by Kate Clanchy
KATE CLANCHY
Some Kids I Taught
and
What They Taught Me
For my colleagues:
Trish and Emma,
Nikki, Steve and Frank,
Janet,
Cathy, Dee and Annabella,
and all the others.
Contents
Introduction
About Love, Sex, and the Limits of Embarrassment
Callum, Paul, Liam, Akash, Emmanuel, and Javel
Callum’s Dog • Paul’s Boots • Liam’s Club • Akash’s Play Javel’s Rose and Emmanuel’s Trousers
About Exclusion
Kylie, Royar, and Simon
Kylie’s Baby • Royar’s Firecracker • Simon’s Child
About Nations, Papers, and Where We Belong
Shakila, Aadil, and Me
Shakila’s Head • Aadil’s Blood • My Papers
About Writing, Secrets, and Being Foreign
Priti, Farah, Priya, and Amina
Priti’s Canoe • Farah’s Secret • Priya’s Poem • Amina’s Birthday • Priya’s Poems
About the Hijab
Imani’s Argument
About Uniform
Elsa, Connor, and Saira
Because of Elsa • Because of Connor • Because of the Poor Table • Because of Saira
On the Church in Schools
Tess, Jude, and Oldest One
About Prayer
Emily, Priya, and Kamal
Kamal’s Paris
About Poverty, Art, and How to Choose a School
Cheyenne, Darren, My Son, and Scarlett
About Prizes
Phillip and Tanya
About Selection: Sets and Streams, Grammars and Not
Jez and Oldest One
Jez’s Joke • Oldest One’s Not-Grammar School
About Teaching English
Michael and Allen
The Ineffable Genius of Michael Egbe • Allen’s Smithy
About Being Out of Place
Sofia, Janie, and Chris
Sofia’s Spelling • Chris and Janie’s Code
About Being Well
Lianne, Danielle, Susie, Kristell, Courtney, and Dawud
Lianne’s Biscuit and Courtney’s Dance • Dawud’s Sister
About What I Think I Am Doing
Jason, Aimee, Heya, and Shakila
Jason’s Skull • Aimee’s Control • Heya’s Poem
Introduction
Thirty years ago, just after I graduated, I started training to be a teacher. As far as I remember, it was because I wanted to change the world, and a state school seemed the best place to start. Certainly, it wasn’t a compromise or a stopgap career: I had no thought of being a writer, then.
Soon I was much too busy to write even if I had thought of it. Teacher training is hard, a crash course not so much in the study of education, but in the experience of school: in the taking of the register and the movement of chairs from room to room; in the flooding sounds of corridor and stairs; in the educational seasons, from the tempering heat of exam week to the crazy cosiness of Christmas; and above all in the terrifying confidence trick that is classroom discipline. It’s a bodily experience, like learning to be a beekeeper, or an acrobat: a series of stinging humiliations and painful accidents and occasional sublime flights which leave, you either crippled or changed. If you are changed, you are changed for life: your immune system will no longer raise hives when adolescents mock you; you may stand at the door of a noisy classroom with all the calm of a high-wire walker, poised to quell the noise with a twirl of your pole.
Now, I can still confidently tell rowdy adolescents to behave on the bus; still enter a classroom and look at the back row in the indefinable, teacherly way that brings quiet. I still want to change the world and think that school is an excellent place to do it. I have never got tired of classrooms, and have always, except when my children were very young, been employed in some capacity in a state school. Soon after I got my second teaching post, though, I also started to write in my spare time and holidays. A few years later, I began selling some journalism and cut down on my teaching hours; and when I was thirty, I published my first book. Suddenly I found that if I introduced myself in my new guise as a writer I’d be asked what I wrote about, and how, and listened to with a care that seemed exaggerated, even silly. I realized I was accustomed, when I talked about my work, to hardly being listened to at all.
Because everyone tells schoolteachers their jobs: everyone from politicians in parliament and journalists in newspapers to parents at the school concert and pensioners on the bus. The telling ranges from the minutely pedagogical – how we should set, mark, and test; to the philosophical and psychological – how to punish and reward; all the way to the religious – church schools, mindfulness; and politicized issues, such as the reintroduction of grammar schools. The tellings come in the form of laws, political manifestos, editorials, crazed comments in online forums, and – amazingly often – a conversation with someone you have just met. Partly, this happens because people are so interested in schools – most of us were formed there, many of us have children there – but it is also because people feel free to set about a teacher in a way they never would a doctor or a lawyer.
For teachers have a lower social standing than other professionals. This isn’t just because we are paid less, as I found out when I entered the even less well remunerated, but far more prestigious, profession of writing. And it isn’t just because of the messy, practical nature of teachers’ work, either: laymen do not tell a vet how to go about birthing calves, or a gynaecologist where to poke. It may be because so many teachers are women; or perhaps because we work with poor children; and it is certainly because so few of us are posh ourselves (teaching has always been the profession of first resort for graduates from working-class backgrounds). It’s because of gender and class prejudice, because, in short, most teachers are Miss, as working-class pupils call their female teachers in England.
