by Anon
We couldn’t be dealing with stratified rows for such an open forum, so I put the desks in horseshoe formation. It looked a bit like a corporate brainstorming session, but once I got the poetry and music going, it would be totally different. My first lesson was going to be like a cross between an eighteenth-century salon and a beatnik happening.
I put verses of poetry on the walls (Blake, Langston Hughes, Rilke, Carol Ann Duffy, e e cummings), some Modernist art (The Scream, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Duchamp’s Urinal), and a series of portraits (Yeats, Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, Arundhati Roy, Miles Davis, James Baldwin). I played an album of Beat Poetry. I remembered that I had to put a bit of British Values into my English lessons, so I stuck Shakespeare and Milton back up (they were languishing in a plastic bin full of old exams) and surrounded the room with Union Jack bunting, but that just made it look like a Rotary Club, so I took it down again. I placed a Bramley Apple Pie on each desk and waited.
PERIOD 3: INTRODUCTION TO A LEVEL, YEAR 12
One by one, they gingerly entered and stood with their backs to me.
‘Come in! Come in! Welcome to our salon! Make yourself comfortable. Find a chair. Or beanbag. And chill out.’
They were completely freaked out. Their entire school career they had been told to be quiet and write in silence. Who was this freak?
‘Just sit down! Sit down wherever. And read some poetry! Yeah! Whenever you feel like it!’
Gradually, they sat and stared at the poems. They seemed distracted by Jack Kerouac talking bollocks in the background.
‘OK, guys!’ I said, chummily. ‘So who wants to go first? Who has read any of these poems before?’
Alexia put her hand up.
‘OK, cool! That’s cool! So where did you read it?’
‘At home.’
‘Cool. Nice. And what do you think of it?’
‘It’s good. Yup. I like it.’
‘OK. Anyone else have anything to say about the poems that they are looking at?’
Post-nuclear-fallout silence.
‘No? OK. Why don’t you swap poems?’
Five minutes passed. A beatnik with a heavy New York accent recited a poem about a telephone being stuck to his head.
‘Anyone?’ I asked, frustrated. ‘Someone must think something.’
You would have thought.
They didn’t peep. I rationalised that they were not used to each other yet. Still stuck in Year 11 self-consciousness. I asked what their favourite books were. Nobody said anything. Eventually Alexia said The Bell Jar and Zainab said Things Fall Apart, but they were too shy to say why they liked them. Isaac said he liked graphic novels. Ella couldn’t think of anything.
‘Come on! You must be able to think of something!’ I implored.
She shrugged. ‘Wassat one? Wiv da big dumb guy and da little one?’
‘Of Mice and Men?’
‘Yeah. Dat.’
‘OK. Any others?’
‘Macbef?’
‘Any you haven’t done for GCSE?’
She shook her head.
I scanned over the class list, and saw that Ella had been awarded a C at GCSE.
‘Well, why are you doing English A Level?’
‘Dunno. Goes well wiv Meedja. And I had Miss. I liked Miss.’
A chorus of ‘Yeah. We loved Miss.’
The Beat Poetry album finished with a jazz musician poet tapping out a beat on a drum, crying, ‘BROOKS BROTHERS, MARX BROTHERS, MY BROTHERS, WHEN WILL YOU CRY LIFE’S SWEET SONG?’
I was drowning. Time to move on, swiftly. Bring the purpose back. I turned the computer on and opened the first dystopia lesson.
On the board were images of a gas mask, cloned sheep, a freeze frame of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman in Gattaca, book burning, a futuristic cityscape with flying cars and terrible pollution, Big Brother, and Thomas More’s island of utopia with a red line through it.
‘What are we doing this term?’ I asked.
‘Biology?’
‘The Future?’
‘Close. What kind of future?’
‘Dystopias.’
‘Good.’
I clicked on to a quote, in black Garamond on a white background:
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind.
— Fahrenheit 451
‘Who’s read this?’
Alexia, Zainab and Isaac put up their hands.
‘You should have all read it over the holidays …’
Liam was nodding vigorously.
‘What was your favourite book that you read, Liam?’
‘Ah … that’s difficult to say, Sir. Yeah. Difficult.’
‘Because you didn’t read any of them?’
‘Nah, nah. I read them. I just …’
‘Forgot them?’
‘Nah. I’m just still … finking about dem, Sir.’
‘All right, Liam. You have until the end of the week.’
I clicked onto my final slide. A pile of books and a bunch of flowers.
‘For the Plenary: what is the significance of this?’
They shook their heads as they walked out.
I slumped back in my chair.
Next lesson, I should aptually electrocute them.
PERIOD 4: A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, YEAR 11 SET 3
After the usual complaints that they wanted to have Miss, I jumped straight into the context. We began with the same slide I used for Jason and the Argonauts and Holes: what does it feel like to leave home? What does it feel like to arrive somewhere different? What does it feel like to be an outsider?
