This posting is really only going to seem relevant to parents of school-aged children, but I think it also says something about how British society sees itself and, as I have commented on before, how wedded to the past it is. As I have written before, a woman and her 7-year old son live in my house. The boy goes to a local Church of England school which seems to be caught somewhere between the obsession with being sued that is common in the 2000s and attitudes that were going out of fashion in the 1950s. It assumes all families consist of a mother, father and three children and that the mother does not work and is in a position to bake cakes and provide voluntary assistance throughout the year. As it was, many of the nouveau riche, formerly lower middle class parents who tend to send their children to the school (faith schools always draw on a narrow social as well as religious, and often ethnic, basis) are now having to send the mother to work to deal with the recession, especially as so many of the fathers are self-employed and small/medium enterprises (SMEs) are suffering.
Anyway, a declaration has gone out that now the childen must wear Summer uniform. For the girls this is a silly blue-white checked dress of the kind you would have found in small branches of Tescos in 1973 (when Tescos was a down-market general stores rather than the mega-supermarket chain of today). The boys must wear shorts. Again, in my experience shorts went out in the early 1930s. They are humiliating for the children who have to wear them, and given how active boys are, just increase leg gashes and bruises that look terrible. Light summer trousers would be fine. The boy in our house is already embarrassed as other boys say they can see his underpants through the shorts. I also think the clear gender segregation is bad. What would happen if as in the movie 'Ma Vie En Rose' (1997) a young boy decided he wanted to wear a dress? What if one of the girls (or rather her mother) felt it was best for her daughter to match the current fashion among female university students around here, to wear shorts? People have been struggling to break down gender segregation and then a school seeks it to be very visible on the basis of how things were done fifty years ago.
In the late 1970s there was a move to less gender-specific clothing with sweatshirts or plain shirts and trousers. Where I grew up which had a large Muslim population, this overcame the issue with Muslim girls being compelled to wear skirts contrary to the precepts of their faith. Of course, I suppose a Christian school does not have to face that issue, but what about girls and boys with birth marks or scars on their legs? They have no option but to expose this. In the late 1990s parents, especially the middle class, who turned their back on a liberal approach to education, saw the revival of uniform as somehow connected to discipline. Of course, uniform avoids the problem of school becoming a fashion parade and fights over expensive trainers, but that did not mean having to change uniform back to the pre-1976 model. Ties have come back for girls and boys, fortunately now elasticated, though that was forced again by fear of litigation over health and safety rather than practicality. Many schools have the sensible 'French Foreign Legion' style caps with the neck protector, but the school I am talking about has simply revived the old fashioned school cap and stuck it on the head of boys and girls. The boys look like mini-versions of Brian Johnson of heavy metal band AC/DC, not really appropriate for school in the 2000s, more worringly the girls look too much like St. Trinians pupils.
People need to understand that uniform is fine for school children, but a uniform that is suited to the demands of the 2000s not the 1950s. We need to return to the practical style of the 1980s. I am sure some schools do, though none in the cities I visit regularly. To compel children into outfits that segregate them on basis of gender, take no consideration of religious or medial needs and open them up to ridicule, is a bad way to run things and must increase the challenges, already numerous, that teachers face on a daily basis. The ironic thing is, parents in their 30s now were born in the mid-1970s and went to school in the early 1980s and so never wore the kind of uniform they are happy to see foisted on their children. Just because it was seen as suitable for your parents does not mean you should force it on your children. Realise what good education is about, and it is not based on looking like children from an Enid Blyton story.
Showing posts with label school pupils. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school pupils. Show all posts
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
Sunday, 8 March 2009
Remembering the Bullies
One effect of having a 7-year old child resident in your house is that the things he is experiencing often trigger of memories of events in your own life. I am not entering into the debate around 'false memories' and abuse, but I am going to look at how hearing about bullying of this child has often brought back memories of (unpleasant) things that happened to me, that I had somehow compacted and stored away in a part of my brain where I tend not to go. I was not abused in my childhood, but my father was harsh, sometimes for a few moments violent and certainly often frightening. My mother often humiliated me, but in a way which I think was motivated by what she felt was the right thing to do though it has left scars that have remained for decades. This is partly as I have a real phobia of humiliation not only for myself but for others whether real people or even fictional ones, so I imagine that these things have lingered longer for me than they would for the bulk of the population.
Bullying of school aged children is very common, though it is taken far more seriously than it used to be. The number of children bullied at some time in their school career (ages 4-16) is around 44%. Of course the duration and the severity of the bullying varies and 16 children in the UK kill themselves each year as the result of bullying. Bullying has become far more sophisticated and it is far harder to escape it as bullies use texts and the internet to get at other children. Interestingly 71% of children have said that they have been a bully themselves at some time in their school life. I suppose this is human nature as often the bullied will find an outlet in picking on someone else. Bullying has a wide range and can be psychological and/or physical. None of us likes to be humiliated or teased but it is especially painful when you are growing up and are facing challenges and may lack self-confidence and self-esteem anyway.
With the child in my house being both bullied and a bully, fortunately in what seems like short-lived incidents that as yet do not seem to have had a long-term impact on his life, I have been reminded of things in my life from childhood up into my thirties when I have been bullied. What I have come to realise is that I have segmented each incident and so have not seen it as a long problem, rather a short-term thing. However, now I look back there seem very few years between the ages of 5-19 in which I was not suffering some form of bullying. Bullying was handled very poorly in the 1970s and 1980s (and of course before then), and I am glad that schools pay far more attention to it now in all its forms and have policies and teaching in place rather than simply dismissing it as a natural part (or in many cases in the UK, especially in private schools, as a necessary part) of growing up. My parents' reaction was simply to tell me I acted as 'a natural victim' that my behaviour simply egged on bullies. They offered no solution to this but simply added to the humiliation by saying I walked and spoke like someone with a mental defect which was hardly going to help. Many teenage boys are gangly and their voices are altering, they want to be told that that is part of adolescence not made to feel that they are somehow peculiar because that is often what the bullies try to do anyway; you do not need it from your parents too.
There were lots of bases on which I suffered bullying. I am a white male who grew up in a middle-class area of the UK so you would imagine I would have had a privileged life and little on which to discriminate against me, but bullies will always find something. At primary school I was told by people that they could not associate with me because I came from the wrong side of the town not the exclusive estate. I was told that our house was too small and we did no have the necessary consumer items to be considered worthy friends, namely a brand new car and a colour television. Teachers were often complicit in these sorts of things being very critical of children they did not feel fitted the norm. I was removed from doing a reading in a school assembly because I pronounced the word 'a' as in 'a town' or whatever as 'ay' rather than 'ah' which was apparently the correct way. I wonder what they would have done if someone from northern or western England had come to the school, probably put them into 'remedial' classes as they were called, to give them the 'correct' pronunciation.
There were other biases. I was told that because I had not been Christened people could call me by any name they chose, because my name was odd anyway. I also apparently looked wrong. I did not like football which meant that I was excluded from the bulk of schoolboy activities and discussion and would actually be ordered off the pitch during PE lessons as the team would rather play with 10 players than have me on their side. My friends tended to be the other marginalised people and even girls, which was odd in those days. Once I was old enough I spent my break times in the school library and though I was once assaulted by two boys in a public library at the age of 12, I was generally safe in the school library.
So there was a lot of name calling but there was physical attacks too. I remember when I was eight being pinned to the ground by two older boys for some reason I do not know why. They found a piece of steel that looked like a guillotine blade (the school was very run down and had lots of disused buildings on the site full of debris, these days it would have been closed on health and safety grounds, but this was 1975) which they pressed against my neck and forced gravel into my mouth. At least they were forced to write an apology but they caught me walking home one day (they walked up my street to get to theirs) and the stronger one gripped me by the neck and lifted me off the floor causing immense pain, so the apology letters had been a small, short-lived victory. I remember a particular bully called Ian Johnstone (I imagine he is long dead by now as though he would only have been 41, I first saw him smoking at the age of 7) who simply walked up to me one day and thrust his knee into my genitals and laughed as I writhed in pain telling me I was clearly so weak as not to be able to stand up to such an attack. There was the usual tripping (sometimes in a very sophisticated way I was once caught out by a set of bolas that a boy had made by linking three conkers on string together and deftly throwing them so they caught around my legs sending me sprawling to the floor).
A lot of the bullying was fostered by parents most of whom earned good incomes, had all the latest consumer items, somehow felt they worked hard and were better than those who did now work in offices and that they were tough and their children had to be tough too. Their toughness had nothing about going hiking or being physically fit, it was about being callous. You can certainly see the seeds of Thatcherism in the middle class areas of the mid-1970s. Her nastiness fitted in perfectly with this class that defined success by ownership rather than experience and strength by how selfish you could be. They were the heirs of the mill owners of the 19th century but lacking even the business sense and willingness to put in effort that those ancestors had.
At secondary school things were marginally easier because I spent all my time hidden in the library though I was punched there once. Playgrounds were more crowded so there was no room for football anyway. I was poor at sports but as more of the 'cool' boys smoked increasingly I came in with better results as they began to struggle as we aged. I was fortunate that two of the sports teachers also taught History my best subject so they forgave me a lot and fortunately, but the mid-1980s were aware more of the range of abilities and gave me marks for effort in sport even when I came in last. A bigger school with some pupils who were disabled meant people could not have the narrow criteria they had set at my primary school. Of course it did not stop the teasing and things, but if I went straight from class to the library and back to class I could avoid a lot of it. I was punched once by a girl of my age simply because she felt I had got in her way when coming into a classroom. At 14 I suffered a cosmetic illness and to some extent it got me off the hook as even the thugs of the school appreciated how I had got through it and it stopped them shouting at me in the playground or asking me why my school trousers were so baggy (this was the early 1980s and all trousers had to be tight) or why I had no girlfriend. Other people, however, ironically not the usual thugs, felt they had a green light to slap me round the head and this would happen as I was filing through crowds.
There was still some of the stuff about not having all the consumer items from the very Thatcherite children, but now in a far bigger school (1200 pupils) there was a much wider mix of social class and so they had to tread carefully. It was only years later when talking with a friend who had gone to school in backwater parts of Scotland in the 1980s where she as a English girl faced constant incomprehension from staff and pupils because of her accent, that I realised that even the 'poor' children at my school were far better off than the average. All the parents owned homes, there were no tenants and all had cars. I suppose any microcosm of society sets its own parameters even if these are out of step with the entirety of that society.