Miss: I have heard so many professional people express distaste for that name, but never a working teacher. Usually, the grounds are sexism, but real children in real schools don’t use ‘Miss’ with any less (or more) respect than ‘Sir’. Miss grates only on the ears of those who have never heard it used well: as it grated on me, as a middle-class Scot, thirty years ago. No longer: Miss is the name I put on like a coat when I go into school; Miss is the shoes I stand in when I call out the kids in the corridor for running or shouting; Miss is my cloak of protection when I ask a weeping child what is wrong; Miss is the name I give another teacher in my classroom, in the way co-parents refer to each other as ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’. Miss seems to me a beautiful name, because it has been offered to me so often with love.
I would like more people to understand what Miss means, and to listen to teachers. Parts of this book, therefore, are a sort of telling-back: long-stewed accounts of how teachers actually do tackle the apostrophe; of how we exclude and include; of the place of religion in schools; of how the many political changes of the last decades have played out in the classroom; of what a demanding, intellectual, highly skilled profession teaching can be. These confident answers, though, are short and few, because mostly what I have found in school is not certainty, but more questions. Complex questions, very often, about identity, nationality, art, and money, but offered very personally: questions embodied in children.
These questions, and the piercing moments when they were presented to me, make up the bulk of this book. It is structured around them: first around the child and the dilemma she brings, then in a wider grouping of related topics, and finally, loosely, around the c
ourse of my thirty years in schools, because it is me, not the children, learning the lessons here. I am in each story, clearly delineated, so that you will know what sort of person is doing the listening and filtering, and, I hope, be able to put my views aside and see the kids more clearly. I want to show you us, children and teachers, ‘Kids’ and ‘Miss’, both in groups, as if in a long school corridor, and then close in, so you can see the stuff we have brought with us from home, so you can hear some of the things we say.
These are not biographies: they are partial views of young people absorbed in their circumstances, on the move, on the cusp, on the turn. But, even in a snapshot, children have the right to privacy just as adults do; and, more strongly than adults, the right to leave their old selves behind them. So, even where the stories are the most admiring, and when individuals positively wanted to be identified, I have detached these accounts from their original names, times, and places. Some stories need more privacy, and I have provided that with occasional very extensive blurring of identity. I have quoted one or two poems, and named two poets, from the anthology of my students’ poems, England: Poems from a School, and used, with express permission, one real name from my past; other than that, no named individual here should be identified as any particular living person. I hope, however, that offence would not be given even if a general identification were made, because I have included nobody, teacher or pupil, about whom I could not write with love.
There is so much to love in school. I am writing this in September, school’s New Year. I am snug in my study, writing: I would rather be in school. Teaching has taken me a long journey out of my class, and my nation; it takes me, every time I go in, out of myself. Today, the corridors are full of the young, of new pupils, and of old pupils renewed. Things have happened to them over the summer: they are different, experimental people, full of themselves, eager to tell me about it. The register is fresh with names; the exercise books are crunched open at the spine, the pages blank and smooth as Larkin’s spring leaves. Begin afresh, they seem to say. afresh, afresh. I fall for it, every year. You come too.
About Love, Sex, and the Limits of Embarrassment
Callum, Paul, Liam, Akash, Emmanuel, and Javel
Callum’s Dog
To begin at the very beginning, with sperm and egg, with condoms and cucumbers, with ghastly line drawings of urethras and sperm ducts, and me, just starting out as a teacher. To go all the way back to the very early nineties, and to a small town on the east coast of Scotland. The Tories had been in power since way before I could vote, and Section 28, which notoriously forbade the ‘promoting’ of homosexuality in schools, was still law. These were the just-post-Thatcher years, and the mining industry in Scotland was a warm corpse, a popped boil, its raw red bings and destroyed communities disfiguring the central belt. They were the Trainspotting years, when drugs were rampant in the estates of Edinburgh, hundreds had died of infected needles, and thousands more were infected with HIV.
And so, one fine day, the High Heejuns, as the powers that be are called in Scotland, looked at this toxic list of miseries, and decided that Something Must be Done, and, as usual, that the Something would probably be easiest and cheapest done in schools. Education, then and now, is far more centralized in Scotland than in England, so it was not long before books, schemes of work, and acetate illustrations for that then-cutting-edge piece of classroom equipment, the overhead projector, were on their way to Blastmuir High School, where I had a temporary job, and to the muggins in charge of the target group of thirteen-year-olds: me.
Lord, how young I was – twenty-four, and in my fluffy-haired photos I look even younger. My Second Years, though, still looked like children to me, even though they were entering their teens: all of them so short, so hunched in their wee anoraks. My eye was tuned in to the multiracial London pupils I’d taught the year before, who had, by the same age, Somali height or Cypriot bosoms or styled, stiff Japanese hair, or at the very least a different, flamboyant way with the school jumper. These winter-coloured, mouse-haired children, so pale and so freckly, with their muttering, sibilant names – Fraser, Struan, Susan, Fiona, Catriona; I was having difficulty, as Prince Philip said he had with Chinese people, in telling them apart.
