Tis the season

Well, here we are in December.

Hmm. What shall I write about? The current political climate? The Euro crisis? Maybe the perilous future of capitalism?

No. No don’t be ridiculous. Of course not. The only thing, literally the ONLY thing that we are permitted by LAW to talk about in December is Christmas. That’s it. Any attempt to have a non-Christmas related conversation will be met with screeching sirens and the immediate arrival of the Festive Police, who will wrap you up in tinsel and hang you from the highest evergreen.

Just to remind you, the officially-permitted topics of conversation from the 1st December onwards are as follows:

1. Are you ready for Christmas?

Oooh tricky one. Trying to gauge the appropriate response to this isn’t a straightforward matter. Obviously no one is genuinely interested in whether you are, in fact, ready for Christmas. To assume that would be a schoolgirl error. The person asking you this question either A. wants to boast about how ready THEY are for Christmas – presents all wrapped, turkey in the oven and it’s only Advent Sunday – and feel nicely superior at your panicky response.

On the other hand, it might be B. – they’ve done literally nothing at all to get ready for Christmas and they want you to say you haven’t either, so that they can feel better about their shambolic organisation. In either case, saying the wrong thing could easily result in a festive smack in the chops and a seasonal trip to A&E so you are well advised to respond with a nervous laugh and a broad statement like:

2. Doesn’t Christmas get earlier and earlier each year?

This is basically rhetorical. Christmas has been roughly the same time every year since the whole stable/manger/star juxtaposition. But this is the kind of statement that is so self-evidently true that it can only really be met with vigorous approval, so it’s a safe bet. Although it’s difficult to maintain your sense of moral outrage convincingly if it’s mid-November and your nodding agreement sets off the jangling and flashing of your Santa earrings.

3. Isn’t it terribly commercialised?

Why yes it is. Well spotted. This is the conversational equivalent to whistling in the wind. Yeah, every year, we’re all going to cut down. Get off the consumerist band-wagon and make little boxes of home made sweets and hand sewn lavender bags for presents and hand made cards. Money will be saved, and there will be extensive improving activities for the children and the true spirit of Christmas will be restored. Which is all well and good.

But then all of a sudden it’s December 21st, the one hand made Christmas card is a skiddy mess of Pritt stick and patchy glitter only fit for doting grandparents, the chocolate fudge mixture is burnt to the bottom of your good saucepan and after an extensive search you find a pile of half chewed lavender bags in the dog’s basket. So it’s the usual mad dash around Boots for a big haul of three-for-twos to swap with a whole pile of extremely similar presents that the recipients can give away as raffle prizes in the new year.

Thing is though, despite everything, despite the panic and the bankruptcy and the way that the Christmas season creeps into the August holidays these days – well, we can’t say we don’t love it. The rituals are more than comforting – they are life affirming and even beautiful.

If there’s ever a good reason to be a parent, it’s the feeling you get watching the nativity play, tissue in hand, watching your child make the very most of their moment as Third Snowflake. Like our parents did for us, and our grandparents before us. And, if we’re lucky, like our children will do for our grandchildren, and so on down the line of our family and our shared history.

So here’s looking forward to a magical and a Merry Christmas to us all, and here’s to many more, just like them, for years to come.

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Listen. Time passes.

There are some days when being a teacher is the best job in the world. Days when working with young people is fresh and rewarding and amazing. When you know that you are doing a worthwhile and important job.

Today is not one of those days.

I’ve been a teacher now for three years and it’s not like it used to be, back at the beginning. Back then I worried about whether I could define irony under pressure or spell propaganda (possibly); whether I could remember which one was George and which was Lennie, and which one was the Duke of Clarence and if Juliet was a Capulet or a Montague. And, even more terrifyingly, whether I could persuade the children to stay in the room, in their seats, and maybe even write something down occasionally.

When you start teaching, well when I started teaching, that’s the stuff I worried about. You watch other teachers in wide-eyed wonder as they seem to make the children shut up and listen. It all looks like witchcraft.

I’m not saying all that’s in the bag but that’s not the fact that I can’t spell onomatopoeia that wakes me up at 5am, and then keeps me awake, one eye on the winking green numbers of the alarm clock until it’s time to get up. It’s not even the exam results or the Ofsted shenanigans. Although I can’t say all that stuff doesn’t give me the heebeegeebees. Really not.

What keeps my eyes pinned open, my mind galloping, even when my body is dog-tired – it’s the children.

Of course it’s the children.