I suppose I was quite fortunate, despite my feelings to the contrary at the time, that my illness stopped a lot of the bullying I had experienced. Unpleasant teachers trod more softly with me as well rather than their previous chastising manner. Humiliation seemed stock in trade in those days and I think I have mentioned Mrs. Williams, Mr. Callen and Mr. Salmon in postings before. In particular, Callen moderated his approach; Williams always had new targets to pick on anyway. Once I went to Sixth Form College, what is now Years 12 and 13 (and I in fact did Year 14 too) I was in a neighbouring town with only a few people I knew. You might have thought at that age 16-18, bullying would be left behind as juvenile. I did get misplaced sympathy from people, who, because of my illness thought I was dying and were surprised to meet me again in my twenties. However, some people still indulged in out-and-out bullying, unfortunately one being the boy I was put next to in my History class, a Eurasian called Rishaad who ridicule my clothes incessantly (he came from a wealthy family and always had the latest fashion) and when I did not rise to his bait (by now being well schooled in avoiding bullies' jibes) he would simply punch me as a bit of warming up before the class started. Of course the time I pushed (rather than punched back) he pretended to be very upset and got the teacher involved saying I was discriminating against him. Given all the bullying I had sustained up to now and the ongoing criticism of my parents, I spend these years very unhappy and this led to a vicious circle of low self-esteem and thinking (as I had done in the latter years of secondary school) that any woman asking me out was trying to pull off a trick or was at best mistaken.
University life was not too bad, though I lived in a very strait-laced corridor in my first year and because I was not Christian and because I was anti-Thatcher I was seen as an oddity rather than something to be bullied. At university there is always a huge diversity of people you can usually find someone in the same situation. In the second year, when living in a rented house, the landlord's step-daughter also a student was incredibly bullying. There was unresolved tension between daughter and step-father who seemed to despise her and made her sleep in the house when there was a whole wall missing. She was very arrogant and blamed anything that went wrong on her fellow flatmates, for example the collapse of the 1970s sofa despite the fact that she and her boyfriend used to pet on it one on top of the other whereas the rest of us simply sat there one at a time. She felt she had a right to stand right in front of the television while ironing so blocking the view for everyone else and constantly whining about everything I did. I suppose that was not bullying but it was an unpleasant atmosphere.
I have spoken about the bullying that I experienced while in my last job, a terrible invasive bullying by a colleague. It is interesting that like a number of the bullies he had a real sense of self-righteousness that somehow I was in the wrong and he was behaving precisely normally. He set out to prevent me getting any recognition for any work I did claiming he inspired anything of value that happened in the office. He also expressed amazement when managers trod softly around him, wondering why they thought they might upset him. There was the 'moral' thing too, as a robust Christian he could not tolerate the pattern of life he assumed that I lived, whereas in reality it was boringly sober and asexual. My manager lived in a fantasy world of her own creation and could not tolerate anyone who said anything that did not tally with her perceptions of how the world worked. Despite direct appeals to her she would not accept that bullying was taking place. I only recognised the severity of it when the man in question left for another job, saying incredibly arrogantly that he felt his work there was done. He did, though, come back some years later and it must have been a nightmare when he returned saying something along the lines that he understood the company needed the benefit of his skills.
Having kept a diary every day since 1st January 1978, I know that my memories of bullying are not false, they are real. As I see the boy in my house experience some of the same things, these memories are coming unpacked and each course of bullying has numerous humiliating or painful incidents that made up the whole experience of that bout of harrassment. For a great deal of my life I have experienced bullying and it really retarded my emotional growth and made me feel worthless for so many years. It took some wonderful people to lift me out of that situation and even then I can still be sucked into being bullied by the more sophisticated methods colleagues use. What equated effectively to collaboration between my parents, teachers, colleagues and managers with the bullies made it harder. I have managed to pull out of it, even though it has taken many years. However, for many people, especially children the scarring of bullying often runs deep and can destroy what would otherwise have been a fulfilling life. This stuff is too unpleasant to want to make up.
P.P. 03/01/2010: Having read of a new two-part television drama of 'The Day of the Triffids' shown over the recent Christmas period on BBC1, I was reminded of the last time the BBC produced an adaptation of this story. It was shown in April 1981 and starred John Duttine. Like many young people (I was 13 at the time), impressed by the series, which naturally fitted the apocalyptic feel of that time (with the threat of nuclear holocaust a regular topic of discussion on television and even in schools) I went in search of the original novel. My school had two libraries, one old one which held the non-fiction books and then a paperback library run by one of the younger English teachers which was only open at lunchtimes. I was a member of both and went to the paperback library and found a 1960s copy of the story which I proceeded to borrow. A younger girl had also wanted it but by the time she arrived, I was waiting in the queue to check it out, but she insisted that I gave it to her. I refused so she simply kicked me very forcefully in the small of my back (she had braced herself against a desk, this library being housed in a classroom) throwing me forward against the check out desk. She had a gruff lightly freckled face, fair hair cut in a common short Eighties style and though a year below me, was little smaller than me. The teacher did not understand what was happening and assumed I had stumbled. The girl simply glared at me, expecting me now to give her the book, but I checked it out and left in real pain. It turned out my father had a copy of the book anyway and I returned the school copy on Monday. What came back to me so sharply was, however, the girl's assumption, in many ways, twenty years ahead of its time, that she should have anything she wanted, no-one else's interests mattered and that violence was a matter of course if demands were not met. She did not bully me in the way the others have done, but she was certainly symptomatic of the kind of culture that sees bullying as something of strength and in fact is uncomprehending/intolerant of anything that stands in the way of that particular moment's desire.
Bullying of school aged children is very common, though it is taken far more seriously than it used to be. The number of children bullied at some time in their school career (ages 4-16) is around 44%. Of course the duration and the severity of the bullying varies and 16 children in the UK kill themselves each year as the result of bullying. Bullying has become far more sophisticated and it is far harder to escape it as bullies use texts and the internet to get at other children. Interestingly 71% of children have said that they have been a bully themselves at some time in their school life. I suppose this is human nature as often the bullied will find an outlet in picking on someone else. Bullying has a wide range and can be psychological and/or physical. None of us likes to be humiliated or teased but it is especially painful when you are growing up and are facing challenges and may lack self-confidence and self-esteem anyway.
With the child in my house being both bullied and a bully, fortunately in what seems like short-lived incidents that as yet do not seem to have had a long-term impact on his life, I have been reminded of things in my life from childhood up into my thirties when I have been bullied. What I have come to realise is that I have segmented each incident and so have not seen it as a long problem, rather a short-term thing. However, now I look back there seem very few years between the ages of 5-19 in which I was not suffering some form of bullying. Bullying was handled very poorly in the 1970s and 1980s (and of course before then), and I am glad that schools pay far more attention to it now in all its forms and have policies and teaching in place rather than simply dismissing it as a natural part (or in many cases in the UK, especially in private schools, as a necessary part) of growing up. My parents' reaction was simply to tell me I acted as 'a natural victim' that my behaviour simply egged on bullies. They offered no solution to this but simply added to the humiliation by saying I walked and spoke like someone with a mental defect which was hardly going to help. Many teenage boys are gangly and their voices are altering, they want to be told that that is part of adolescence not made to feel that they are somehow peculiar because that is often what the bullies try to do anyway; you do not need it from your parents too.
There were lots of bases on which I suffered bullying. I am a white male who grew up in a middle-class area of the UK so you would imagine I would have had a privileged life and little on which to discriminate against me, but bullies will always find something. At primary school I was told by people that they could not associate with me because I came from the wrong side of the town not the exclusive estate. I was told that our house was too small and we did no have the necessary consumer items to be considered worthy friends, namely a brand new car and a colour television. Teachers were often complicit in these sorts of things being very critical of children they did not feel fitted the norm. I was removed from doing a reading in a school assembly because I pronounced the word 'a' as in 'a town' or whatever as 'ay' rather than 'ah' which was apparently the correct way. I wonder what they would have done if someone from northern or western England had come to the school, probably put them into 'remedial' classes as they were called, to give them the 'correct' pronunciation.
There were other biases. I was told that because I had not been Christened people could call me by any name they chose, because my name was odd anyway. I also apparently looked wrong. I did not like football which meant that I was excluded from the bulk of schoolboy activities and discussion and would actually be ordered off the pitch during PE lessons as the team would rather play with 10 players than have me on their side. My friends tended to be the other marginalised people and even girls, which was odd in those days. Once I was old enough I spent my break times in the school library and though I was once assaulted by two boys in a public library at the age of 12, I was generally safe in the school library.
So there was a lot of name calling but there was physical attacks too. I remember when I was eight being pinned to the ground by two older boys for some reason I do not know why. They found a piece of steel that looked like a guillotine blade (the school was very run down and had lots of disused buildings on the site full of debris, these days it would have been closed on health and safety grounds, but this was 1975) which they pressed against my neck and forced gravel into my mouth. At least they were forced to write an apology but they caught me walking home one day (they walked up my street to get to theirs) and the stronger one gripped me by the neck and lifted me off the floor causing immense pain, so the apology letters had been a small, short-lived victory. I remember a particular bully called Ian Johnstone (I imagine he is long dead by now as though he would only have been 41, I first saw him smoking at the age of 7) who simply walked up to me one day and thrust his knee into my genitals and laughed as I writhed in pain telling me I was clearly so weak as not to be able to stand up to such an attack. There was the usual tripping (sometimes in a very sophisticated way I was once caught out by a set of bolas that a boy had made by linking three conkers on string together and deftly throwing them so they caught around my legs sending me sprawling to the floor).
A lot of the bullying was fostered by parents most of whom earned good incomes, had all the latest consumer items, somehow felt they worked hard and were better than those who did now work in offices and that they were tough and their children had to be tough too. Their toughness had nothing about going hiking or being physically fit, it was about being callous. You can certainly see the seeds of Thatcherism in the middle class areas of the mid-1970s. Her nastiness fitted in perfectly with this class that defined success by ownership rather than experience and strength by how selfish you could be. They were the heirs of the mill owners of the 19th century but lacking even the business sense and willingness to put in effort that those ancestors had.
At secondary school things were marginally easier because I spent all my time hidden in the library though I was punched there once. Playgrounds were more crowded so there was no room for football anyway. I was poor at sports but as more of the 'cool' boys smoked increasingly I came in with better results as they began to struggle as we aged. I was fortunate that two of the sports teachers also taught History my best subject so they forgave me a lot and fortunately, but the mid-1980s were aware more of the range of abilities and gave me marks for effort in sport even when I came in last. A bigger school with some pupils who were disabled meant people could not have the narrow criteria they had set at my primary school. Of course it did not stop the teasing and things, but if I went straight from class to the library and back to class I could avoid a lot of it. I was punched once by a girl of my age simply because she felt I had got in her way when coming into a classroom. At 14 I suffered a cosmetic illness and to some extent it got me off the hook as even the thugs of the school appreciated how I had got through it and it stopped them shouting at me in the playground or asking me why my school trousers were so baggy (this was the early 1980s and all trousers had to be tight) or why I had no girlfriend. Other people, however, ironically not the usual thugs, felt they had a green light to slap me round the head and this would happen as I was filing through crowds.
