Learning Journal

Negative comments shall be the subject of this journal.
I was talking with one teachery acquaintance of mine about who to model oneself after, as the film Dead Poet's Society had been brought up. I said that I did not model myself after Robin Williams in that film, more Robin Williams from Mork and Mindy. (It was a very refreshingly clever joke, yes?) My acquaintance said: 'I model myself after whichever teacher is the most cynical and doesn't want to be here.'
Hmm.
And, the day after, as I trekked around the college, another acquaintance passed me on the stairs and remarked: 'How can you look so happy in this [expletive deleted]?'.
Hmm.
Teaching is certainly a job that few enjoy. My mother, having trained as a secondary school teacher, can attest to this. My mentors try their best to present a good face, but even they sometimes complain. And other FE teachers I talk too rarely have much good to talk about.
Therefore - how can I look happy? The question my acquaintance seemed to be asking, I believe, was: "I am ground down. I am ill. I am tired. I have been defeated, day after day, unable to complete my job. The students are against me, not wanting to be taught with what I am given to teach. Those who control the curriculum are against me, making wilful changes and making me adapt to things that I do not agree with. The politicians are against me, demanding more and more and giving less and less. Society is against me, angry with exam results whether they are good or bad. And all my fellow teachers can do is corroborate in my unhappiness with their own misery. Why do you smile? How can you smile? What is this smile? I want a smile. Give me a smile."
I suppose I am happy because I don't accept colleges or education or anything as they are. I came onto this course recognising that few are happy with all this. I didn't expect it to be easy, and I didn't expect many people to be teachers for very long. Most drop out, little burnt bacon frazzles.
And I suppose I'm happy because I am not here to learn how to educate, but to learn how our present education system works, and wonder how to improve it. If I'd come onto the course interested in learning how to be an FE teacher, I can imagine how unhappy I would be. The sad truth is that we don't really know how to teach, for we have only a beginning understanding of 'learning', of communicating knowledge, of what knowledge even is, and what we are told to do is wrong in so many ways. Philosophers have not found a sound base for epistemology yet, and we are supposed to teach knowledge? It is quite amusing, to me, and this is why I can smile.
It's not a joke that many people would comprehend.

I was observed two days ago, by my college mentor, and mostly everything was A-OK. The only problem - other than some piggledy boardwork, which will take me a while to perfect - was the classroom management, as before in my first observation.
I'm not sure what to think about this. I am in conflict over this issue.
It has not been long since I myself were a student, so I can recall what it was like to take an A-Level. And it was rather frustrating - being presented with a load of information to remember that meant nothing. In chemistry, I understood that sunlight had something to do with vitamin d, but not why or how. In biology, I understood that lipids did this and DNA was that, but not why or how. What use is knowledge when it is nothing but a fact? To make facts from knowledge is to make a factory of it, processing dead things to make a homogenised sausage fit only for the poorest to live on.
At this point, an astute reader such as yourself might observe that I am somewhat opposed to this.
When I was an A-Level student, I felt almost honour bound to not do much work. The teachers rushed around balming away confusion and worry with remarks such as "just revise and you'll do fine", and we slowly came to realise that achievement meant getting marks, which meant answering questions, which meant memorising the textbooks and guessing what the markers wanted. After every modular exam, condolences would be issued from the teachers - oh, I can see how you didn't understand how to answer this question, what they actually wanted was...
It seemed that what the markers always wanted was for us to have read the mark scheme beforehand.
Of course, amongst the academic teenagers - the males cross-browed persons playing RPG games on their PCs, discussing university placements and ever-smelling of a mild unwashedness; or their female counterparts the ones who dressed about ten years above their age, always looking slightly out of place and having a more girlishly trilling giggle - this came naturally. What was knowledge but pebbles to swallow and then regurgitate in shiny polished form? But others rebelled, tired and angry and scared of a world which didn't explain itself, a hall of mirrored secrets. How could we get into the minds of the examiners and figure out what they wanted us to say? How did the questions exactly specify the answers they apparently wanted?
As a teacher now marking mock exams, I can see it all relies on remembering everything exactly. When asked for a THEORY one must say THIS. When asked for a STUDY one must say THIS. It is not a test of being intelligent and linking things cleverly, or thinking creatively, or arguing a point, or studying psychological phenomena (the sort of thing, for example, a psychologist might do). It is remembering Who, What, When about dead people. Each course is the same, for all intents and purposes, except for the dead people studied.
And so, our observable and accountable teaching leads to observable and accountable students taking their observable and accountable exams, and we all breathe a sigh of relief as that tricky concept of education is ignored.
Considering this, I don't mind if my students talk, or play with mobile phones, or listen to music in lesson. I don't mind if they don't know what they're doing, and don't want to ask. They don't know why they're doing it anymore. They came to college wanting to pass courses but two years of it stretch ahead - a foreverish time - and it is still a scary and alien and strange place. Michel Foucault wrote about the French schooling system seeming to always point forward, saying that the mystery would be solved at the next stage, at the next stage, and then they would understand what they were doing and why. But he wrote his dissertation and was ejected from the system, realising that the system had never had anything to give him, that he had been lied to. It is fine if the real point is the development of the student within, and towards a realisation of whatever intellectual and social processes can be fermented - yet why must we lie about it, and explain to each pupil they are reaching towards some far off star and must grow upwards to catch it?
Many students realise that things aren't turning out as they were promised, that the secrets are not being solved, that they are getting no closer to this inner circle of knowledges. The cult of education is not letting them in. Some will turn away forever, despising the whole stupid thing - and one wonders if this is a cause of the pervading culture of anti-intellectualism. Some will succeed in some way, herded into pleasantly simple vocational courses where every single aim is obvious and close and near and tickable (although the why's of the process are even less tangible, in many cases). And some will fit in with the open spirit of university, where questions had many answers and meaning can be found. But none of it will make sense of what's gone before. Maybe it makes no sense.
So, we come into college today, and it tired us that we have to chomp through masses of facts, and even the teachers turn off, tired and bemused and not understanding the why's and the how's, not able to answer such questions from the students, feeling the questions in exams unfair, and not entirely teaching anything at all. We dress up in the clothes of a teacher, but perhaps we are just instructing dogs to beg for scraps. No wonder they sniff each other and woof and play little doggy games and don't listen to us. We're demeaning every subject we teach, and abusing the intellects of our students, not giving them a choice or recognising the abilities they have. And so they turn away from us and don't give us the attention we are required to wield.
I don't want to be required to take command of anybody or anything. It would make me part of the massive chain which shackles us all. I believe that, unless we free each student and give them the responsibility to learn, to nurture the desire to understand, we are not doing anything of use. Nor do I mean the more subtle power relations of a Rogerian 'humanist' classroom. I mean something else, which would have the capacity to breed those thoughts which question everything, and thinkers which understand ideology and its constraints, rather than submitting to its comfort gladly.
And, until then, I don't want to tell my students what to do if they're merely amusing themselves. I can't ask them to listen to what not even I have any respect for. The things I can make mine, the things I can truly teach, aspects of the curriculum I have wrestled from EdExcel and made something else, these would be things I could expect, in my enthusiasm, all to listen to. But this is not classroom management, it is engaging interest of all parties with something wholesome and worthwhile. I cannot force others to consume what is just dead sausagemeat.

