In one GCSE class at the moment, I have had two boys return recently after prolonged suspension for
drug-taking, one girl off with morning sickness who is due to leave at Christmas to have her baby, a boy with
his arm in plaster after a fight with his step-dad, a girl trying to look after her younger brother and his
newly acquired asbo because their parents are gawd knows where, a boy moved into foster care after his mother
burnt his coursework and school books, and a sack of other problems that I don’t want to even delve into.
At parents’ evening I only met the parents of those without problems on this scale, who are muddling along the best they can. I met the mother who put her daughter on the pill when she turned twelve, because that’s what her mother did to her. The mother still only looks in her twenties though. She didn’t tell me this, of course, but it’s the kind of thing I overhear when the kids are meant to be working but are instead discussing their many other concerns. I met the mother who perhaps I should never have told about her son’s outstanding coursework, because she promised to return home and beat it out of him. And I don’t think she was joking.
I worry about this class. What worries me is that I can’t teach them properly when the majority of them
miss several lessons each month. There are a core of conscientious pupils who were unfortunate enough to end
up in the class and I can picture their faces now: concentrating hard, making notes and trying to ignore the
pierced lipped, greasy haired rabble around them. Some of these hard-workers have fallen by the wayside too:
increasing absences, hangovers, stories of joy-riding and vandalism.
How do the pupils feel when their classmates are suspended for drug use, or off having babies? A few years ago I would have been shocked. Particularly as this is no inner-city school with all the problems we imagine them having. But now I’m becoming more and more immune to news of fights, suspensions, drugs. I don’t think this is a good thing because it makes me complacent when I should still feel outraged enough to quell the apparent hero-worship and incessant jokes about the returning drug-takers. But what do I say? They’ve heard it all before; why is my condemnation going to make any difference?
Sometimes I turn a deaf ear to their jokes and banter. But this is no good, because it seems to have
encouraged them to push the subjects up for discussion even closer to the boundaries of acceptability. I
could turn round and become the authoritarian, but I suspect that this would become a contest between them
and me of how much they could get away with before crossing that line. All I want is for them to get on with
their coursework. I shouldn’t have to be their moral guardian too. From them I expect some respect, which is
hardly ever forthcoming, but come next summer nobody is going to be looking down exam results for anything else
but grades. The two years of misdemeanours, disruptions, law-breaking and rudeness will be shown in my
folder of continuing professional development as a list of letters and percentages, and then I’ll start
all over with another class of pupils ready to change before my eyes into troubled adolescents.
I think my point here is that sometimes teaching is overwhelming because it forces us teachers to take into account all these messy mixed-up lives, when all we wanted to do was impart a love of physics / volcanoes / Shakespeare / fractions. Even now, as I sit here on a Sunday afternoon marking coursework, I’m thinking to myself that so-and-so did well despite this or that, but when this work is externally examined, the examiner won’t know that the work in their hands is nothing short of a miracle, produced when all the odds were stacked against that child. Sometimes the anonymity must be a relief.
added 4/12/05
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