I’ve blogged before about how many people are wide eyed about how BRAVE I am to teach REAL LIVE SCARY CHILDREN. Like I’m some sort of distinctly unglamorous lion tamer. But it’s really not like that. What I face every day are not rooms full of wild animals but just, you know, people. Sometimes scared, occasionally hilarious, frequently grumpy, always vulnerable.

And after a few years you get to know these children and you start to care about them, not as a crowd but as individuals, as people with sometimes extremely crappy lives.

And sometimes you can help. You can give a listening ear, you can hand out biscuits and a little bit of advice here and there. You can recommend books and occasionally you can even get them to pass a few crucial exams, if you’re willing to sweat actual blood and give up all your personal life. And most teachers are prepared to do that, and more.

But mostly, the help you can give is – at best – pretty marginal. You get to know the children, and then you have to stand by while life buffets them about and knocks them sideways. You have to stand on the sidelines watching, helpless and mute, while they make the mistakes they are destined to make, biting your nails and wishing you could look away. You have to watch as they kick out at the world and then wince as – in the words of the song – the world kicks back, a lot flipping harder.

As a secondary teacher, by the time you meet your charges, it’s all pretty much a done deal as far as their future is concerned. Genetics and family and culture have all combined to lay down the tracks that these young people are trundling along on. You can oil the tracks, you can speed up progress, but if a crash or a derailment is coming, you’re powerless to stop it, more or less.

In the last few weeks I have witnessed a few pretty spectacular crashes. Most of them were absolutely and completely predictable, but predictable doesn’t mean preventable. I’ve been buying a lot of man size tissues, and baking a lot of cakes, and then lying awake fretting and worrying and hoping that things will soon get better for them, for all of them. But knowing that – probably, for many of them – it won’t.

What I have learned, more than anything else, from three years of teaching is that age is a very very ambiguous concept. Getting older doesn’t mean becoming more mature. Many many adults of my acquaintance are, to all intents and purposes, just children with more expensive clothes and hobbies. Many adults haven’t developed emotional maturity and they are still every bit as frightened and anxious and flawed as they were as children. On the other hand, some of the children I teach are emotionally mature, self-aware and a great deal more grown up than many adults. And often delightfully lacking in the kind of bitterness that can so often set in as life takes its wearing toll on us all.

What really separates out the teenagers from the grown ups is not maturity or emotional control or even some sort of perspective on the world. What we have acquired, what sets us apart from the teenagers is this, and only this: experience. Knowing that everything passes, sooner or later. That pain and pleasure may seem overwhelming and devastating but they both fade, if you hang on in there for long enough.

One day, your broken heart will be all healed and perky again, just in time to get it broken all over again, but this time in a fresh and different way.

And one day the worries that woke me up at 5am about that child, and his pain and the horror of his life – they’ll have faded away. To be replaced, no doubt, with a fresh and different set of worries about another child altogether.

So, this is what we should be passing on to the next generation: hang on in there, because this too will pass.

We’re all the same, and, young and old, we’re all in this together.

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One out, all out

OK OK I know. It’s been a long time. But don’t worry. I have an excuse.

I’ve been on strike.

Yes, it’s my absolute right to withdraw my labour. In fact, you may not realise this but the perks and benefits of blogging are absolutely lousy. Basically, there aren’t any. You sit at your keyboard, neglecting your friends, family, house and personal hygiene and indeed the social niceties until 800 words of idle chit chat is completed. Then you post it.

And. That’s it.

No cheques pour in. I keep checking my back account but no, there are no spontaneous donations to the Sardonic Bloggers’ Fund. There are disappointingly few offers of deliciously irresistible book deals.

Certainly there’s no pension plan (though if there was, no doubt someone would have plundered it by now to pay for all those destitute bankers who are down to their last Labrador).

I suspect the Christmas bonus is not going to deck the halls with more than a few discarded amusing anecdotes.

On the other hand I am rather looking forward to the Christmas party, because I certainly know how to have a good time on my own.

And not only are there no actual perks for this work, well there’s worse to come. Your work just kind of hangs out there, like a wildly flapping arm sticking out of the window of a moving car. Unprotected, vulnerable to being sliced off by passing traffic and certainly feeling the chilly breeze.

Oh sometimes people say nice things and that’s great, really it is. But then sometimes you catch a little criticism or, worse MUCH WORSE, the brutal blow of a lack of interest (‘Read your blog? Ha ha no, I have better things to do with my time…) and WHAM your outstretched arm’s nothing but a bloody stump.