There was still some of the stuff about not having all the consumer items from the very Thatcherite children, but now in a far bigger school (1200 pupils) there was a much wider mix of social class and so they had to tread carefully. It was only years later when talking with a friend who had gone to school in backwater parts of Scotland in the 1980s where she as a English girl faced constant incomprehension from staff and pupils because of her accent, that I realised that even the 'poor' children at my school were far better off than the average. All the parents owned homes, there were no tenants and all had cars. I suppose any microcosm of society sets its own parameters even if these are out of step with the entirety of that society.
I suppose I was quite fortunate, despite my feelings to the contrary at the time, that my illness stopped a lot of the bullying I had experienced. Unpleasant teachers trod more softly with me as well rather than their previous chastising manner. Humiliation seemed stock in trade in those days and I think I have mentioned Mrs. Williams, Mr. Callen and Mr. Salmon in postings before. In particular, Callen moderated his approach; Williams always had new targets to pick on anyway. Once I went to Sixth Form College, what is now Years 12 and 13 (and I in fact did Year 14 too) I was in a neighbouring town with only a few people I knew. You might have thought at that age 16-18, bullying would be left behind as juvenile. I did get misplaced sympathy from people, who, because of my illness thought I was dying and were surprised to meet me again in my twenties. However, some people still indulged in out-and-out bullying, unfortunately one being the boy I was put next to in my History class, a Eurasian called Rishaad who ridicule my clothes incessantly (he came from a wealthy family and always had the latest fashion) and when I did not rise to his bait (by now being well schooled in avoiding bullies' jibes) he would simply punch me as a bit of warming up before the class started. Of course the time I pushed (rather than punched back) he pretended to be very upset and got the teacher involved saying I was discriminating against him. Given all the bullying I had sustained up to now and the ongoing criticism of my parents, I spend these years very unhappy and this led to a vicious circle of low self-esteem and thinking (as I had done in the latter years of secondary school) that any woman asking me out was trying to pull off a trick or was at best mistaken.
University life was not too bad, though I lived in a very strait-laced corridor in my first year and because I was not Christian and because I was anti-Thatcher I was seen as an oddity rather than something to be bullied. At university there is always a huge diversity of people you can usually find someone in the same situation. In the second year, when living in a rented house, the landlord's step-daughter also a student was incredibly bullying. There was unresolved tension between daughter and step-father who seemed to despise her and made her sleep in the house when there was a whole wall missing. She was very arrogant and blamed anything that went wrong on her fellow flatmates, for example the collapse of the 1970s sofa despite the fact that she and her boyfriend used to pet on it one on top of the other whereas the rest of us simply sat there one at a time. She felt she had a right to stand right in front of the television while ironing so blocking the view for everyone else and constantly whining about everything I did. I suppose that was not bullying but it was an unpleasant atmosphere.
I have spoken about the bullying that I experienced while in my last job, a terrible invasive bullying by a colleague. It is interesting that like a number of the bullies he had a real sense of self-righteousness that somehow I was in the wrong and he was behaving precisely normally. He set out to prevent me getting any recognition for any work I did claiming he inspired anything of value that happened in the office. He also expressed amazement when managers trod softly around him, wondering why they thought they might upset him. There was the 'moral' thing too, as a robust Christian he could not tolerate the pattern of life he assumed that I lived, whereas in reality it was boringly sober and asexual. My manager lived in a fantasy world of her own creation and could not tolerate anyone who said anything that did not tally with her perceptions of how the world worked. Despite direct appeals to her she would not accept that bullying was taking place. I only recognised the severity of it when the man in question left for another job, saying incredibly arrogantly that he felt his work there was done. He did, though, come back some years later and it must have been a nightmare when he returned saying something along the lines that he understood the company needed the benefit of his skills.
Having kept a diary every day since 1st January 1978, I know that my memories of bullying are not false, they are real. As I see the boy in my house experience some of the same things, these memories are coming unpacked and each course of bullying has numerous humiliating or painful incidents that made up the whole experience of that bout of harrassment. For a great deal of my life I have experienced bullying and it really retarded my emotional growth and made me feel worthless for so many years. It took some wonderful people to lift me out of that situation and even then I can still be sucked into being bullied by the more sophisticated methods colleagues use. What equated effectively to collaboration between my parents, teachers, colleagues and managers with the bullies made it harder. I have managed to pull out of it, even though it has taken many years. However, for many people, especially children the scarring of bullying often runs deep and can destroy what would otherwise have been a fulfilling life. This stuff is too unpleasant to want to make up.
P.P. 03/01/2010: Having read of a new two-part television drama of 'The Day of the Triffids' shown over the recent Christmas period on BBC1, I was reminded of the last time the BBC produced an adaptation of this story. It was shown in April 1981 and starred John Duttine. Like many young people (I was 13 at the time), impressed by the series, which naturally fitted the apocalyptic feel of that time (with the threat of nuclear holocaust a regular topic of discussion on television and even in schools) I went in search of the original novel. My school had two libraries, one old one which held the non-fiction books and then a paperback library run by one of the younger English teachers which was only open at lunchtimes. I was a member of both and went to the paperback library and found a 1960s copy of the story which I proceeded to borrow. A younger girl had also wanted it but by the time she arrived, I was waiting in the queue to check it out, but she insisted that I gave it to her. I refused so she simply kicked me very forcefully in the small of my back (she had braced herself against a desk, this library being housed in a classroom) throwing me forward against the check out desk. She had a gruff lightly freckled face, fair hair cut in a common short Eighties style and though a year below me, was little smaller than me. The teacher did not understand what was happening and assumed I had stumbled. The girl simply glared at me, expecting me now to give her the book, but I checked it out and left in real pain. It turned out my father had a copy of the book anyway and I returned the school copy on Monday. What came back to me so sharply was, however, the girl's assumption, in many ways, twenty years ahead of its time, that she should have anything she wanted, no-one else's interests mattered and that violence was a matter of course if demands were not met. She did not bully me in the way the others have done, but she was certainly symptomatic of the kind of culture that sees bullying as something of strength and in fact is uncomprehending/intolerant of anything that stands in the way of that particular moment's desire.
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Being Ethnically Reclassified in the UK
Many readers will be familiar with the character in many of the Agatha Christie detective novels called Miss Jane Marple. She is an elderly woman who solves crimes by relating them to parallel incidents that she had experienced in her own small village. Authors soon become familiar with the fact that whatever the setting whether it is Ancient Egypt, contemporary Britain or a colony many light years away then people generally behave the same, they have anger, jealously, envy, pomposity, compassion, love and many other factors. Being human even when we write about alien or fantastical species we do it through the vision of being human and we make these characters as human or as anti-human as we choose, but for us we define them on the spectrum. Sorry, back to the point. Anyway, for me, I tend to analyse things less by incidents I have witnessed in real life, I tend to spend a rather reclusive existence, but parallels in fiction whether written or in movies. I access the global village of fiction which of course is based on numerous incidences that the authors and scriptwriters and to some extent actors and directors have experienced themselves.
It is in this context that I am going to turn to an interesting problem which I have seen unfolding over the past few weeks. As regular readers will know I live in a house with a white woman who was from South Africa and is now naturalised British and her six-year old son who attends a local Church of England school. Now, this is where the problem started. Each year the school sends home a list of all the information they have about the children for parents to update, especially as mobile phone numbers for emergency contact change so often. We have moved house twice since the boy started the school as well. The peculiar thing was in the category marked 'ethnicity' they had put 'East European' which in southern England these days is usually taken to mean Polish. Whilst people have been arriving from many states of Eastern Europe which are now in the EU (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria; Greece has been a member since 1982 and was never a Communist state, so I leave it out of this category) the Poles have been most visible with Polish shops appearing and Polish DVDs in rental shops. Around 10% of the population of Southampton is now Polish and cars with Polish registration plates are a common sight on the roads of South of England. I have no problem with immigrants, by arriving they have proven they have 'get up and go' and clearly there is demand for their labour in the UK. Many people forget that vocational training in Eastern Europe is often of a higher standard than in the UK for people such as builders and nurses.
Anyway, the background of the woman in my house is that she was born to a mother of Afrikaaner descent (originally back in the 18th century Huguenot settlers, i.e. Protestant refugees from France) and a father who was of German descent and his birth certificate was issued during the war so shows he is German back generations, certainly not Polish. I suppose this is the closest to Eastern Europe she has come, but German is not usually seen as East European. This is the terrible thing about the school defining the boy's ethnicity, we have all begun to analyse our antecedents on their basis of racial definition and it has terrible overtones of Nazi racial policy. The boy's father was white British with some Dutch connections.
Why did the school redefine the child from British to East European? For a start East European is not an ethnicity (British is even less so), it includes Slavs as the predominant people, but there are others such as the Magyars of Hungary who come from a different context and many people in those countries are also descendants of German medieval settlers. Ethnically most East Europeans are Caucasians (in Syria there are people called Circassians who are of Caucasian descent but presumably in this system would be labelled 'Arab') but as in the UK people can be a range of ethnicities and can come from a country. You can be black British or black Polish. So East European like British is a regional specification not an ethnic one. If you ask the child himself he defines himself as 'White African' and is very proud even at six of coming from Africa even though he has only spent a total of 2 months there in his life.
To some extent I think the school is conscious that its intake is almost exclusively white. When the boy started the only non-white pupil was a single Korean but now, even though the mix has widened to include mixed-race (predominantly White with Afro-Caribbean), Afro-Caribbean, East and South Asian children they are in a complete minority and make up only 1-2 children per class of 30 pupils. Maybe the school thought they could gain some credit by moving some of the White British into the East European 'ethnicity' and thought no-one would notice: they were very wrong. This is where I begin referring to the media because in fact it has unleashed a level of reaction which is quite stunning. If you have ever seen the movie 'Brazil' (1985). In this film set in a dystopian 'Nineteen Eight-Four' type world an insect falls on a typing machine changing the details of the arrest of a revolutionary Archibald Tuttle to that for a Mr. Buttle and much of the movie is about a civil servant trying to rectify this situation as the authorities close in on the wrong man. You will see why I draw a parallel in the moment.
