Questioning

As I mentioned in my first post, I am staying anonymous on this blog for now, which means avoiding clues that might reveal where I teach.  That said, given that I’ve already mentioned that I’m a secondary teacher in the UK, I think I’m safe to type the following without disclosing too much:

The behaviour at my school is not good. 

According to the news, our school is definitely not alone in this.  I’m not a psychologist and nor am I in a position to postulate any theories about how the pandemic, changes in education or government or society or whatever else have affected the development of the kids; I can only really report what I’ve experienced, and what I’ve experienced is that some of these children are being total jerks right now.  I do aim to be the sort of teacher that has patience and empathy, never gives up on a single child etc. etc., but on the tougher days it takes someone far saintlier than me to wish for anything better for certain children than a long, long prison sentence, preferably somewhere deep underground. I’m not proud.

If your staffroom is anything like mine, the conversation is usually dominated by the topic of behaviour, what needs to be done about it and what makes it so much worse than it used to be.  Often, I’ve found myself and others talking about discipline in terms of fear, or the lack of it: 

‘These kids are fearless.’

‘There’s nobody on leadership that they’re really afraid of any more.’

‘I’d have been terrified of putting a foot wrong when I was at school.’

Teachers love a moan, and we tend to look back to a romanticised and entirely fictional past where all pupils had respect, all teachers were looked up to and all behaviour was impeccable.  I think it’s particularly misleading for teachers to compare today’s pupils to ourselves during our own schooldays, because we were the pupils who went on to become teachers; to some extent at least, we were the ones for whom the systems worked.  We may have felt afraid of stepping out of line when we were at school, but that doesn’t mean that all of our classmates did.

That said, I’m pretty sure the teachers at the school I attended as a secondary pupil were genuinely scary at times.  I still remember my Year 7 maths teacher and the exact periods in the week that I had his lessons, simply because he terrified me and I dreaded every single lesson that he taught me.  I was told later on in school, by a somewhat less frightening member of staff, that this teacher actually really liked me and had spoken about me in glowing terms, and yet every Wednesday and Thursday I felt sick to the stomach walking through his classroom door.  He was one of the invariably moustachioed old guard, the ones who had been teaching since the days of the cane and who, by the time I finished school, had almost all retired.  The school’s overall approach to discipline didn’t change, though; I spoke to a relative of mine who attended the same school a few years later who spoke of the same fear he felt walking into certain lessons.

Comparing notes with him, we realised that there was a certain behavioural technique used in our school.  A good example came from my first ever morning in Year 7, when I was sat with my new form group waiting for the bell to go.  Our form teacher walked into the room and stared at us, a stern expression forming on his face as we all fell silent.

“That is incredibly rude,” he said.  “You stand up when a member of staff walks into a room.”

This was, of course, the first time that anyone had ever told us that this was the rule, and it immediately put us all on the back foot.  Previously unspoken rules like this cropped up all the time, seemingly out of nowhere: we were pulled up on uniform infringements we had no idea were infringements, or for forbidden stationery items that we’d never been told were forbidden.  I remember one child getting a dressing-down for being seen by a teacher on an evening eating on the street in his school uniform (imagine!).  We were kept in line by a code of behaviour that acted like an iron maiden: you remained in the dark, standing morally upright, fearful of any mild deviation that led to you being unexpectedly spiked.

Now if any of those teachers are still alive – and I am reliably assured that several of them aren’t – I can imagine what they’d say.  First of all, they’d probably point out that that the iron maiden analogy is a bit melodramatic (which, yeah, fair point).  I think they would also argue that, well, the system worked.  The pupils mostly behaved and the school turned out huge numbers of successful students with excellent exam results who went on to study at top universities and in some cases earn shedloads of money (not so much in my case, obviously; I became a teacher).  And look at you, I can imagine them saying to me.  You turned out okay, didn’t you?

And the answer to that, I’ve only realised recently, is no.  Actually, Sir, I f***ing well didn’t.  Yes, I got decent qualifications, and yes, you taught me how to toe the line and conduct myself in a polite, professional manner (something that, now I’m a teacher, I worry is lacking in the students that leave my school).  However, it also left me with a lack of self-confidence and an endless need to people-please.  Even now, I still struggle to stand up for myself at times and I can go out of my way to avoid even the mildest of disagreements, let alone conflict.  It’s been years now, and I’m still struggling to shake the fear of putting a foot wrong.

