Will I conquer the classroom?

13 Jul 2010 2 Comments

by Little Miss Hijaab Head in Blogroll, Random Musings, Teaching

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged, or written anything for that matter.  Life has been a combination of marking exam papers, family commitments and now, gaining employment in a secondary school!

Yes!  I finally landed a job, after the “Amehdgate” scandal of 2009 (more about that another time – or when sufficient time has passed so I don’t stand the risk of getting sued!) which seemed to colour my new life in Leeds.  Someone clearly thinks I’m employable and good at what I’m qualified to do; either that or they were extremely desperate!  Either way, I have a teaching job secured for September of this year and was asked to do three weeks of supply teaching in the English department before the summer holidays.

Bonus.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been out of education for six months, or maybe it’s because I’m finally showing my age, but things are seriously different.  I cannot avoid but to say (here it comes, brace yourselves) “It wasn’t like this in my day.”

Within the space of seven days in this school, I have heard or been in the vicinity of swear words in a variety of languages related to the male and female sexual organs, told repeatedly to go and copulate with myself and had to listen to screaming from young people of all ages.  This has been peppered with flying objects in the shape of pencils, balled up pieces of paper, chairs and, in one case, a table; coupled with this has been loud, obnoxious rapping in defiance, students rearranging the furniture, spontaneously, often three or four times a lesson, leaving the lesson at will and returning at will, sometimes, not returning at all.

Lesson changeover is a strange thing.  Songs are played whenever the buzzer sounds (bells are old fashioned and dated, buzzers that sound like fire/bomb alarms are much more “hip”(never mind that I keep trying to evacuate the building 7 times a day).  Apparently music persuades students to go to lessons, encouraging them to walk; obviously this has been done after much discussion and with plenty of scientific and medical research conducted over a number of years, however, I do not see the effects.  Yes, it’s a way to signal the fact that students should be walking to lessons, whether they are or not is a different matter entirely.

I know from experience (however limited) that young people can be trained to go to lessons on time, we spent ages doing it in my last place, however, if students genuinely do not want to do so, they won’t.  It’s that simple.  There’s no need for scientific research or to conduct an experimental study, if you take a massive group of young people, put them together in a building, sound a buzzer and play some music, I can guarantee they will not go to their lessons, however interesting these lessons may be.

I thought about this as the third pencil went flying passed my head this afternoon; I pondered upon ways in which I could engage the classes I have been given – despite there being only 8 days left until the summer holidays, I wanted to establish with students that I’ve been paid to teach, that’s precisely what I intend to do.  So since I have been at the school I have tried to engage students with topics that relate to their own situations in life – with the group of disaffected, bottom set Year 10 boys from Afro-Carribean, Pakistani and Indian backgrounds, I looked at racist comments and how they felt about them, trying to inspire them to write persuasively against racism and injustice.  I used quotes from the BNP and a scientific study about the size and intelligence of black peoples’ brains in comparison with their white counterparts, with a view to provoking a reaction.  The result of my efforts have been most of the students in the class wrote something, with varying degrees of standard English and success, but they wrote something nevertheless, which I should be proud of; in a short space of time, I did manage to get the attention of violently abusive and quite misogynistic fifteen-year olds who clearly had a problem with women, people of other races and generally each other.

Today, I tried to add a new dimension to the race angle and introduced the “I have a Dream” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. thinking it would engage and inspire the boys to want to improve their own speeches.  I keep telling myself to concentrate on the positives, look to the students who did work, time how long the students were engaged in the lesson, don’t count the number of times pencils went flying past or raps started with loud drumming on the desk, because, during the course of that lesson some students were engaged and some students were learning.

I must admit though, the whole thing has been an eye-opener and a shock to the system.  Every day I go in there I tell myself that I’m a successful, good teacher with some successful results behind me, I just need to establish myself.  And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.  I’m twenty-seven years old; I will not be beaten down by a bunch of unruly teenagers, half my age.  Sooner or later, I will conquer the classroom in this school, it may be straight away, it may not be for a while, but it’ll happen.  God-willing.

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