The mother returned the form, corrected, to 'White British' to the school but the information that she was in fact 'East European' seemed to have leaked out. Many parents volunteer in the school and some of the clerical staff are harridans very much like doctors' receptionists and so a parent may have seen it or a member of staff gossiped about it. Teachers often like to bring out children's multi-culturalism. In my youth for some reason people thought I was Scottish and would ask me to talk about my 'home country' when I never actually went to Scotland until I was 36, so a teacher may have asked the boy to say something about Poland and this was reported back. Given the hostility to Poles which is growing in the South of England, it was probably unsurprising that at the school sports day a father of another child came up to the mother and said 'I cannot say what I want to say to you in a school playground' implying it was going to be very offensive and said 'I do not talk to people like you'. He then shepherded other parents away from the woman and spent the event scowling at her, implying that she was somehow soiling the event by being there. He said his son who is friends with her boy would never be permitted to come to our house or socialise with her son.
Now, for someone who grew up in apartheid South Africa and has witnessed racism of a perverted sophistication on a scale that no-one (especially whites) who has lived all their lives in the UK has ever experienced, you can imagine how offensive it was to treat the woman in this way. She left South Africa to get away from such attitudes and found them thrust back at her. She showed immense courage to stand there and stay for the sake of her son. Now, I know racism is a common disease in the UK, but as someone who is a white man, I have rarely experienced (once in West Germany I was told to 'get back on the ferry') so it has brought it home to me. What is bizarre is that this all stemmed from an error on the part of the school office.
I was reminded of the novel by James McClure (1939-2006) called 'The Steam Pig' (1971). McClure wrote crime novels set in apartheid South Africa and this one is about a woman whose father is ethnically redefined when he attends hospital, away from white to mixed race (in South Africa they had a long list of physical characteristics that they used to define people and would sometimes redefine people when characteristics became apparent) and so refused treatment at the whites hospital. The woman 'goes for white' bleaching her hair had wearing blue contact lenses to make herself appear more white so that she can have access to better housing and jobs than her father was pushed into when redefined. As readers know I am always interested in settings in which crimes or particular motives can occur which would not work elsewhere/when and this is a classic, but is chilling in its exploration of the implications of racial classification.
To some extent we are now entering into their game by worrying about how the mother and child have been ethnicall classified and getting this rectified. They should not behave in that way to any parent or child, and especially given they are a specifically Christian school. What sort of lesson does that teach for the future? I heard a headmaster from a school in Birmingham talking back in the early 1990s and he said that often teachers are challenged about why they cannot do more to stem the rise of racist attitudes and he said that 30 hours a week for nine months per year that children spend in school is insufficient to overturn the brainwashing in racism that they get at home. Schools do not give up in challenging such attitudes, but they are often fighting a losing battle.
No-one has pushed flaming rags through our letterbox or written grafitti across our house, things that so many people from ethnic minorities still experience. To some extent inadvertently the woman and child have become a rallying point for some of the mothers from other ethnic groups now that they have been thrust into that category. It does indicate that close beneath the surface of even a prosperous, overtly Christian sub-set of British society racism is very strong and leads people in almost a mundane way to be offensive and through segregating schoolfriends on racial grounds as this father is doing, give such an appalling message to the next generation which should be growing up with different attitudes if multi-cultural Britain is going to have any chance of surviving let alone thriving.
It is in this context that I am going to turn to an interesting problem which I have seen unfolding over the past few weeks. As regular readers will know I live in a house with a white woman who was from South Africa and is now naturalised British and her six-year old son who attends a local Church of England school. Now, this is where the problem started. Each year the school sends home a list of all the information they have about the children for parents to update, especially as mobile phone numbers for emergency contact change so often. We have moved house twice since the boy started the school as well. The peculiar thing was in the category marked 'ethnicity' they had put 'East European' which in southern England these days is usually taken to mean Polish. Whilst people have been arriving from many states of Eastern Europe which are now in the EU (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria; Greece has been a member since 1982 and was never a Communist state, so I leave it out of this category) the Poles have been most visible with Polish shops appearing and Polish DVDs in rental shops. Around 10% of the population of Southampton is now Polish and cars with Polish registration plates are a common sight on the roads of South of England. I have no problem with immigrants, by arriving they have proven they have 'get up and go' and clearly there is demand for their labour in the UK. Many people forget that vocational training in Eastern Europe is often of a higher standard than in the UK for people such as builders and nurses.
Anyway, the background of the woman in my house is that she was born to a mother of Afrikaaner descent (originally back in the 18th century Huguenot settlers, i.e. Protestant refugees from France) and a father who was of German descent and his birth certificate was issued during the war so shows he is German back generations, certainly not Polish. I suppose this is the closest to Eastern Europe she has come, but German is not usually seen as East European. This is the terrible thing about the school defining the boy's ethnicity, we have all begun to analyse our antecedents on their basis of racial definition and it has terrible overtones of Nazi racial policy. The boy's father was white British with some Dutch connections.
Why did the school redefine the child from British to East European? For a start East European is not an ethnicity (British is even less so), it includes Slavs as the predominant people, but there are others such as the Magyars of Hungary who come from a different context and many people in those countries are also descendants of German medieval settlers. Ethnically most East Europeans are Caucasians (in Syria there are people called Circassians who are of Caucasian descent but presumably in this system would be labelled 'Arab') but as in the UK people can be a range of ethnicities and can come from a country. You can be black British or black Polish. So East European like British is a regional specification not an ethnic one. If you ask the child himself he defines himself as 'White African' and is very proud even at six of coming from Africa even though he has only spent a total of 2 months there in his life.
To some extent I think the school is conscious that its intake is almost exclusively white. When the boy started the only non-white pupil was a single Korean but now, even though the mix has widened to include mixed-race (predominantly White with Afro-Caribbean), Afro-Caribbean, East and South Asian children they are in a complete minority and make up only 1-2 children per class of 30 pupils. Maybe the school thought they could gain some credit by moving some of the White British into the East European 'ethnicity' and thought no-one would notice: they were very wrong. This is where I begin referring to the media because in fact it has unleashed a level of reaction which is quite stunning. If you have ever seen the movie 'Brazil' (1985). In this film set in a dystopian 'Nineteen Eight-Four' type world an insect falls on a typing machine changing the details of the arrest of a revolutionary Archibald Tuttle to that for a Mr. Buttle and much of the movie is about a civil servant trying to rectify this situation as the authorities close in on the wrong man. You will see why I draw a parallel in the moment.
The mother returned the form, corrected, to 'White British' to the school but the information that she was in fact 'East European' seemed to have leaked out. Many parents volunteer in the school and some of the clerical staff are harridans very much like doctors' receptionists and so a parent may have seen it or a member of staff gossiped about it. Teachers often like to bring out children's multi-culturalism. In my youth for some reason people thought I was Scottish and would ask me to talk about my 'home country' when I never actually went to Scotland until I was 36, so a teacher may have asked the boy to say something about Poland and this was reported back. Given the hostility to Poles which is growing in the South of England, it was probably unsurprising that at the school sports day a father of another child came up to the mother and said 'I cannot say what I want to say to you in a school playground' implying it was going to be very offensive and said 'I do not talk to people like you'. He then shepherded other parents away from the woman and spent the event scowling at her, implying that she was somehow soiling the event by being there. He said his son who is friends with her boy would never be permitted to come to our house or socialise with her son.
Now, for someone who grew up in apartheid South Africa and has witnessed racism of a perverted sophistication on a scale that no-one (especially whites) who has lived all their lives in the UK has ever experienced, you can imagine how offensive it was to treat the woman in this way. She left South Africa to get away from such attitudes and found them thrust back at her. She showed immense courage to stand there and stay for the sake of her son. Now, I know racism is a common disease in the UK, but as someone who is a white man, I have rarely experienced (once in West Germany I was told to 'get back on the ferry') so it has brought it home to me. What is bizarre is that this all stemmed from an error on the part of the school office.
I was reminded of the novel by James McClure (1939-2006) called 'The Steam Pig' (1971). McClure wrote crime novels set in apartheid South Africa and this one is about a woman whose father is ethnically redefined when he attends hospital, away from white to mixed race (in South Africa they had a long list of physical characteristics that they used to define people and would sometimes redefine people when characteristics became apparent) and so refused treatment at the whites hospital. The woman 'goes for white' bleaching her hair had wearing blue contact lenses to make herself appear more white so that she can have access to better housing and jobs than her father was pushed into when redefined. As readers know I am always interested in settings in which crimes or particular motives can occur which would not work elsewhere/when and this is a classic, but is chilling in its exploration of the implications of racial classification.
To some extent we are now entering into their game by worrying about how the mother and child have been ethnicall classified and getting this rectified. They should not behave in that way to any parent or child, and especially given they are a specifically Christian school. What sort of lesson does that teach for the future? I heard a headmaster from a school in Birmingham talking back in the early 1990s and he said that often teachers are challenged about why they cannot do more to stem the rise of racist attitudes and he said that 30 hours a week for nine months per year that children spend in school is insufficient to overturn the brainwashing in racism that they get at home. Schools do not give up in challenging such attitudes, but they are often fighting a losing battle.
No-one has pushed flaming rags through our letterbox or written grafitti across our house, things that so many people from ethnic minorities still experience. To some extent inadvertently the woman and child have become a rallying point for some of the mothers from other ethnic groups now that they have been thrust into that category. It does indicate that close beneath the surface of even a prosperous, overtly Christian sub-set of British society racism is very strong and leads people in almost a mundane way to be offensive and through segregating schoolfriends on racial grounds as this father is doing, give such an appalling message to the next generation which should be growing up with different attitudes if multi-cultural Britain is going to have any chance of surviving let alone thriving.
Saturday, 12 April 2008
It's Not Us, It's You Who's To Blame: Upside-Down Values in British Society
Two news items struck me today and thoroughly irritated me. They always say that the high-tech that you see in a spy movie or a heist movie has generally been in use by intelligence agencies or criminals five years before you see it in a movie and think it is so advanced. This is how I am now viewing British society. Recently I wrote about what I anticipated the next steps to be in the creation of the British police state over the next 5-10 years and then today I look around and find that some of them are already in place. It was claimed Poole Council (Poole is a medium-sized coastal town in South-West England) had put a family under surveillance for two weeks because they believed the parents were trying to cheat the system for the allocation of school places for their 3-year old child. Rather than be embarrassed when this came to light, the council (this is a local authority not some national intelligence or police body) said that it was quite within the law to put the family under surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which was introduced to help track terrorists and serious criminals, not ordinary families commiting no crime. The surveillance actually exonerated the family from doing anything wrong. As I have said before such 'anti-terrorist' powers always quickly become abused by authorities, pretty often 'little Hitlers' like local council officers as much as by state bodies. Poole Council seemed quite pleased with itself and proudly said it had had five other families under surveillance to try to combat false applications for school places. These people should be paying compensation not crowing about how quickly they are eroding our civil liberties.