Perhaps the angsty misery of the blogger could be reduced if I formed a union. Who’s in? We could invest in a water-cooler and have a biscuit fund and then bitch about who eats too many biscuits. Start ill-advised flirtations by email and then ignore the object of your witty banter in the canteen.

Then it’ll seem like real work.

Of course, you’re all thinking, this idea is doomed to failure, because bloggers are of course a bunch of anti-social weirdoes who Don’t Get Out Much. Otherwise we wouldn’t have time to, er, blog right?

And this is true. The real reason I have managed to go for <mmmmumbleee> weeks without a blog is, you know, life. In particular, my life. My life which is, frankly, utterly ridiculous. I have way way too much to do, every single day.  It’s not about prioritising. It’s not even about time management. God knows I have given up sleep and most human interaction in order to just get by (you know, sorry, everyone – and I promise we can catch up when I retire…).

But the truth is that it’s time for me to admit that I was wrong to let life, even my laughably ridiculous life, get in the way of the blogging. Because of all the things in my life, all the things that crowd in like angry camels to fill up my time, this is the one single thing that I gives me the purest pleasure.

And, strangely, it seemed to make the nonsensical nature of my life easier when I was doing it. In my life, my ridiculous, typical life, I spend most of my time trying to keep up with things that I have absolutely no hope whatsoever of keeping up with. I spend my days running on a treadmill, afraid to stop even for a moment, even though I’m exhausted and sweaty and frankly knackered – because it won’t end well. I’ll fall off in an undignified heap.

Nothing’s ever finished. The to do list just gets longer, with subcategories and appendices and occasionally RED CIRCLES.

But the blog – the blog’s different. The blog gets finished. The blog can be ticked off. The blog sorts out my thoughts about something, even if it’s just a little thing, and it underlines them, completes them, posts them for the world (or a tiny section of the world anyway), in nice clean text with a wittily appropriate picture.

The blog, it turns out, rocks.

So I’m back in business. I can’t promise every day (at least not until August oh roll on AUGUST). But, my strike ends now.

I’m back in the game.

And yeah, if you hurry I will consider any reasonable offer for a book deal; though we’re probably a bit late for this Christmas.

There’s always 2012.

 

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The pursuit of happiness

Not so long back, I backed my car into a skip. Well, in fact I backed my husband’s car into a skip. I can’t even claim that I didn’t know where the skip was; it was on my drive, where I’d left it. And it wasn’t all that tricky to see either, being bright sunshine yellow and about the same size as the car I was driving, maybe even slightly bigger.

(The truth is, I backed into the skip because I was all of a fluster – I had just lost my iPhone. Well, I say lost it. I had left it unattended briefly, on my shopping trolley and someone had claimed it. I had donated to the needy, effectively. His or her need for my iPhone was apparently somewhat overwhelming. I hope it brought them happiness.)

Well anyway that was a pretty difficult phone call to make (on the land line of course – how primitive!) to the Long Suffering Husband, about the donated iphone and the damaged car juxtaposition. He did say in a hopelessly optimistic way, ‘Did you just damage the BUMPER?’ – one can only assume that he misunderstood the word ‘skip’ to mean ‘shallow tea tray’ or something of similar height.

So it was that I found myself in a Bodyshop, where nice men in boiler suits looked at my dented rear end and tutted in a convincingly distressed manner, although nothing like as distressed as I was when I received the quotation.

The next day I returned to collect the car. The boiler suited man was unrecognisable from the tutting headshaker of the previous day. He snatched my hand and skipped me outside, with a look of ‘WAIT! Just WAIT till you see THIS!?!?!’

And there was my car, gleaming and glistening in the late afternoon sunshine. The bouncing boilersuited mechanic was grinning and nodding in a slightly manic fashion. He waved his arms in a gesture of great significance towards the rear of my car.

‘Ta da!” he said. More or less. His eyes flicked to the car, to me, to the car, back to me, like a very short rally in a dull tennis match. If there was a soundtrack to this moment, there may have been a drum roll. Or possibly a mariachi band.

I was a little taken aback, because this was something you don’t see every day in the twenty first century. In fact you rarely see it in my experience.

It was PRIDE – pride in a job well done. Justified pride. And boy did this man look happy.

I left his workshop feeling a little envious. God, I thought, that must be nice. To do a job you are REALLY good at. To feel that mariachi band moment every day, maybe even several times a day.

Pride and satisfaction in a job well done.

Doesn’t that sound jolly?