We watched a documentary about Ellis Island; we created an Ellis Island in the classroom and imagined we were arriving there for the first time. We practised terrible Bwooklin accents, and role-played the conversation we would have with the immigration officials. We imagined the bridge was over a river in our town and we wrote a story about immigrant communities who lived there. I told them we were just going to read the play and not stress, because they had enough of that to deal with later in the year. They were warming to me.
*
Lunch. Walked over to the Canteen with Little Miss Outstanding and Tom. Didn’t even think about bolting for the graveyard. Lasagne. Get in. Tom psyched me up for Meedja, and said I just needed to do a simple introduction lesson in which I asked them what they had seen and maybe find some good clips of old films like Le Voyage dans la lune. I could stretch that out over an hour, no problem.
PERIOD 5: MEEDJA, YEAR 12
Worse than I could have ever feared. I asked, ‘What have you seen?’ We sat in silence for most of the lesson. Eventually I asked Ella, ‘Why are you doing Media?’
She shrugged and said, ‘Goes well wiv English.’
‘Why are any of you doing Media?’ I asked.
Shrugs.
‘Like social media.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Everyfing’s Media.’
PERIOD 6: MEEDJA, YEAR 12
I put on Le Voyage dans la lune and asked what they thought of it.
Shrugs.
‘Ella?’
‘Bare old.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Black and white.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Bare boring.’
‘Why?’
‘Black and white.’
‘Anything else?’
‘French. Gave up French.’
‘But there were subtitles.’
‘Gave up reading.’
I put on The Truman Show and told them about Plato’s cave. They went ‘Wooah’ and looked at me funny.
*
At the end of the day, I went back to the Department and wrote an email to HoD, cc’ing Tom.
I know the term has technically begun, but I am pleading with you to make a change to my timetable.
I don’t want to teach Media
I don’t want to teach Media
I don’t wa
nt to teach Media
I would quite like to teach History Or anything else
Except Media
Tom came in and looked over my shoulder.
‘I take it the first lesson didn’t go so well.’
‘I don’t care what you have to do, but just get me out of this.’
HoD walked in.
‘What did you do to Ella?’
‘Nothing. Why?’
‘She came to see me in tears at lunchtime. Said she wanted to change from English and Meedja to just Meedja. Then she came to see me just now in even more tears saying she wants to drop Meedja too. You sadistic tyrant! What did you do to her?’
‘I asked her what she had read. Then I asked her what she had seen.’
‘That’ll do it.’
*
Suddenly, Little Miss Outstanding burst into the Department in floods of tears. I put my arm around her and asked what was wrong. She said that all the boys in her new Year 11 class had been bullying her. I sat her down and made her a tea. Through shuddering sobs she said that she had posted pictures of herself on Facebook in a bikini on holiday in Santorini and that all the boys had seen it.
Who’d have thought it? You put up risqué photos of yourself onto a giant noticeboard which billions of people have access to, and then Boom! Your pervy pupils go and look at it.
I told her not to worry, and rushed off to Debating Club.
*
We all had new responsibilities this year. Little Miss Outstanding was now editing the school magazine. Tom was granted his Chutney Club on the roof of the Science block. I got Debating Club.
There used to be a module at GCSE called Speaking and Listening, which our kids flourished at because they are often much better at telling stories than writing them and are so damn funny and their stories so extraordinary. But the government abolished Speaking and Listening at GCSE. They are the two least rigorous senses, after all.
PERIOD 7: DEBATING CLUB
I started with a lesson from the system, which featured a balloon debate in which the kids had to decide whether to throw Wayne Rooney, Justin Bieber, 50 Cent or Britney Spears out of a balloon. They became extremely animated by this, and passionately defended their lumpen celebrity of choice.
I fired them up with arch interjections, like ‘I am amazed the balloon can get off the ground at all, given the weight of jewellery and egos involved.’
They said, ‘Ooooooh, Sir! Nah, Sir! You’re baaaaaaad. You’re well out of order!’
I assured them that as an avid Belieber, we were going to keep Justin safe, no matter what.
To help them, I showed them examples of debates on Question Time and BBC Parliament to model how to debate issues. About halfway through, a kid asked why these posh people weren’t put in detention for shouting out, interrupting each other and name calling. I realised that political discourse had become so toxic that I could no longer find suitable examples to show them. The world was regressing, becoming more primitive. In this new Looking Glass world, the adults in power were behaving worse than Year 7 Set 4s. Don’t copy the adults, kids. Keep the outside out.
That afternoon we did euthanasia. I had the video primed. This one couldn’t fail. It was BBC, after all. And it had Terry Pratchett in it, so there was some cultural enrichment in there too. I watched the film over and over to check there was nothing unsuitable. I followed best practice by checking with Mentor that there was no one in the class who might react badly to the issue. The film showed an elderly couple travelling to Dignitas in Switzerland so that the husband can bring an end to the misery of his incurable illness. They are paragons of dignity. After he calmly slips away, she turns and stands, unruffled, looking out of the frosted window at the deep snow. British values in full effect.
The kids dealt with it with great maturity and sensitivity. I was destroyed by it, wiping tears from my eyes. Here I was, their teacher, the one who was supposed to be revealing the mysteries of life to them, but I was teaching something I knew nothing about.
