A Good Smacked Bottom

When I was small, the Ultimate Deterrent was always the threat of a good smacked bottom. I fully understood that when my mother threatened to give me one of these, she wasn't proposing to get this item from a box on top of the wardrobe and present it to me with a ribbon round it - no, her goal was a goodness modification to my own small backside. And when threatened with this, I knew very well that the Clog Brandishing Lady was not amenable to reason, and that those stairs that I had to get up by the count of ten to evade the translation of my bottom to the realms of virtue had to be got up now. I argued, as any child will do, until she had reached six, but then I ran like hell, because my mother didn't mean half way up the stairs where she could still see and hear me, she meant in my room with the door shut. And reader, she did mean it.

I don't know where she got that phrase - a good smacked bottom - for it seems unlikely that my bottom would imbued with goodness by a smack, and anyway, it was not generally my bottom with which my mother had the issue. In the confederacy of my small Krenzly bod, my bottom was the sufferer for the sins of my mouth or my stroppy flouncing about which broke stuff. As I grew older, it also occurred to me that my mother was modelling some very poor grammar, as what she really proposed was not a good smacked bottom at all, but a well smacked bottom - something like a well tempered Klavier.

I did not like to be hit, but I retained no lasting emotional scars from the "good smacked bottom" run-ins, partly because I got the fuck out of the way. I did not like men or boys to be too close to me, and I ascribe this partly to the fact that - unlike my mother - my brother and my father did not deal in threat or warning, they just hauled off and whacked you round the chops or in the belly and that was that. I learnt to get the fuck out of the way of them as well, but a damn sight sooner - ie I avoided them altogether.

At school, I was never threatened with any form of violence by those in authority over me. I got into plenty of fights with boys larger and more violent than myself, but bar the loss of my front teeth, I got by outside my house just fine. And also bar the eternal naughtiness in Year 8 maths - when I used to take yo-yos and rubber balls to school to occupy myself during my inevitable exclusion from class - and a notable occasion when I sat muttering swear words at my teacher whenever he approached me for a lesson - I survived seven years at secondary school without running into trouble for my poor attitude.

The reason I mention this is that my attitude was poor. I was a very self-conscious rebel - without a clue how to show my full rebelliousness, but also without much of the required backbone. I was arsy and full of myself and had a lot of aggression going nowhere, but I did not usually spend my time in school in trouble. My parents meant business. I skived, I loafed, I calculated the exact amount of laziness I could carry off without trouble - and I was quiet in lessons, wrote essays and copied up experiments and learned distressingly difficult valents, equations and mathematical theories without a bleat. My parents never made me. I was famous in my circle for the fact that my parents did not ever organise me or ask about my homework. But I knew very well - and so did my siblings - that my parents meant business.

Teachers at my school were almost never ill. The school was selective and children were streamed or set and did their work. When we were in year nine, two boys were caught with drugs on the school premises. We never saw them again. My school meant business.

I hated school. I felt - rightly or wrongly - that nobody there gave a shit about me or my fellow students. We worked a lot out of books, and I never saw a four part lesson in my life. Most of the extra curricular activities were netball, at which I sucked. But I was given books - one between two - and quiet - lessons of total silence to write or complete maths problems in - and I for this I am still grateful.

Whether any of this means anything in terms of education and achievement I can't tell. I know that teachers now are perpetually ill - and I ascribe this to the horrible behaviour they are expected to countenance. I know that children constantly complain of headaches towards the end of the day, particularly if the class grow noisy. Sometimes they ask for "a quiet lesson" - reading or writing or drawing in "silence" (meaning they whisper).

Children don't like being smacked, and it seems pretty nasty to bully somebody smaller than yourself. However, if you don't teach children how to behave, they won't know. Some parents encourage their children to be disrespectful to teachers. Such people should home-school their kids, with books lovingly paid for by the state. Few parents smack their kids without some shame nowadays, though at the end of three years of 24/7 parenting, parents turn out to be human, and so it still goes on. And I doubt if it does them any harm. Plenty of things harmed me but I got over the smacked bottoms - or threat thereof - just fine. Think on.

Brand New Teach

Why is teaching not getting any better? What proves that it isn't getting any better? And what is Anybody Doing About It?

Here are some statistics to crunch:
teachers are paid for 1296 hours a year. Last year I worked a full year as a teacher, and this was deemed to be a total of 38 weeks, or 190 days. suggesting that a teacher's working day is 6.82 hours long. Considering that such a stretch would include a mandatory paid break of 20 minutes, this seems about right. A teacher's working day at the school where I performed my duties began at 0820 and ended at 1520. Again, it all seems all right.

Except that: between 0820 and 1520, the vast majority of teachers' time is actually "contact time" - ie time spent with children, either pedagogically or pastorally. Well, isn't that what teaching is supposed to be? Good.

Now, let's add on:
1 meeting (after school) per week - 1 hour (faculty, staff, pastoral teams)
2 sessions of marking per week - 2 hours
5 hours per week planning
2 hours per week filling in register returns / telephoning parents about their pastoral concerns / chasing children for their errant behaviour or note return
10-12 parents' evenings per year @ 4 hours a pop
Media showcase - 1 evening attendance 4 hours
School play - 4 hours a night for 4 night, plus two or three four hour days (weekends)
1 detention per week - 40 minutes
Report writing - 2 for each form taught, at 2-3 hours each (10-15 hours min; 15-20 max)
Departmental Evenings - two per year, 4 hours each
Year 11 ball - attendance from 7pm to 2am
Moderation: 2 meetings, 2 hours each - 2 hours preparation per meeting
Checking administrative errors - 20 minutes per report-writing
Photocopying - 10 minutes a day

Pity the poor NQT who has no lessons planned, no foreknowledge of events and whole school deadlines, and no time off at all, because s/he has to go to extra meetings. The one I currently see is working from 0730, when she arrives in the morning, until 1730 when she leaves. On this basis, she will have completed her yearly hours in April - much good will it do her. She will still have to work until about 24th July.

She will still have to put up with parents who will not accept that their kids are Bone Lazy Idle Skivabouts, or that they themselves have driven their kids to near-nervous breakdown in the short time they've had, and are making things worse not better. She will still have to put up with kids who swear, have paddywacks, and make utter tossers of themselves and victims of other kids. She will still have to listen to assessments of her teaching by people who don't teach her subject, and have no idea what her working life consists of, because that is how NQT assessment works.

She is at a good school, where expectations of staff are not out of line with government directives. The majority of both staff and children - and indeed, parents - there are kind, polite and decent. She is a good teacher. But why isn't it any better? Why do teachers disappear with stress for half years at a time? How much more of what we aren't prepared to pay the poor bastards for do we expect to get? I was shocked to read in Private Eye that a Healthcare Trust had asked its nurses to work an unpaid shift to help balance the books. But when you think that Miss Smith will be working from April to July for free, it seems that that's what public service is about.