The other thing, is why is there such an issue over which school children should go to and that families will do anything such as move house, change religion or lie about where they live to get into them? Well, it is because we have moved to such a divisive schooling system. Ever since Tony Blair's script-writer called comprehensive schools 'bog standard' in 2002 there has been a green light to move to an education system which increasingly divides UK society. More and more schools are allowed to select which pupils come to them on really any grounds they choose. Last week the BBC revealed that in a random selection of areas government officials found many schools were imposing illegal selection criteria to bar certain types of children for example through asking about family income or marital status or in some cases actually charging fees of up to £945 (€1190: US$1880) per term for what is supposed to be a free schooling system. Of course such schools cream off not only strong pupils but resources too so you do not have a very good school and then a reasonable school down the road you have an excellent schools and a very poor quality school as second choice. When a third of parents do not get their children into their first choice of secondary school you can see the reason why they are driven to extreme methods. In the UK going to a poor school can damn you for life barring you from getting good exam results, getting to university, getting work. Children are locked into certain paths from the moment they start school and despite Britain's supposed classless society it is nearly impossible to get off the path you get put upon. Success in the UK for young people has nothing to do with ability it is about winning an educational lottery. So, if Poole Council was not full up of arrogant idiots who somehow think their petty concerns are more important than real life and think they should use police state tactics to enforce their personal views, they might save the council taxpayers money from surveillance and put it in to ensuring all schools in their borough are of a good standard.
The other news story was about the High Court ruling that to send British troops ill-equipped into battle was to violate their human rights. An Army spokesman has said British troops are always properly equipped and yet at inquest after inquest we hear how a soldier died because they had a defective parachute or lacked night vision goggles or lack body armour or their armoured vehicle had no armour underneath it and so on and so on. If the government wants to involve the British Armed Forces in so many conflicts it should stop doing it on the cheap. So quickly they seem somehow, probably influenced by President Bush's thinking, returned to the attitude of the First World War (excellent on this is 'British Bunglers and Butchers of World War I' by John Laffin (reissued 2003)), that victory can be achieved by an almost ritualistic sacrifice of young people in large numbers. When guerilla forces who have been hiding in the mountains for years can pull out anti-aircraft rockets, you cannot go up against them less than totally prepared and fully equipped. Yet again, however, we are told we are wrong to raise such complaints and should ignore what is being done to fellow British citizens (and in fact increasingly from other countries as the British Army seeks again to fill up its thinning ranks with soldiers from the Commonwealth, despite the fact that the Gurkhas from Nepal were revealed last week to only get 10% of the pension a British soldier they may have served alongside would get). No, these are important issues and 'you': you in local authorities, you in the military, you in government, are wrong. Listen to the people who are suffering because of you narrow minded, arrogant policies and do the right thing for a change rather than whining when we draw your attention to your terrible blunders.
The other thing, is why is there such an issue over which school children should go to and that families will do anything such as move house, change religion or lie about where they live to get into them? Well, it is because we have moved to such a divisive schooling system. Ever since Tony Blair's script-writer called comprehensive schools 'bog standard' in 2002 there has been a green light to move to an education system which increasingly divides UK society. More and more schools are allowed to select which pupils come to them on really any grounds they choose. Last week the BBC revealed that in a random selection of areas government officials found many schools were imposing illegal selection criteria to bar certain types of children for example through asking about family income or marital status or in some cases actually charging fees of up to £945 (€1190: US$1880) per term for what is supposed to be a free schooling system. Of course such schools cream off not only strong pupils but resources too so you do not have a very good school and then a reasonable school down the road you have an excellent schools and a very poor quality school as second choice. When a third of parents do not get their children into their first choice of secondary school you can see the reason why they are driven to extreme methods. In the UK going to a poor school can damn you for life barring you from getting good exam results, getting to university, getting work. Children are locked into certain paths from the moment they start school and despite Britain's supposed classless society it is nearly impossible to get off the path you get put upon. Success in the UK for young people has nothing to do with ability it is about winning an educational lottery. So, if Poole Council was not full up of arrogant idiots who somehow think their petty concerns are more important than real life and think they should use police state tactics to enforce their personal views, they might save the council taxpayers money from surveillance and put it in to ensuring all schools in their borough are of a good standard.
The other news story was about the High Court ruling that to send British troops ill-equipped into battle was to violate their human rights. An Army spokesman has said British troops are always properly equipped and yet at inquest after inquest we hear how a soldier died because they had a defective parachute or lacked night vision goggles or lack body armour or their armoured vehicle had no armour underneath it and so on and so on. If the government wants to involve the British Armed Forces in so many conflicts it should stop doing it on the cheap. So quickly they seem somehow, probably influenced by President Bush's thinking, returned to the attitude of the First World War (excellent on this is 'British Bunglers and Butchers of World War I' by John Laffin (reissued 2003)), that victory can be achieved by an almost ritualistic sacrifice of young people in large numbers. When guerilla forces who have been hiding in the mountains for years can pull out anti-aircraft rockets, you cannot go up against them less than totally prepared and fully equipped. Yet again, however, we are told we are wrong to raise such complaints and should ignore what is being done to fellow British citizens (and in fact increasingly from other countries as the British Army seeks again to fill up its thinning ranks with soldiers from the Commonwealth, despite the fact that the Gurkhas from Nepal were revealed last week to only get 10% of the pension a British soldier they may have served alongside would get). No, these are important issues and 'you': you in local authorities, you in the military, you in government, are wrong. Listen to the people who are suffering because of you narrow minded, arrogant policies and do the right thing for a change rather than whining when we draw your attention to your terrible blunders.
Monday, 25 February 2008
Not Forgetting and Not Forgiving 2: Teachers
While I was ill last week I was haunted by memories of those teachers who humiliated me in my youth. I am sure everyone has teachers who made their young lives a misery. I realised that this blog was the ideal environment to purge myself of those ghosts that for more than thirty years have angered me for what they inflicted on me in my youth. I know what they did will probably seem very minor to many people, especially those who suffered harsh abuse, but I think it is important for me to get them out there and away from my psyche.
I thought about whether I should use my former teachers' real names. I do not know the first names of any of them anyway. I realised that so much time has passed that the bulk will have retired; some I know, are dead. Those still at work will be in high positions, close to the ends of their careers, so more than strong enough to weather the negative comments of one small boy they taught in the 1980s. If they continued behaving in the way they behaved to me, I am sure they will feature in the curses of a thousand adults. I now detail those teachers I can neither forget or forgive, in rough chronological order of when I encountered them:
Mrs. Simmons - art teacher
Now, in the UK, most primary school teachers stick with a single class of pupils each year and have to teach them all the subjects. This can be pretty challenging for them, though to some extent it is leavened by the fact that handling pre-11 year olds (in my county we stayed in primary school until 12, out of step with the rest of the UK) they do not have to go into a great depth on any subject. Some, however, do not seem to even work at the level of reading the text book a couple of pages ahead of the children. I met a German researcher at a party in Oxford once and she was investigating how many British primary school teachers believed dinosaurs and humans had co-existed. She had been stunned at how many had held this view, despite the fact that even basic books on dinosaurs make the 64 million year gap between them apparent.
Anyway, that is the contextualisation on the type of primary school teachers of which Mrs. Simmons was one. She taught a class I remember very well about British kings and queens and got most of those of the 20th century in the wrong order. She might be excused as she was employed by the school to teach art to different classes as well as holding down her own class, so it may have stretched her abilities far further than she anticipated. To lessen the burden on herself she forbid us from using certain English grammar in our writing, such as direct speech, we were only allowed to use reported speech which she found easier to mark and correct. (Thinking back on such deficiencies I remember clearly a trainee teacher we had had the year before, while our main teacher was off ill, and when doing addition she would 'carry' the number as you are supposed to do and then 'give it back', so making, for example, the units column have one extra than it should have. She had to be corrected in her ways when our teacher returned, but how this trainee could function in everyday life, let alone as a teacher working with such a fundamental error in her mathematics, I have no idea).
There is another common issue which I realised as I began writing this posting, that applies to teachers working at all levels and that is how self-righteous so many of them are. It is a trait I kept on encountering during my school life. On reflection, I guess you have to believe in your views on things and feel that you have to impart them to others to have the motivation to actually be a teacher, but many of the worse go far too far. I remember one religious education teacher we had who promised to show us so many horrific videos that she felt every girl in the class would never consider having an abortion. It was her first post and I was glad calmer heads stepped in and stopped her distorting things so greatly. Such an attitude also inflicted Mrs. Simmons. Foolishly she told all the parents coming to the parents evening that she saw one of the greatest problems of (her 10-year old) pupils was their immorality around sexual issues and felt that this had to be stamped out. We were oblivious to this crusade of hers but it was going to cause problems. Superficially she appeared the 'cool', trendy teacher but had an approach to schooling more suited to an old fashioned 'school ma'am'.
In the UK you are supposed to receive your first sex education at the age of 8. It is basic stuff which is mainly about what all the sexual bits of your body do. This is built upon when you do biology at 12. However, I was at school during a period of great industrial unrest so the teachers were often on strike and so somehow we had reached 10-11 years old before anyone realised we had not had our sex education. It became apparent as my year (of three classes) were clearly less well informed about such matters (and the associated emotional issues) than the years below us, let alone children of our age from other schools. Mrs. Simmons, of course, was not happy to have to do this, but she bit her lip and did so, but in such a desultory way that my class was now out-of-step with the other two classes in my year.
Another theme, aside from self-righteousness, that I will return to in this posting as a failing of teachers, is their use of humiliation. I will do anything to avoid humiliation and will intervene or leave a room rather than watch others humiliated. I accept that that is a phobia of mine, but using humiliation on children as so many teachers do, is a terrible tool that can cause problems for years to come. Following the sex education lessons, two girls in my class, one rainy break time, sat and wrote a fake letter (something girls often did, usually on a romantic theme) and in fact an activity Mrs. Simmons encouraged. This time, however, they used their newly found knowledge and wrote as if it was to a boyfriend they had had and saying that they had got pregnant as a result. Now, this may seem a bit mature for girls of 11, but given that now in the UK some are getting pregnant at 14 or younger, probably not too early to discuss the issue. Did Mrs. Simmons use this in a positive learning way when she uncovered this letter? No, of course not. It gave her the opportunity to lay down her strong views on sexuality and not only humiliate the two girls in front of the whole class, but also made us all feel that what was discussed was evil. I discussed this incident a couple of decades later and the two women who had written the letter as girls remembered it vividly. I blame Mrs. Simmons handling of the issue for making it very hard for my class to get on with the opposite sex. This was something which became very apparent when we all moved up to the secondary school and mixed with children who had not had such warped teachers or delay in the education they needed to mature at a proper pace. Given that the UK outstrips every other country in Europe in terms of the number of teenage pregnancies, people like Mrs. Simmons need to be kept out of the teaching profession.