For me what really exacerbated all this, though, was the fact during the whole of my time in secondary school, Section 28 was in place.  If you’re reading this blog, I imagine you already know what Section 28 is, but in case you don’t, it was a UK law that, between 1988 and 2003 prevented any teacher from “promoting homosexuality” or “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”  In practice, it prevented any teacher from talking about LGBTQ+ issues, challenging homophobia or effectively supporting any of the LGBTQ+ children in their care. 

Of course, the law wasn’t the teachers’ fault, but at the same time I didn’t see much evidence that many of my teachers were exactly struggling with it either.  Humiliation wasn’t left out of the teacher’s disciplinary toolkit back then, and if two boys were talking or messing about, an insinuation that they fancied each other was a cheap and effective instrument to pull out of the bag.  Even if it was done in a jokey way, the frequent use of “X is gay” as a punchline, by both staff and students, built up over time to convince me that being gay was at best a joke, and at worst something disgusting and wrong.

Growing up and realising I was gay in an environment where homophobia existed, where nobody was challenging it and where certain adults were openly condoning or even engaging in it, conditioned me to believe that that was the norm.  This would have course have been damaging in any environment, but I wonder now how much damage it did in conjunction with my school’s approach to behaviour.  I didn’t step out of line once at secondary school – not one detention, set of lines, punishment essay, not even a single telling off I don’t think (beyond the ones routinely dished out to whole class groups) – because that’s the kind of kid I was.  I was one of the fearful ones.  From a disciplinary standpoint, the system worked on a kid like me.  But by instilling a fear of ever deviating from their standards, when their standards allowed for the proliferation of homophobia, they also instilled in me an innate feeling that being gay made me inferior to anybody who wasn’t.

I’ve come to realise that I’ve struggled to shift that feeling ever since.  On the surface, I believe all the right things about LGBTQ+ rights, but if it ever comes up in conversation that I’m gay, the very word “gay” still sticks in my throat: no matter what I’ve learned or told myself in the intervening period, there’s still a feeling that saying that this aloud is a confession of sorts, an admission of a fault to be atoned for.  I still expect people to respond negatively, I still hear an apology in my voice, and I still feel that the onus is on me to smooth out any awkwardness that other people might feel about it.  When people – particularly straight men – respond positively, or even neutrally, I still can’t help feeling a gratitude that I know on a conscious level I really don’t owe them at all.  Even decades later, the scared teenager inside me can’t believe his luck that he can be open about his sexuality without getting his head kicked in by the popular straight kids.

For the teacher I am now, faced with the fearless kids out on the corridors, I feel like my exasperation isn’t simply down to the fact that some of them just won’t behave.  Yes, there must be a frustration that I don’t have the same control over pupils that some of my own teachers had over me, and maybe I get angry at certain kids because I see in them the traits of the cool, homophobic crowd of my own schooldays.  Maybe, though, some of the anger and frustration that burns inside when faced with their defiance and insolence is actually a form of envy; that deep down, I wish I’d had the guts or the gumption to question the adults who, however inadvertently, were making my life far harder than it needed to be. 

I’m not an expert on behaviour beyond what I’ve learned during my time in the classroom, and I don’t have answers to how to fix it beyond trying my best to ensure consistency, fairness and empathy in my approach and avoiding revenge fantasies of locking the little sods away in dungeons.  If I’m coming to any firm conclusions here, I guess it’s that we need to be aware of the impact our approach to discipline has on our students, to be wary of the dangers of imparting our own prejudices, and to find our voices and shout ourselves hoarse any time anyone in a position of power suggests Section 28-esque laws against gay, trans or any other kind of kids again.   

I’m not really trying to draw conclusions though; really, this is just the starting point of this blog, of beginning to get my head around the lingering impact of my own schooling, upbringing, and sexuality on who I am now and the sort of teacher I’ve become and want to be.  I’m thinking aloud, and I’d love for others to join in the conversation.  Please do let me know your thoughts, and please do share with this with people you think might be interested.