties can only extend over the school day, and the millions of individual experiences our tutees are party to when they leave and before they arrive will always outweigh our tutor time chats and activities. So, for the time being I can smile and quietly enjoy the fact that 7B are ahead of the pack. But I sure as hell better be there for them when things start going wrong. And can I – or any of us – really guarantee that for the children in our care?

A quick trawl round the ‘net has confirmed for me that you’re nothing without a personal brand nowadays. I was just trying to create a compact letter head, but that’s getting very difficult, what with the number of outlets which we now have to express ourselves publicly, and which we might therefore want to make public. Once you’ve fitted addresses for a blog, website, Facebook page, MySpace page, Bibo and Skype as well as more pedestrian information like email, or even (do people still have these?) a landline number, there’s not much space for a letter anyway. And then comes the branding issue. Does co-ordinating the look and feel of your opinion-sharing (the blog), your social networking (Facebook, Bibo) and your online credentials (website) make you a digital pioneer, keen to present yourself as a coherent and effective online personality? Or does it make you a drone; a human Big Mac so desperate for a smooth, standardised feel and appearance that you lose any semblance of the personality you’re striving so hard to create? Or does it just mean you spend way too much time online, and have probably forgotten the old-school methods of developing an interesting and effective personal brand (i.e. by being and interesting and effective personal person)? I’ve got to admit that my first impulse was to start co-ordinating everything to fit with PeriodOne’s style, but I’m now thinking that the last point does have some validity, and that large portions of the population would simply shake their heads sadly at the thought of someone devoting so much time to their virtual personality and look. And, at the back of my mind, there’s the another thought gestating and slowly becoming a monster: is it me, or is it the kind of people who, try as they might, are not able to shape their actual lives to the form that they desire who flee to the more easily adjustable parameters of the online world? Once upon a time, before they took over the world, they used to called ‘geeks’ …

Timing a tube strike with the first day of the new school year was a master stroke of inconvenience-causing, mayhem-inducing industrial action here in London. It certainly added an edge as key members of staff languished on the wrong side of the Thames while new year sevens arrived, wide-eyed and quivering. I have the honour of sheparding one form of these new recruits through their first year, and they turned up in a flurry of nervously clutched planners, impeccably polished shoes and ridiculously oversized blazers. One boy’s parents were particularly keen to ensure all school equipment was thoroughly future-proof: in obvious anticipation of a sudden, hulk-like expansion in their son’s physical dimensions, they had bought him a uniform that would have been a bit roomy even for me. Now, received wisdom with year sevens is that one must ‘go in hard’, i.e. not matter how scared, nervous, polite and down-right tearful they appear, here shall be no quarter. Presenting oneself as an approachable, easy-going form tutor on day one means an endless stream of pointless questions on day two (year sevens are well known for their tendency to surrender all shreds of common sense at any given opportunity), and an endless stream of complaints from colleagues on day three as the new batch tests the limits of the school behaviour policy. So, I went in hard, and am now desperately praying that it’s worked: only time will tell. By the end of the week, my form were still looking sharp, and there’s only been positive feedback so far, so here’s hoping …