by I’ve been struggling a bit with my sinuses today. When I was in one of the electronics shops in the mall, trying to find some ink cartridges that of course they didn’t have, I realised that with all the visual and auditory stimuli (such painful music!) I wouldn’t survive more than five minutes working in an environment like that.
As a private teacher I get through ink on an almost industrial scale. The stuff ain’t cheap. For a long time I didn’t have a printer at all, and would go to one of the many printing shops in the city almost every day, but that became too time-consuming.
It feels funny to say that I’m a teacher, public, private or anything in between. Years ago when I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do, Mum would ask me if I wanted to get into teaching purely as a joke: she knew the answer would be an emphatic no. Seeing the effect that full-time teaching had on Mum for pretty much all of the nineties was enough for me. It was incredibly stressful for her, and on Sunday nights you could cut the atmosphere in the house with a knife. Having a completely dysfunctional head at her school didn’t help. Around the turn of the century the demands on teachers were ramped up yet again with even more assessment (not just for pupils but for teachers too) and an unhealthy obsession with “literacy” and “numeracy” at the expense of making or experimenting or investigating. I thought it was bloody ridiculous that Mum’s eight-year-olds had to learn “literacy”: why does a kid of that age even need to know the word? I still remember reading something one of Mum’s pupils wrote: I like reading and writing, but I don’t like literacy. That said it all. Since Mum left the UK teaching world behind in 2003, things have continued to go backwards. Teachers are now hopelessly underpaid, overworked and undervalued. The people who would make the best teachers are avoiding the profession. Standards of education will inevitably fall regardless of how many double-A-stars kids end up with.
Luckily I don’t teach in a school. Put me in a maths class in front of two dozen or more fifteen-year-old boys as big as me, at least half of whom don’t want to know, and I wouldn’t last long, even before you factor in everything a teacher has to do outside the classroom. The only classroom I teach in, as such, is the one at the lolly-stick company. Last Thursday I had to give both (!) my students a test, as I’m required to do every tenth session. I had to devise the test myself, complete with listening, speaking and reading comprehension components. This was no easy task: creating tests is relatively easy but there’s a lot of skill in making good tests. Unlike the final test, this one had no bearing on whether my students pass the course. I marked the subjective elements of the test fairly generously and they got scores of 65% and 68%. The final test has to have a pass mark of 75% which I think is ridiculously high: I prefer to stretch my students, which you can’t do with that kind of pass mark. I’ll have no choice but to make the final test a bit easier.