Mrs. Webb - music teacher
There must be something about music and language teachers as they fill up the bulk of this posting. In those days, long before the National Curriculum, all pupils had to do music. Those who were talented took proper lessons with an instrument, but the rest of us has to do an hour of music per week. We generally listened to classical pieces and heard about the history of composers and played a few percussion instruments. Mrs. Webb resembled Rosa Klebb in the movie 'From Russia With Love' the kind of woman to terrify any eleven year old (the age I was when I last met her). I lack any musical ability and, in particular, rhythm which makes it had to play percussion instruments. Consequently I was in line for attack from her. In those days teachers could insult you in a way they would not be permitted these days. She felt I was constantly playing out of tune deliberately and would level invective against being 'an individual'. Of course, flushing with embarrassment I was even worse at playing again, triggering the vicious cycle. I was also clumsy and being terrified in her room would knock over things (we had to balance the wooden chairs upright on the tables at the end of class again something else that would be banned these days and I always struggled to achieve it). I do not think I was alone in her attacks as one day when the school hall was being re-decorated we had to eat our packed lunches in classrooms and I was assigned to her room with about 30 other pupils. I hid in the corner and stared at a poster about wind instruments. The room was silent as everyone ate; clearly everyone was in terror of her picking on one of us. She found this strange and told us we had permission to speak, but no-one said anything still and I wondered if she realised how much she terrified us.
Mr. Atherton - language teacher
The language teachers at my school, despite all being British, eerily seemed to match the stereotypes for their respective countries. The French teachers were often relaxed, urbane, with young wives and stylish clothes, the German teachers were very austere almost rude at times and the Spanish teachers, unsurprisingly had similarities with the French but dressed more casually and could be really flirtatious or, if female, looking like the matriarch of an extended Spanish family.
Mr. Atherton fitted his language with casual, bright clothes and a moustache that would have suited Errol Flynn. He came from northern England and I made the mistake of encountering him in his early days in southern England when he seemed to be on some crusade to hammer southern English children as soft and deserving of harsh treatment. He was very tricky and I fell into one of his traps about when you could and could not speak and got a detention, the only detention I ever received in my whole school career, something I was so ashamed of that I never mentioned it to my family. He was one of those teachers who pretend to be your friend but in reality hold you in contempt. Thinking about his smug attitude really riles me even now. Fortunately his career was brought to an end a few years later when I had left the school as, despite having a young wife, he was caught having an affair with a sixth form girl (sixth formers were 17-19 years old, so it was legal, but obviously disapproved of).
Mr. Marks - language teacher
Mr. Marks was upfront nasty. He would give you small scraps of paper to put your answers to tests on and when you found it difficult to fit the answers on one line you would lose marks as he would say the answer, though correct, was written wrongly. Such behaviour is soul destroying, because you think: what is the point of even trying to get it right? So many of these teachers do not realise how by such behaviour they turn you away from their subjects, let alone making it hard to truly know how you are progressing. He seemed to want to humiliate me all the time (I doubt I was alone in being picked on, but, of course, I can only talk from my personal experience). At the time of a general election he made me stand up and outline my political views so that he could spend the rest of the lesson explaining why I was so wrong: he was a grown man, I was thirteen, but, of course, he thought it was impertinent that I felt that I had political views at that age.
The worse case was the following year when I was sent to his class by mistake due to an administrative error and he ordered me out of the classroom (blaming me for the error). I had to wander the school trying to find someone to tell me where I was supposed to be. He had very dodgy Social Darwinist ideas and would question children waiting to buy crisps and drinks at break time about what ability level of class they were in, assuming less intelligent children would eat more.
Mr. Shoveller - deputy head
My school had loads of deputy heads for different functions. The worst was Mr. Shoveller who looked like a textile mill owner from the 1840s. His attitudes to any physical interaction between boys and girls was much the same and he would prowl around the school disco moving the hands of miscreants dancing during the slow dances (the hands were not permitted to rest on anyone's buttocks) and on school trips arms were not permitted to be put around anyone in photos taken.
For some reason he treated me reasonably well, but I do not forgive him as I witnessed his real side. Every day at the school one pupil was taken out of class to serve as an errand boy/girl to the secretary of the school. This meant that you were positioned for the day in the administrative heart of the school and hence near Mr. Shoveller's office as he was the most junior of the deputy heads. That afternoon, a sunny one when all the windows were open, a boy was brought to him who had been trying to spend a £10 note (worth a lot more in the early 1980s than now) in snack shop.
The boy, (I knew him reasonably well but we were not friends) was questioned at length about where he got the money from. Shoveller did not believe his explanation that his mother had given it to him to get drinks and snacks for a party (I knew this to be the truth as he had earlier spoken about the party). His mother worked and could not be raised during the day (this was the age before mobile phones and at a time when employers often did not permit outside contact during working hours, again a sharp contrast to today). So, having heard the evidence as he could gather it at the time, Shoveller acted as judge and jury and beat the boy for theft (in those days corporal punishment was still permitted in schools by senior staff). The number of beats seemed excessive to me and the boy was howling for all to hear, no doubt the pain worsened by the fact that actually he had done nothing wrong. I was sat outside the window and realised how arrogant and callous Shoveller was, self-righteous too in that he felt he could beat the wrongdoing out of the boy. It still sickens me to think of how terrorised children were in those days by bullying teachers.
Mr. Salmon - science teacher
This man retired while I was at school meaning he would in his late eighties by now, though he told us he would be dead three years after retirement anyway. With him there was no single incident to point to, just how harsh he was in every lesson. I used to leave with a stomach ache caused by his snide, acid comments about people and their failures. You were terrified of doing anything wrong in his lesson but knew that you could not avoid it. Again he was one of these who liked to be tricksy with his challenges. He always said he only bet on certainties but would cajole us to take the losing side just so that he could subsequently ridicule us. Even for a school that seemed to employ misfits he seemed to have stepped from the 1950s or even 1930s in his behaviour and attitudes. He was very proud that he did not own a television without being aware of how out-of-step that made him with all of us.
I am beginning to see common themes arising here as, like many of the others, he was self-righteous and clearly loved the extent of his own knowledge and parading it before us, portraying us as poor specimens (in a district where all the most intelligent went to private school, maybe that was his true perception of us state school children). He believed that radioactivity did no harm to the human body which seems a very dangerous belief for a science teacher.
Humiliation and stress began to impact on me medically while at secondary school. There was another teacher who when he realised how I was suffering stopped slapping me around the head (I was not alone in experiencing that, he did it to many of the boys) and ridiculing me, realising that he had probably gone too far. He spoke to me one-to-one about the issue, and it is that realisation on his part that lifts him out of my condemnation today. Mr. Salmon, who literally made me ill with worry, (I can so clearly remember the stomach aches after his lessons) had no iota of an idea of how much discomfort he inflicted, it probably would not have penetrated his thinking even if he had been told directly.
Mrs. Williams - music teacher
You can understand how pleased I was when I reached the age of 14 and music stopped being a compulsory subject. This woman was rather odd and there were many rumours about why that was, maybe it was simply she was a musician. She had performed in alternative music groups in the 1960s, at one stage just making peculiar sounds with her voice. It was said she had had a miscarriage after having been struck by lightning but that sounds like the kind of story that schoolboys make up. She certainly stuck out in what she wore, predominantly leather clothes - jackets, skirts, trousers, tops, boots in a whole variety of shades, of course black but also maroon, olive, red, various shades of brown. I know it was the 1980s and leather clothes were popular but did seem rather outre for a teacher at work. She fostered a clique of admiring pupils around her. Obviously, many of the keen musicians were in this clique, though not all, and pupils with other interests were permitted to enter her ranks of acolytes as long as they did nothing to displease her on the basis of one of her cryptic rules. This 'in' and 'out' division with her obviously caused tension in an average class where he clique members would be favoured over the rest of us.
The key problem, though, was her general set of quirky rules that you learned through error. She would not accept the word 'hey' to be said in her class and if anyone used it they had to undergo a humiliating ritual. Humiliating rituals were favoured by her for many errors against her rules. For boys she would have you stand on your chair and rotate like a ballerina whilst she played tinkly jewellery box music. In contrast to Mrs. Webb, Mrs. Williams seemed to accept that I had no musical ability in me and left me pretty much alone. However, humiliation to one's friends and classmates can be painful to yourself too and I cringe as I remember pupils being treated that way. She had no realisation that to use such methods signals to children that humiliation is a permissible tool and they need discouragement on that basis, rather than a green light.
Miss. Brook - English teacher
I have now reached the aged of 16 in my school career. This woman I know retired a few years later, probably something like 22 years ago now, so again, she is probably at least 82 if not 87. I know that if she was in education today she would have been charged with some some. Again, like Salmon, she belonged in a previous age. Like Marks she was self-centred and arrogant and like Shoveller, Williams and the rest, self-righteous. The fact that she had less physical and mental impact on me probably reflects that have experienced 6-7 years under all these nasty people I had developed a much harder shell and could see her for the sickening individual she was. She was not even very good at her subject with views that dated back thirty years and she made no attempt to catch up with current thinking.
In common with many of these teachers she liked to exercise an acid humour on pupils (maybe that is all that a career in teaching leaves you with). However, she also exhibited her prejudices very actively in class. She questioned us about our religion and seemed to particularly dislike Roman Catholics (who made up a sixth of our class) and seemed it incomprehensible that any of us were not Christians (she felt you had to know the Bible intimately to be able to study English literature). Such things are private, not to be dragged out into the open in class.
Brook had nothing good to say about contemporary culture as if all us teenagers should listen to nothing bar Beethoven at the most modern. She openly criticised how we dressed as if out of school we would dress the way she did as a 60+ year old woman. She also felt that the concerns of no-one else in the school were marginally as important as her concerns (for example if you had to go on a history trip). The fact that the English teachers had their own separate staff room, I think simply illustrated the difficulties they caused for the rest of the school. Her greatest problem was how lowly she perceived her pupils. Owing to the fact that none of us subscribed to the culture she liked and because we often espoused new ideas she was convinced that we were going to fail, especially if we were Catholic or Scottish or thought about going to university. She gave the lowest predicted grades of anyone I have encountered and clearly signalled that we were an embarrassment to her and the best we could hope for was to train as a manager for a supermarket. Again I think much of this stemmed from the area where we lived with its high level of private schools, though at 16+ many of the private school children had come back into the state sector, something she did not seem to comprehend despite her regular cross-examining of us in class.