12
Emily
I am very worried about her. She is always wan, withdrawn. She definitely isn’t well. I think she stays up all night. It’s impossible to pin down exactly what the problem is. Anorexia? Bulimia? Someone said she might be epileptic. I should call home, but I believe all her family have now passed.
It may just be shyness. She is terribly, terribly shy and introverted. She can barely look me in the eye. Always quiet. Hates to be asked questions. Incredibly evasive and prickly.
It’s probably just depression. Well, melancholy. The more antique disposition. A natural by-product of her astonishing intelligence. My God, is she bright. She knows it all. When she does choose to speak, the rest of the class is silent, while we digest what she has said. And it will be, invariably, the most surprising and original thing I have heard all week. She is sharp, blasphemous, outrageous, iconoclastic, defiantly feminist, hilarious. And then she leaves us there, dangling –
While we struggle to keep up.
But she is utterly confounding. One minute she is warm and winsome, almost coquettish – yes, flirtatious – while she shares her most intimate thoughts with me late into the night. And then, just as I think I have got her onside, she turns on me with savage glee. She can be truly unsettling; definitely the most disturbing person I have taught. But she is also the most exciting discovery I have made. Yet almost impossible to teach.
I am regularly struck dumb when trying to teach her. Like Billy Collins, I want to lift her ‘tippet made of tulle’ from her shoulders and lay it on the back of the chair, to untie her bonnet, so her hair unfurls, to fiddle with the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons down the back of her long white dress …
That’s right. I have fallen in love with Emily Dickinson.
*
Every lesson we did something different. The first lesson we just looked at that haunting daguerreotype, one of the only images of her in existence. We know so little about Emily. And that is why she is great to teach. We need that distance, that space to discover.
We tried to imagine her life. I gave them a bit of context from Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Liam liked Emerson’s quote about how he was a ‘transparent eyeball’; he said, ‘Oooh’, and made the triangle with his hands.
We walked around the room, turning on each beat, so even if the line didn’t make explicit sense, at least they embodied the rhythm. It was the same principle as teaching Shakespeare – establish the iambic heartbeat, and you understand it. Liam was very gifted at drama, so he directed a dramatisation of ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’, where the whole class was standing around the grave, singing the chorus as a gospel choir. Alexia was a fabulous creative writer, so we often wrote imaginary letters to Emily from her lovers, based on the fragments of poetry found on envelopes that had once contained lost letters. We imagined which words were cut when her poems were edited, instead of all those damn hyphens. We even created her Facebook page. She didn’t have many friends, sadly.
We all found different things in the poems. Wally thought they were about one thing, and one thing only. He didn’t do ambiguity. I remember when we did Antony and Cleopatra at school, my English teacher said, ‘Everyone is either a Roman or an Egyptian.’ Wally was a Roman, for whom every line was a straight road to a place he already knew. For Wally, Emily was a chick stuck in her attic who needed to get out more and get some. Every poem was about sex, or lack thereof – all literature was – that was why he was doing it for A Level. Zainab and Alexia began challenging him on his sexism, but he reacted by ‘calling the Politically Correct police’. He was just saying what everyone else was thinking, after all. Although if he thought he was going to get laid, he had a funny way of going about it. He was happy to discourse about his use of porn, which made all the girls in the class retch. I tried to pander to his basest instincts by telling them to put on ‘their filth goggles’ when reading ‘A Narrow Fellow in the Grass’, which really does have a sexual dimension. Wall
y sniggered like Finbarr Saunders all the way through, but the rest of them didn’t buy it. Zainab said, ‘Isn’t it just about a snake in the grass?’
‘Is that would you would prefer?’ I asked.
‘Yes!’ she said.
I concurred that maybe it was just about a snake in the grass. But they couldn’t just say that in the exam. What else?
Zainab was also a Roman – she could only see God. She saw no struggle, no conflict. The Narrow Fellow was Jesus. That was that.
Alexia was an Egyptian with a fertile imagination, who led us deftly towards a richer understanding of the poem. For her, it was just about nature, transcendentalism, the end of innocence, androgyny, and a radical rejection of Emily’s role within an overbearing patriarchal society.
Ella thought whatever Alexia thought.
The glorious thing was that we could not have a final, definitive answer. No categorical tick or cross. The opacity and mystery of her poetry kept us intrigued, and, in the deathless phrase of a thousand kids, ‘made us want to read on’.
And read it again.
13
The Letting Go
At the end of another long, attritional, baffling and exultant day, I walked into the Department and was confronted by a weird guy in my chair. He wasn’t just in my chair. He was tipping backwards on it.
I exited fast, and observed him. Tom approached to find me crouched down with my nose pressed against the glass.
‘Who the hell is that?’ I whispered.
‘New Trainee,’ said Tom. ‘But he’s not going to last long with that kind of chair etiquette. Ponce alert.’
‘Who’s training him?’
‘You are.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘What? You’re ready. I believe in you.’
‘Oh, seriously. Go fuck yourself.’
‘What’s the problem? He’s taking your Year 8s off you. You just have to sit there.’