How best can one deal with the yellow sickness of prejudice as it bursts forth in class, pus from a still unlanced boil? And how best can you deal with the weariness of institutionalised life, as you are worn down by the repetition of the days and of the waiting of respite from them until you are ground into a flint which sparks hatred and harm?
These are the questions I ask today.
In one of my classes a student, who seems to be a perfectly pleasant young woman most of the time, somehow
brought up the issue of transsexuals, complaining about the existence of one in college. She described in some unhappy detail the clothes s/he wore and so forth, lamenting the tainting of the building with the genderbending vapours of this Frankenstein's Monster. Not in those words, of course, I am enjoying some artistic license. I and another student, in some liberal shockhorror, attempted to placate this conservative mindset with soothing nothing about the right of such people to exist. But - how can you really calm such thoughts? I am aware, as a psychologist, that opposition to the Other is built into our historically and socially constructed version of the self, as we find spaces to occupy on the vast plain of differentiation. Such prejudice exists no matter how much evidence to contradict the prejudice exists - even if the prejudiced person accepts this evidence on an intellectual level. This belief in the wrongness of some other person's life has a use value more important to the prejudiced person than its reality - it is a ticket into a certain set of cultural groups, that helps to define one's place in the world. This student complained about how this transsexual was distracting. And, of course, this is a very salient point to this student, as to her the transsexual IS distracting. But only because she incites herself to think so. I didn't want to embark on a massive lecture on prudishness, censorship, and alienating values. I didn't want the class to divide itself and become distrustful based on personal opinions about the right- or wrongness of changing gender. Perhaps I can find time to screen The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Not only is there this dislike between peers, there is sad evidence of dislike between teachers and their students. I often take lunch in the staffroom, surrounded by the accoutrements of the teacher's lifestyle - the photocopier meant for emergencies (when the one in repro breaks down), the fartingbubblingclanking old drinks machine, the kettle and microwave only for use by people who pay some money for the privilege, the TV without an aerial. This staffroom is populated by, obviously, staff. It would be a rich place for ethnographic research, as this group of staffpersons is most definitely in need of analysis. Commonly, talk is about painfully local football teams on league tables so low they are sponsored by businesses you haven't heard of (The Harold Porkies Pork-Based Pork-Style Pork-Remnant Pork Conference League, fifth division) or sadly swapped tales of respectless students. "I don't know why I bother," is sighed by the winner of this they-hate-me Top Trumps, and everyone sits back and broods over how they think they deserved the temporary martyr's crown of thorns. I munch on my exquisitely packed lunch - made by me! - and ruminate darkly. Or I read a book from the little teacher-donated library, which includes Sexual Energy, which isn't very good. Reich's orgone theory is more interesting.
After one particularly heated debate about the betterness of DVDs over VHS, there was another round of the-kids-hate-me. But it was not concluded in its usual pomp and circumstance. There was no concluding sigh, no trump topped. Instead, as I bought my customary 50p hot chocolate from the drinks machine - taking careful care to use exact change as it nevereverever gives any - something was said. Boy, was something said. A teacher said: "I'd like to develop a discipline machine. It would teach those students and their parents a lesson they would never forget. You would put a student inside it, and it would beat them within an inch of their lives."
There was, startlingly, agreement. Some chuckling. And little tears on my face, shining like the starshells of madness in this man's eyes.