A teacher has to have faith in his/her pupils, especially when they become teenagers, otherwise they are going to abandon all hope. Maybe that was what she wanted so that we achieved nothing more than she did. Clearly she felt we were contemptible and deserved nothing better, a bad attitude for a teacher who is supposed to raise, rather than douse expectations.
Recent reports say that there are 17,000 incompetent teachers working in the UK at present teaching 100,000 pupils at some time or another during every school week. I do not know whether the teachers I discussed above were incompetent but they were bad teachers in other ways. Teachers should not be self-righteous, they should not bully and especially not humiliate pupils. They should give constructive criticism not patronise people. They should expect the best of all pupils not dismiss them and push them away from opportunities. They should not make arbitrary decisions but base choices on sufficient evidence. They should also be aware of how much they screw up people's lives for decades to come, when they behave in nasty ways. They are in a position of immense power and should use it responsibility or should be kicked out of the profession as soon as possible.
Now, I estimate around 100 teachers taught me in 14 years I spent at school and college and only a fraction of them remain in my memory for what they inflicted on me. No-one pretends teaching is an easy job, but it is clear that no-one who enters the profession should be allowed to treat pupils in a way which causes mental and emotional difficulties as all of the teachers highlighted here, did for me. Some of them may be dead and gone but their impact lives on in the way my life turned out and I am sure there must be thousands of people they have screwed up in similar or worse ways. I remember the nasty teachers not the good ones and I imagine I will continue to condemn them for as long as I remain alive.
P.P. Andrew White - university tutor
Recently I saw an old Volvo car and it brought back to mind a tutor I had at university who caused me so much problem by his incompetence that it was clear that I had blotted him from my memory. The man is Andrew White and I imagine that he is now about 45/46 so probably in a similar sort of position as to when I met him. I see he has gone from where I encountered him, though one of his colleagues who was not much better, is not only still there, but has been promoted. I never met such a patronising woman who seemed to hold her students in contempt and loved playing mind games with us. However, she did not have as direct input into the problems I experienced as White did.
White was simply incompetent, completely out of his depth and we students suffered as a consequence. I failed the course that I had saved thousands of pounds for. He had given minimal feedback and then turned up at last stage, at my house with a feedback form jammed with criticisms that he insisted I sign. It said if the university authorities wanted more information of how poor I was at my course they should contact him. This damning document was only produced in the final month of the course. If I had truly been that bad the suggestions should have come much sooner. I did not roll over in the way he and his colleagues expected. I scrawled over his feedback form saying I totally disagreed with it (never be compelled to sign anything and if they insist make sure you spoil their document with your comments written over it, very visibly) and took his improper behaviour to a formal university complaint. I never found the outcome but I trust that they booted him out of the university.
White drove around in an old Volvo in which the seatbelts did not work and I wished that I had shopped him to the police. I saw the car again a couple of years later outside a restaurant in London and it was only because I was with a girlfriend that I did not attack it or storm into the restaurant and seek to humiliate him for what his incompetence did to my life and his arrogance in seeking to cover-up his blunders. If I ever see him again when I am alone I will probably end up in prison for assault. My hatred runs that deep.
I thought about whether I should use my former teachers' real names. I do not know the first names of any of them anyway. I realised that so much time has passed that the bulk will have retired; some I know, are dead. Those still at work will be in high positions, close to the ends of their careers, so more than strong enough to weather the negative comments of one small boy they taught in the 1980s. If they continued behaving in the way they behaved to me, I am sure they will feature in the curses of a thousand adults. I now detail those teachers I can neither forget or forgive, in rough chronological order of when I encountered them:
Mrs. Simmons - art teacher
Now, in the UK, most primary school teachers stick with a single class of pupils each year and have to teach them all the subjects. This can be pretty challenging for them, though to some extent it is leavened by the fact that handling pre-11 year olds (in my county we stayed in primary school until 12, out of step with the rest of the UK) they do not have to go into a great depth on any subject. Some, however, do not seem to even work at the level of reading the text book a couple of pages ahead of the children. I met a German researcher at a party in Oxford once and she was investigating how many British primary school teachers believed dinosaurs and humans had co-existed. She had been stunned at how many had held this view, despite the fact that even basic books on dinosaurs make the 64 million year gap between them apparent.
Anyway, that is the contextualisation on the type of primary school teachers of which Mrs. Simmons was one. She taught a class I remember very well about British kings and queens and got most of those of the 20th century in the wrong order. She might be excused as she was employed by the school to teach art to different classes as well as holding down her own class, so it may have stretched her abilities far further than she anticipated. To lessen the burden on herself she forbid us from using certain English grammar in our writing, such as direct speech, we were only allowed to use reported speech which she found easier to mark and correct. (Thinking back on such deficiencies I remember clearly a trainee teacher we had had the year before, while our main teacher was off ill, and when doing addition she would 'carry' the number as you are supposed to do and then 'give it back', so making, for example, the units column have one extra than it should have. She had to be corrected in her ways when our teacher returned, but how this trainee could function in everyday life, let alone as a teacher working with such a fundamental error in her mathematics, I have no idea).
There is another common issue which I realised as I began writing this posting, that applies to teachers working at all levels and that is how self-righteous so many of them are. It is a trait I kept on encountering during my school life. On reflection, I guess you have to believe in your views on things and feel that you have to impart them to others to have the motivation to actually be a teacher, but many of the worse go far too far. I remember one religious education teacher we had who promised to show us so many horrific videos that she felt every girl in the class would never consider having an abortion. It was her first post and I was glad calmer heads stepped in and stopped her distorting things so greatly. Such an attitude also inflicted Mrs. Simmons. Foolishly she told all the parents coming to the parents evening that she saw one of the greatest problems of (her 10-year old) pupils was their immorality around sexual issues and felt that this had to be stamped out. We were oblivious to this crusade of hers but it was going to cause problems. Superficially she appeared the 'cool', trendy teacher but had an approach to schooling more suited to an old fashioned 'school ma'am'.
In the UK you are supposed to receive your first sex education at the age of 8. It is basic stuff which is mainly about what all the sexual bits of your body do. This is built upon when you do biology at 12. However, I was at school during a period of great industrial unrest so the teachers were often on strike and so somehow we had reached 10-11 years old before anyone realised we had not had our sex education. It became apparent as my year (of three classes) were clearly less well informed about such matters (and the associated emotional issues) than the years below us, let alone children of our age from other schools. Mrs. Simmons, of course, was not happy to have to do this, but she bit her lip and did so, but in such a desultory way that my class was now out-of-step with the other two classes in my year.
Another theme, aside from self-righteousness, that I will return to in this posting as a failing of teachers, is their use of humiliation. I will do anything to avoid humiliation and will intervene or leave a room rather than watch others humiliated. I accept that that is a phobia of mine, but using humiliation on children as so many teachers do, is a terrible tool that can cause problems for years to come. Following the sex education lessons, two girls in my class, one rainy break time, sat and wrote a fake letter (something girls often did, usually on a romantic theme) and in fact an activity Mrs. Simmons encouraged. This time, however, they used their newly found knowledge and wrote as if it was to a boyfriend they had had and saying that they had got pregnant as a result. Now, this may seem a bit mature for girls of 11, but given that now in the UK some are getting pregnant at 14 or younger, probably not too early to discuss the issue. Did Mrs. Simmons use this in a positive learning way when she uncovered this letter? No, of course not. It gave her the opportunity to lay down her strong views on sexuality and not only humiliate the two girls in front of the whole class, but also made us all feel that what was discussed was evil. I discussed this incident a couple of decades later and the two women who had written the letter as girls remembered it vividly. I blame Mrs. Simmons handling of the issue for making it very hard for my class to get on with the opposite sex. This was something which became very apparent when we all moved up to the secondary school and mixed with children who had not had such warped teachers or delay in the education they needed to mature at a proper pace. Given that the UK outstrips every other country in Europe in terms of the number of teenage pregnancies, people like Mrs. Simmons need to be kept out of the teaching profession.
Mrs. Webb - music teacher
There must be something about music and language teachers as they fill up the bulk of this posting. In those days, long before the National Curriculum, all pupils had to do music. Those who were talented took proper lessons with an instrument, but the rest of us has to do an hour of music per week. We generally listened to classical pieces and heard about the history of composers and played a few percussion instruments. Mrs. Webb resembled Rosa Klebb in the movie 'From Russia With Love' the kind of woman to terrify any eleven year old (the age I was when I last met her). I lack any musical ability and, in particular, rhythm which makes it had to play percussion instruments. Consequently I was in line for attack from her. In those days teachers could insult you in a way they would not be permitted these days. She felt I was constantly playing out of tune deliberately and would level invective against being 'an individual'. Of course, flushing with embarrassment I was even worse at playing again, triggering the vicious cycle. I was also clumsy and being terrified in her room would knock over things (we had to balance the wooden chairs upright on the tables at the end of class again something else that would be banned these days and I always struggled to achieve it). I do not think I was alone in her attacks as one day when the school hall was being re-decorated we had to eat our packed lunches in classrooms and I was assigned to her room with about 30 other pupils. I hid in the corner and stared at a poster about wind instruments. The room was silent as everyone ate; clearly everyone was in terror of her picking on one of us. She found this strange and told us we had permission to speak, but no-one said anything still and I wondered if she realised how much she terrified us.
Mr. Atherton - language teacher
The language teachers at my school, despite all being British, eerily seemed to match the stereotypes for their respective countries. The French teachers were often relaxed, urbane, with young wives and stylish clothes, the German teachers were very austere almost rude at times and the Spanish teachers, unsurprisingly had similarities with the French but dressed more casually and could be really flirtatious or, if female, looking like the matriarch of an extended Spanish family.
Mr. Atherton fitted his language with casual, bright clothes and a moustache that would have suited Errol Flynn. He came from northern England and I made the mistake of encountering him in his early days in southern England when he seemed to be on some crusade to hammer southern English children as soft and deserving of harsh treatment. He was very tricky and I fell into one of his traps about when you could and could not speak and got a detention, the only detention I ever received in my whole school career, something I was so ashamed of that I never mentioned it to my family. He was one of those teachers who pretend to be your friend but in reality hold you in contempt. Thinking about his smug attitude really riles me even now. Fortunately his career was brought to an end a few years later when I had left the school as, despite having a young wife, he was caught having an affair with a sixth form girl (sixth formers were 17-19 years old, so it was legal, but obviously disapproved of).
