Confessions of a teacher: Because school isn't quite what you remember it to be... (5 page)

The newly appointed head isn't the only big news that is coming our way this month. The full school inspection that was due to take place in November has been moved forward to October, just when we return from our October break. Panic has swept through the whole place. Everyone has only three weeks to get up-to-date with the latest educational jargon, the tons of paperwork that never gets done for lack of time and preparing detailed lesson plans so complex they are worthy of being framed. Queues are forming at the photocopier from 7h30 in the morning and reforming at the end of the day till 8h00. The one and only photocopier is doing so much overtime that the 'out of order' sign is now one of its permanent features. Nothing like an inspection to make people frantically run from one corner of the school to the opposite like headless chickens. At times like these, we increasingly resemble the child who suddenly realises he hasn't done his Maths homework and is desperately trying to remediate the situation before his next Maths class. Except we do our homework. So all things considered, it is more like the kid who isn't sure he has done the correct homework and is desperately trying to do all the exercises in the entire Maths book.

I've got one more period to go before the end of the teaching day and I have a free period before I meet the chimps. Jack is sitting at the computer as I enter the base. Lea and Caroline are also there, getting on with work and chatting to Jack at the same time. As I walk in, I catch Jack's last sentence.

- Of course, you need to know high order priority questioning, Bloom's taxonomy.

- huh? comes the unified answer.

I have heard all the words in that sentence but wouldn't know how to combine them together to get something that makes sense. By the quizzical look on my colleagues' face, I can tell that I'm not the only one. I'm starting to get a sense of what the chimps feel like when I ask them a question.

- Yes, you know, high order priority questioning - Bloom's taxonomy...

I wish he would stop repeating these words like a lullaby. I heard them as clearly as the first time round but still can't make sense of any of it.

- We talked about it at a meeting last year.

- Ah, the three of us reply before Lea plucks up the courage to ask what exactly that is.

It turns out that Bloom's taxonomy is nothing more than the art of asking open questions rather than closed ones. For example, one shouldn't ask 'what is the answer to...' but 'why is ... the answer to...'. There is a whole range of questioning techniques which all of us have been using since we started teaching except we've never called them by any name, let alone something like 'high order priority questioning, Bloom's taxonomy'.

The world of education loves jargon. Every few years a new curriculum is forced down teachers' throats with a fancy name such as 'Five to Fourteen', 'Higher', 'Higher still'. There are starting to run out of ideas for a new name. Where do you go when you've gone higher still? If they'd asked me I could have suggested 'the sky is the limit' or 'reach for the stars' but they didn't ask me and they never will. The new one they have come up with is 'Curriculum for excellence'. They have truly limited themselves with that one and the only way forward can only be 'Curriculum for perfection'. In any case, we have now been teaching 'Curriculum for excellence' for one year and are still no further forward as to what it entails aside from Bloom's taxonomy. All schools in the country are overflowed with documents that are supposed to tell you what it means. Two buzz words have emerged as strong representatives of Curriculum for excellence: Experiences and Outcomes. What it really means is everybody's guess. Should you endeavour to find out more, the official line states:

" The experiences and outcomes are a set of statements (to be found in an equally mesmerising and lengthy document) which describes the expectations for learning and progression for each of the eight curriculum areas.

The title
experiences and outcomes
recognises the importance of the quality and nature of the learning experience in developing attributes and capabilities and in achieving active engagement, motivation and depth of learning. An outcome represents what is to be achieved (and what nobody has a clue about).

The experiences and outcomes for each curriculum area build in the attributes and capabilities which support the development of the four capacities. (Huh?). This means (it actually means something?) that, taken together across curriculum areas, the experiences and outcomes contribute to the attributes and capabilities leading to the four capacities".

I rest my case. The problem with Education is that it is overseen by three groups with very different vested interests. The thinkers of Education who have, more than likely, never set foot in a classroom but who are paid to come up with new learning strategies and new curriculum. They are idealistic but to be fair to them, not all their ideas are bad. The general opinion that teachers are stuck in their ways and reluctant to change is erroneous. Some of the concepts in Curriculum for excellence are good but they do not fit in with the reality of what happens in schools. Getting the kids involved in research projects that assess their skills in various ways is exciting but the bottom line is that I have one single computer in my classroom. It dates from the last decade and takes ten to fifteen minutes to start in the morning. Invariably, teachers are left with the task of deciphering documents, interpreting them the best they can and implementing them in a practical way that is not best served by existing working conditions. What angers us isn't the change but the fact that everything has to be implemented now without any given thought to how it translates into practice. It is up to us to figure it out as we go along. The second group consists of the politicians who don't really care that much about experiences, outcomes, attributes and capabilities. All they want is to be able to convince the general public that the nation is now breeding an ever increasing number of academic geniuses. They are far more interested in statistics and league tables. They don't really care how they get these results as long as they get them. The third group is those who hold the money: Politicians again, local authorities and school managers. Their concern is being cost-effective. They love the woolliness in the academic lingo because they can interpret it any way they want and find many opportunities for saving money. Teachers are caught in the cross-fire of three different agendas and seem to be the only ones who genuinely care about education. The bottom line for me is that the bell has gone and I have to attempt to teach something to the chimps, with or without the help of Mr Bloom and his taxonomy.