Way back at the beginning of the summer I blogged about the nature of happiness and in particular the survey funded by that nice Mr Cameron into what made us happy. Cuddling, I seem to remember featured highly. And hugging. And chocolate brownies. And village life. (SNORT)

Well I’ve been giving this some thought ever since and I think that survey wasn’t really asking the right questions. I don’t think hugs can really bring happiness. Nor chocolate. These things can bring very great pleasure and satisfaction but happiness? Well happiness surely must come from something more substantial. Something deeper. More long-lasting.

I think that happiness comes, most of all, from finding something that you can do really really well. Something that, in the words of Omid Djalilli, we are all looking for something that makes your soul sing.

Like the bouncing boiler suited man; his soul sings when he does a really really good repair.

I am not sure that this fairly obvious truth – when you come to think of it – is all that well understood. Did you? Did anyone ever say to you – find a job that you can do really really well, that will make you happy?

Do we teach our children that? I don’t think we do. Nobody told me and I don’t think people work it out for themselves all that well, because the cultural norm is that work is:

If you’re smart, work should be Important and Worthy. Like being a doctor. You might not enjoy it but it Needs Doing.

If you’re not so smart, work is A Bit Dull, but necessary to buy the essentials in life, like food and beer and handbags. Just grit your teeth and get through it and wait for the weekend, when you can live your real life. And count the days till your retirement.*

And I don’t think I’ve paid enough attention to passing on the gift of happiness to my children either. When you have a baby and te baby grows into a child you fret about all sorts of things. Making sure they eat the right food, that they get enough sleep and exercise and ballet lessons and should they leanrn the violin and blending and phonics and are we spoiling them? And we say, don’t we, that we just want them to be happy when they grow up. Like it is just an accident of fate, like there’s nothing we can do about it, que sera sera and all that.

Well sorry SparklyDaughter. Sorry GothicDaughter. I shall turn over a new leaf and try to talk to you about what I know about being happy. That you shouldn’t look for happiness in the shops, or in a bar, or in the fridge. That you CAN find deep happiness in other people, but investing all your stock of potential happiness in one person is reckless in the extreme. Like putting your cash in Greek National Bonds or some fly-by-night currency like the Euro.

Love *can* bring happiness, sometimes for about five minutes; then love can kick you in the teeth and shove you bum-first out of the window. But while boyfriends and hair and waistlines may come and go, your work – if you can take pride in it, if it gives you a sense of purpose – brings satisfaction and contentment and joy that lasts and lasts and lasts, even when we’re old and ugly.

So yeah that’s today’s thought – don’t give up on love, but remember that work is what makes you really happy. Well that and the pursuit of the perfect chocolate brownie.

So go to work with a bounce in your step today. Try to find passion and pleasure and purpose in what you do. Even if it’s flipping burgers. Flip those burgers really really well, and people will notice.

And, failing that, take in some really nice cakes for break time.

Be happy, and have a nice day now.

*if you are under 45, I would actually recommend that you STOP thinking about how many days until retirement. It will only make you a little gloomy, frankly.

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Caring and sharing

So yeah – I’m “the Sharer”.

As teacher nicknames go, it’s not the worst. It’s not like my old English teacher who we called Johnny Walker, because he always reeked of whisky any time after ten o’clock in the morning. Or The Peg, our geography teacher with the toxic breath. Or even Bowling Ball Bradley, who could have done with just a touch of powder to take the shine off his reflective pate.

No, as it happens, I don’t mind that one. It’s true, for a start – I do try to fill in the glaring holes and gaps in the ‘education’ we offer to the children at secondary level by offering a little something that they could actually use, to supplement the shockingly useless stuff we make them learn all day long.

Because here’s the shocking truth, as I see it – schools aren’t all that well designed to prepare students for the world. Because, well, they aren’t particularly designed at all.

Let me say first of all, this isn’t the fault of the teachers, or the parents, or even the government. It’s not even Thatcher’s fault, although it sticks in my throat to say it. Well, not completely. The roots of this mangy, misshapen, light-starved tree we call the education system go much deeper into the parched earth than that.

The way we teach children, and the subjects we teach, and the knowledge we impart – these are to a very great extent sheer accidents of history.

Let’s start for example with the idea that we teach children one subject for one hour at a time. Then we teach them something else for another hour, then three other completely different things for three more hours.

Why? Why do we do this? Is this the optimum way to learn? An hour is just long enough to pass on a little bite sized chunk. Not really long enough to absorb it, apply it, put it into practice – all the things you need to do to know that it’s properly learned. I guess this might just work, just about, for knowledge based subjects where you can take in one thing at a time. Maybe. But for skills based subjects, it doesn’t really work at all.