Mr. Marks - language teacher
Mr. Marks was upfront nasty. He would give you small scraps of paper to put your answers to tests on and when you found it difficult to fit the answers on one line you would lose marks as he would say the answer, though correct, was written wrongly. Such behaviour is soul destroying, because you think: what is the point of even trying to get it right? So many of these teachers do not realise how by such behaviour they turn you away from their subjects, let alone making it hard to truly know how you are progressing. He seemed to want to humiliate me all the time (I doubt I was alone in being picked on, but, of course, I can only talk from my personal experience). At the time of a general election he made me stand up and outline my political views so that he could spend the rest of the lesson explaining why I was so wrong: he was a grown man, I was thirteen, but, of course, he thought it was impertinent that I felt that I had political views at that age.
The worse case was the following year when I was sent to his class by mistake due to an administrative error and he ordered me out of the classroom (blaming me for the error). I had to wander the school trying to find someone to tell me where I was supposed to be. He had very dodgy Social Darwinist ideas and would question children waiting to buy crisps and drinks at break time about what ability level of class they were in, assuming less intelligent children would eat more.
Mr. Shoveller - deputy head
My school had loads of deputy heads for different functions. The worst was Mr. Shoveller who looked like a textile mill owner from the 1840s. His attitudes to any physical interaction between boys and girls was much the same and he would prowl around the school disco moving the hands of miscreants dancing during the slow dances (the hands were not permitted to rest on anyone's buttocks) and on school trips arms were not permitted to be put around anyone in photos taken.
For some reason he treated me reasonably well, but I do not forgive him as I witnessed his real side. Every day at the school one pupil was taken out of class to serve as an errand boy/girl to the secretary of the school. This meant that you were positioned for the day in the administrative heart of the school and hence near Mr. Shoveller's office as he was the most junior of the deputy heads. That afternoon, a sunny one when all the windows were open, a boy was brought to him who had been trying to spend a £10 note (worth a lot more in the early 1980s than now) in snack shop.
The boy, (I knew him reasonably well but we were not friends) was questioned at length about where he got the money from. Shoveller did not believe his explanation that his mother had given it to him to get drinks and snacks for a party (I knew this to be the truth as he had earlier spoken about the party). His mother worked and could not be raised during the day (this was the age before mobile phones and at a time when employers often did not permit outside contact during working hours, again a sharp contrast to today). So, having heard the evidence as he could gather it at the time, Shoveller acted as judge and jury and beat the boy for theft (in those days corporal punishment was still permitted in schools by senior staff). The number of beats seemed excessive to me and the boy was howling for all to hear, no doubt the pain worsened by the fact that actually he had done nothing wrong. I was sat outside the window and realised how arrogant and callous Shoveller was, self-righteous too in that he felt he could beat the wrongdoing out of the boy. It still sickens me to think of how terrorised children were in those days by bullying teachers.
Mr. Salmon - science teacher
This man retired while I was at school meaning he would in his late eighties by now, though he told us he would be dead three years after retirement anyway. With him there was no single incident to point to, just how harsh he was in every lesson. I used to leave with a stomach ache caused by his snide, acid comments about people and their failures. You were terrified of doing anything wrong in his lesson but knew that you could not avoid it. Again he was one of these who liked to be tricksy with his challenges. He always said he only bet on certainties but would cajole us to take the losing side just so that he could subsequently ridicule us. Even for a school that seemed to employ misfits he seemed to have stepped from the 1950s or even 1930s in his behaviour and attitudes. He was very proud that he did not own a television without being aware of how out-of-step that made him with all of us.
I am beginning to see common themes arising here as, like many of the others, he was self-righteous and clearly loved the extent of his own knowledge and parading it before us, portraying us as poor specimens (in a district where all the most intelligent went to private school, maybe that was his true perception of us state school children). He believed that radioactivity did no harm to the human body which seems a very dangerous belief for a science teacher.
Humiliation and stress began to impact on me medically while at secondary school. There was another teacher who when he realised how I was suffering stopped slapping me around the head (I was not alone in experiencing that, he did it to many of the boys) and ridiculing me, realising that he had probably gone too far. He spoke to me one-to-one about the issue, and it is that realisation on his part that lifts him out of my condemnation today. Mr. Salmon, who literally made me ill with worry, (I can so clearly remember the stomach aches after his lessons) had no iota of an idea of how much discomfort he inflicted, it probably would not have penetrated his thinking even if he had been told directly.
Mrs. Williams - music teacher
You can understand how pleased I was when I reached the age of 14 and music stopped being a compulsory subject. This woman was rather odd and there were many rumours about why that was, maybe it was simply she was a musician. She had performed in alternative music groups in the 1960s, at one stage just making peculiar sounds with her voice. It was said she had had a miscarriage after having been struck by lightning but that sounds like the kind of story that schoolboys make up. She certainly stuck out in what she wore, predominantly leather clothes - jackets, skirts, trousers, tops, boots in a whole variety of shades, of course black but also maroon, olive, red, various shades of brown. I know it was the 1980s and leather clothes were popular but did seem rather outre for a teacher at work. She fostered a clique of admiring pupils around her. Obviously, many of the keen musicians were in this clique, though not all, and pupils with other interests were permitted to enter her ranks of acolytes as long as they did nothing to displease her on the basis of one of her cryptic rules. This 'in' and 'out' division with her obviously caused tension in an average class where he clique members would be favoured over the rest of us.
The key problem, though, was her general set of quirky rules that you learned through error. She would not accept the word 'hey' to be said in her class and if anyone used it they had to undergo a humiliating ritual. Humiliating rituals were favoured by her for many errors against her rules. For boys she would have you stand on your chair and rotate like a ballerina whilst she played tinkly jewellery box music. In contrast to Mrs. Webb, Mrs. Williams seemed to accept that I had no musical ability in me and left me pretty much alone. However, humiliation to one's friends and classmates can be painful to yourself too and I cringe as I remember pupils being treated that way. She had no realisation that to use such methods signals to children that humiliation is a permissible tool and they need discouragement on that basis, rather than a green light.
Miss. Brook - English teacher
I have now reached the aged of 16 in my school career. This woman I know retired a few years later, probably something like 22 years ago now, so again, she is probably at least 82 if not 87. I know that if she was in education today she would have been charged with some some. Again, like Salmon, she belonged in a previous age. Like Marks she was self-centred and arrogant and like Shoveller, Williams and the rest, self-righteous. The fact that she had less physical and mental impact on me probably reflects that have experienced 6-7 years under all these nasty people I had developed a much harder shell and could see her for the sickening individual she was. She was not even very good at her subject with views that dated back thirty years and she made no attempt to catch up with current thinking.
In common with many of these teachers she liked to exercise an acid humour on pupils (maybe that is all that a career in teaching leaves you with). However, she also exhibited her prejudices very actively in class. She questioned us about our religion and seemed to particularly dislike Roman Catholics (who made up a sixth of our class) and seemed it incomprehensible that any of us were not Christians (she felt you had to know the Bible intimately to be able to study English literature). Such things are private, not to be dragged out into the open in class.
Brook had nothing good to say about contemporary culture as if all us teenagers should listen to nothing bar Beethoven at the most modern. She openly criticised how we dressed as if out of school we would dress the way she did as a 60+ year old woman. She also felt that the concerns of no-one else in the school were marginally as important as her concerns (for example if you had to go on a history trip). The fact that the English teachers had their own separate staff room, I think simply illustrated the difficulties they caused for the rest of the school. Her greatest problem was how lowly she perceived her pupils. Owing to the fact that none of us subscribed to the culture she liked and because we often espoused new ideas she was convinced that we were going to fail, especially if we were Catholic or Scottish or thought about going to university. She gave the lowest predicted grades of anyone I have encountered and clearly signalled that we were an embarrassment to her and the best we could hope for was to train as a manager for a supermarket. Again I think much of this stemmed from the area where we lived with its high level of private schools, though at 16+ many of the private school children had come back into the state sector, something she did not seem to comprehend despite her regular cross-examining of us in class.
A teacher has to have faith in his/her pupils, especially when they become teenagers, otherwise they are going to abandon all hope. Maybe that was what she wanted so that we achieved nothing more than she did. Clearly she felt we were contemptible and deserved nothing better, a bad attitude for a teacher who is supposed to raise, rather than douse expectations.
Recent reports say that there are 17,000 incompetent teachers working in the UK at present teaching 100,000 pupils at some time or another during every school week. I do not know whether the teachers I discussed above were incompetent but they were bad teachers in other ways. Teachers should not be self-righteous, they should not bully and especially not humiliate pupils. They should give constructive criticism not patronise people. They should expect the best of all pupils not dismiss them and push them away from opportunities. They should not make arbitrary decisions but base choices on sufficient evidence. They should also be aware of how much they screw up people's lives for decades to come, when they behave in nasty ways. They are in a position of immense power and should use it responsibility or should be kicked out of the profession as soon as possible.
Now, I estimate around 100 teachers taught me in 14 years I spent at school and college and only a fraction of them remain in my memory for what they inflicted on me. No-one pretends teaching is an easy job, but it is clear that no-one who enters the profession should be allowed to treat pupils in a way which causes mental and emotional difficulties as all of the teachers highlighted here, did for me. Some of them may be dead and gone but their impact lives on in the way my life turned out and I am sure there must be thousands of people they have screwed up in similar or worse ways. I remember the nasty teachers not the good ones and I imagine I will continue to condemn them for as long as I remain alive.
P.P. Andrew White - university tutor
Recently I saw an old Volvo car and it brought back to mind a tutor I had at university who caused me so much problem by his incompetence that it was clear that I had blotted him from my memory. The man is Andrew White and I imagine that he is now about 45/46 so probably in a similar sort of position as to when I met him. I see he has gone from where I encountered him, though one of his colleagues who was not much better, is not only still there, but has been promoted. I never met such a patronising woman who seemed to hold her students in contempt and loved playing mind games with us. However, she did not have as direct input into the problems I experienced as White did.
White was simply incompetent, completely out of his depth and we students suffered as a consequence. I failed the course that I had saved thousands of pounds for. He had given minimal feedback and then turned up at last stage, at my house with a feedback form jammed with criticisms that he insisted I sign. It said if the university authorities wanted more information of how poor I was at my course they should contact him. This damning document was only produced in the final month of the course. If I had truly been that bad the suggestions should have come much sooner. I did not roll over in the way he and his colleagues expected. I scrawled over his feedback form saying I totally disagreed with it (never be compelled to sign anything and if they insist make sure you spoil their document with your comments written over it, very visibly) and took his improper behaviour to a formal university complaint. I never found the outcome but I trust that they booted him out of the university.
White drove around in an old Volvo in which the seatbelts did not work and I wished that I had shopped him to the police. I saw the car again a couple of years later outside a restaurant in London and it was only because I was with a girlfriend that I did not attack it or storm into the restaurant and seek to humiliate him for what his incompetence did to my life and his arrogance in seeking to cover-up his blunders. If I ever see him again when I am alone I will probably end up in prison for assault. My hatred runs that deep.
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