The chimps are a funny breed. You can usually jolly them along if you don't make extra demands on their virtually non-existent intellectual capacities. However, like all wild species, they will occasionally become quite unpredictable and prone to a certain display of aggressivity. This is the last period of the day and I'm afraid I've taxed their energy too much by asking them to do one final exercise in their jotter. Only two of them are following my instructions while the rest blatantly ignore me and continue their private conversation, leaving me no choice but to do what any respectable teacher would do: threaten them with the almighty punishment exercise. It's not the threat that gets them suddenly quiet but the tone of my voice. I don't like it. There is something eerie in that unexpected silence and the glare in their eyes. I've been teaching long enough to know when mutiny is in the air. Sure enough one starts to hum, quickly followed by others. Within seconds, the chimps have turned into bees and the entire room is buzzing. When a child does something wrong, you have to turn the mild irritation inside you into a mask of real anger. With humming, there's no need to pretend. The anger is very real. As much as you can challenge individual pupils about their behaviour, with humming there is no real way of isolating the culprits and it pretty much feels like the whole class has turned against you. There is no time to waste in this situation and the only way to stop it is to show them that you are not just angry but mad with fury. This is quite easy as I am actually mad with fury. My voice has gone deep and I'm quite sure that red laser beams are coming out of my eyes while every single vein in my body is pulsating. I am slowly but surely turning into a female version of the incredible Hulk. They can feel my madness and fall silent. "Any of that again and I will call Mr Larson!". Jack is very good with that kind of things and the kids fear him. Too often in schools, people are made to feel inadequate when they call for help with discipline. Yet, this is part of the reason why we have heads of departments. This is what they're paid for: to step in when all else fails. More often than not, they don't like to be disturbed and would do anything for a quiet life. So it's far easier for them to make individual teachers feel inadequate rather than be supportive when their help is needed. Luckily for me, Jack is an exception to the rule. His motto is: "your job is to teach and not to be prevented to do so because of a handful of unruly teenagers".

No sooner have I mentioned Jack's name that one of them, probably unaware of my threat, resumes the humming. I send one of the more cooperative kids to get Mr Larson to come in. Jack arrives within seconds and has been filled in as to what happened by the messenger. As he reads them their rights, you can feel the tension in the air as well as hear twenty pairs of sixteen year old legs shaking under the desks. Jack issues each of them with a blank piece of paper. "Write the names of the people who were humming" he thunders at them. "And I tell you something else, if I don't get the ones who did it, the whole class is walking out of here with a punishment exercise". Needless to say they comply. Jonathan's name is written on every single bit of paper along with Marc, Steven and Louis. In any case, Jonathan has unwittingly made a full confession. I recognise his messy handwriting. Once we've managed to eradicate the spelling mistakes and transcribe what is essentially phonetics into something that makes sense, it reads: "I don't know who was humming. Honest! I couldn't hear anyone humming cause I was humming so loud".

I head home quite tired that night. It doesn't matter how much experience you've got, things like that do get to you. They always lead to endless self-analysis: What if I had done it that way? Maybe I shouldn't have said X or Y. What if... That's the problem with teachers. They become so engrossed in petty incidents that their sense of reality becomes distorted. In which reality does humming suddenly becomes a crime of such magnitude that it turns your day upside down? As I get home and crash on the sofa Dave, my husband, notices how tired I look. He knows better than to ask for details and simply says: "bad day, darling"? Time to shake the whole thing off and return to a world where a million things other than what happened really matter. I just smile and say to Dave: "Oh, nothing much. Just a bad case of humming". Fortunately, there are only two days to go before the October break. Unfortunately that also means one week to go before the Inspection.

Part 2: October, November, December.

The inspectors.

It never ceases to amaze me how days turn into weeks and before you know it, you're back where you started. The inspectors are in but spending the day with the KGB. It will be the next day before they hit the classrooms and pay us surprise visits. I have spent the best part of my holiday preparing all singing all dancing lessons for each class, complete with an amazing display of my technological prowess and an entire set of Bloom-type questions. I have read through pages and pages of documentation that made absolutely no sense and all I got from that was a headache made of flashing letters: CPD (something to do with personal development), PRD (another thing to do with personal development), HGYOS (How good is your school) not forgetting E's and O's to name but a few. The kids have been briefed about being on their best behaviour at all times. I just hope they don't come to see me with the chimps. With them, it's not about their E's and O's but mine. Experiences: that everything goes with a minimum of fuss. Outcomes: that I can make it to the bell and retain some sanity.

Like the end of the holidays, tomorrow comes only too soon. Everybody wears a grim face and has developed a curious whispering habit: "Have they come to see you yet?". "No. You?". Everybody jumps every time their classroom doors open. This happened to me three times since this morning. The first time it was a kid asking if I had a spare jotter. The second time was a senior pupil wanting to hand in an essay. By the third time, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but it was only one of the janitors needing to check something in the room. It's not that we mind having someone observing our lessons. It happens all the time. What we mind is an official from Her Majesty's Inspectorate (I wonder if the Queen actually appoints them herself) sitting at the back of the room with a clipboard and a checklist of things we should allegedly be doing, while devising pernicious questions to ask us at the end. I'd rather have Eleanor Lawson in any time. I may not know the answers to her questions but at least, I understand what she's asking.

There may be scary inspectors about but that doesn't make any difference to Dylan from my first year class. He has copied the date and the word 'objectives' before being side-tracked by something else. I have missed a fair part of his thought process, but by all accounts it led him to Geography. I watch him as he pulls out of his bag a piece of paper that appeared to have been a map at some point but looks more like a paper hanky that has gone through a bad cold. Dylan stretches the paper in front of him and is now taking a ruler to it and drawing crossing lines. A treasure map perhaps? It certainly looks far more interesting than the rest of the words I force him to copy, having made sure that he placed the treasure map back at the bottom of his bag. With Dylan back on track, for a few minutes anyway, we start today's lesson which is all about buying clothes in French. As we work through a sample conversation, I point out to the children how very polite the French are, using expressions such as 's'il-vous-plait' and 'merci'.