And even that little bite sized chunk, perching in a precarious way inside that teenage brain – well it’s pretty much bound to be shoved out of the way by the next hour long deluge of something else, followed by another hour long deluge about something else entirely.

And by the time you see them again, two or three or seven days later, what do they remember? Precious precious little. To be honest, this particular system could easily have been designed to make children overloaded, grumpy and cross by the end of the day. On which measure it succeeds very well.

And let’s just think about the knowledge we are passing onto the children in school and why. It’s a cliché but honestly, truly – what did you learn at school that you have been able to build on in your adult life? Every year I try to get Y12 to work out basic percentages for their General Studies papers – and they can’t do it. How much of the French that you learned at school can you remember? In subjects like science, even at A Level, much of what you are taught is actually so oversimplified as to be just plain wrong, so it has to be relearned at degree level.

And a lot of what we teach at secondary level, we just teach it because it fits with the current system of teaching and of testing it, rather than for any broader educational reasons. I know that sounds sweeping but I believe it’s true. In English this means focusing a great deal on poetry and short stories. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it does mean than very many people leave school without having read a full length novel. (And no I don’t really count Of Mice and Men in this, thanks for asking.) Because there’s not the time.

Well, why don’t we make time. Sweep away everything we have right now, and start again, from scratch. Decide what we actually want children to learn, and then design the best system around that, rather than make the content suit the system. And if you think we’re not really qualified to do this, remember that this is Michael Gove’s actual job, and you and I are infinitely better qualified than he will ever be, because we are actually giving it some thought rather than pulling Scrabble tiles out of the bag or whatever random system he’s using.

First of all, let’s stop teaching knowledge in chunks and start teaching skills and knowledge together, in context. Let them apply their new skills, over and over until they are really good at them. Let them apply them to real life situations.

Next, let’s teach children how to do things that are actually useful. I don’t mean turning school into some sort of community centre. I mean teaching children how to find out things, how to create things. Instead of trying to create real life situations in the classroom, artificially, let them live real life. Get them to run their own projects, learning things in properly integrated way; making the skills actually mean something. Because that’s how people actually learn and remember. Let them do one thing for a day, a week, a month. Let a group of them take over the catering department and run the catering – that’ll REALLY teach them about food tech, about ordering quantities, time management, working in teams, effective communication. Or produce a play, or put on a concert. Or write a magazine, or a book. Or create a scientific experiment that runs over time. Or grow stuff in a garden.

In this system, we lose the distinction between academic and not. Which is as it should be, because in the world your success is not measured like that. And, at the risk of sounding like an old hippy, we might gain something really significant. More children might actually experience what it’s like to have a real purpose, to work as part of a team. And they might even find it makes them happy, because happiness comes from finding something you’re good at, and doing it well. The education system seems to be deisgned to show children exactly what they’re not good at and keep testing them on it so that they are absolutely 100% sure that they are no good.

Who does this help?

And if all this sounds a bit radical, then how about this? Write down the top ten things you wish you had learned at school, or learned more about. Is it something like this?:

How to think? How to learn effectively? How to get on with other people? How to get the most out of yourself, and out of others? How to manage people effectively? How the world works? How to run a successful business? How to write and communicate really really well?

How well do you think our school system is doing that right now? Better than when you went to school, or worse, or just about the same?

I think we both know the answer to that.

This is the analogy I would like to leave you with, and it’s not mine. It’s TicTicGirl’s. She just coming out of the sausage machine of our UK education system. She’s incredibly bright, is TicTacGirl, and very well-qualified but she’s feeling a little bit scared right now. A bit scared that she isn’t really ready to go out into the world.

She says the current secondary system is all about creating nice, square, neat bricks of knowledge. They are all the same size and you can count them. And you pile them on top of each other until you have what looks like a nice high wall. TicTacGirl’s wall is very high and looks super, but if you push that wall, even just a little push you’ll realise that there isn’t any mortar between the bricks. And it all comes tumbling down.

So that’s why I don’t mind too much being called The Sharer. Because I do try to slap around a little mortar whenever I can, tell them some stuff that they can use. I try and make them happy in the classroom, because the system seems pretty well-designed to make them mostly miserable.

And tomorrow I might just pluck up the courage to ask what the other nickname might be. Because that’s another thing I like to model: sometimes, children, you have to take a few risks, because that’s what makes life interesting.

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