Or in teaching them, really. It wasn’t that I couldn’t keep them quiet – on the contrary, if I was stern and cold, they were easy to bid – it was that I couldn’t get them to talk. In London, I had become used to vocal children, from talking cultures: Turkish girls who, halfway through a test or a telling-off, stroked your jacket and asked you where you got it; multi-lingual, super-sophisticated Ugandan Asians who would raise their hands to answer any question with a full paragraph; Jewish ‘becks’ with swathes of curly hair who turned every classroom into a friendly street corner where the neighbourhood was debating the great issues of the day. My lessons, there, turned always on acting out and making up – if there wasn’t a chance to divide into small groups and perform a scene, preferably with a dance and original song included, my London pupils saw it as an hour wasted.
In Blastmuir, these lessons failed spectacularly. ‘How?’ the Blastmuir kids begged, if I asked them to interpret four lines of Macbeth. ‘Act it out how?’ And, if I forced the issue, they would come to the front, stand in a row and read the lines in a very fast monotone, to their socks. They didn’t dance, here. They knew no songs. My London students had spent their lunchtimes plaiting each other’s hair, their hands always on each other, cuddling and stroking. Blastmuir kids didn’t touch. Instead, small boys paced the corridors alone with outsize bags; outside class, boys and girls stood in ranks, backs to opposite walls, as if at an eighteenth-century dance. The older boys played football, aggressively, out on the muddy field with those vast sports bags as goalposts, or walked to the chip shop down the long straight high street in groups of four. And if the older girls applied each other’s bright blue eyeshadow, or adjusted the pink stripes of blusher on one another’s freckly cheeks, or added more hairspray to their pale and rigid hair, they must have done so secretly, in the steel toilets, behind the bashed Formica walls, for I never saw it happen.
Even in the staffroom, teachers sat in divided rows, in high-backed chairs permanently dented by particular bottoms. Staff busied themselves rather than talk. One teacher explained to me that the stitching in her hand was a patchwork Christmas tree: they were such popular gifts that she had to start each Easter to have enough to give away at Christmas. ‘Och,’ sighed a melancholy lady who proved to be the Head of French, ‘och, I can’t abide an orange. It’s such a messy froot.’ And I longed for an orange, suddenly, in that green and khaki Nescafé-smelling room where we were stitching for Christmas, if only to prove this was 1992, and not the war.
Blastmuir kids, I decided, were better than my London students at just two things: spelling ‘wh’ sounds, for they had a strong, hooting ‘h’ in their speech that made ‘where’ and ‘which’ entirely different from ‘were’ and ‘witch’; and keeping a straight face while hissing deadly insults at each other from half-closed mouths. This I learned to cultivate: maybe Blastmuir kids wouldn’t make things up, but they loved a formal debate. I found that with a little push you could create a literary argument: for example, between Macduff and Macbeth. Across the classroom, they hissed and hooted Scandinavian syllables at each other, flyting in the style of Thor and Odin: ‘Macbeth, you cannae be king. You’re no the right sort. Youse is a scaffie wee schemie, so youse are.’
‘Scaffie’ meant grubby, uncared for; and ‘schemie’ one who lived in a council housing scheme, as opposed to your ‘ain hoose’. This was an important distinction to my Blastmuir students, one always visible to them however invisible it might be to me, and often raised in class. ‘Schemie’ was a grave insult, but it had nothing on the comeback: ‘Macduff, youse and Banquo is gayboys and youse know it.’ For ‘gay’ was Blastmuir’s biggest word: its enforcer word; the category into which no one would put themselves. It didn’t mean homosexual, exactly, or not just
that: it meant foreign, citified; it meant dancing, touching; it meant making things up; it meant verboten, un-Scottish, haram.
‘Gay’ also meant, I suppose, in origin: ‘unwilling to go down the pit’; ‘too soft to go down the pit’; ‘his mother doesn’t want him to go down the pit’; ‘believes he can avoid going down the pit just by being clever’; and, ultimately, ‘sensitive in a way that terrifies his parents because they remember all too well how much it hurts’. But I didn’t understand that, then. Even though I had grown up only a few miles away, in Edinburgh, I knew nothing about mining towns: nothing of how proud and macho a culture has to be, how strongly enforced, how rigorously starved of other possibilities, if generations of men are to be pushed down into the hot dark to work themselves to death. Nothing, either, of the demands that mining families must place on their children to honour their father’s extreme sacrifice: nothing, really, about Blastmuir. I only knew the town after the mine and its work, money, dignity, and purpose had been withdrawn. I knew the brittle husk of culture it left behind, and how to despise it.
But at least my ignorance meant I didn’t worry too much about the AIDS book and the acetates from the council. Anti-gay prejudice, I airily assumed, was something everyone would grow out of, really, quite soon; and anyway, the book and the lessons would probably not even connect to the kids’ anti-‘gay’ prejudices, because the acetates really were all about bodies, not the wider, cultural meaning of ‘gay’. I had taught bodies and Sex Ed before without difficulty, even the cucumber and condom bit, and to less docile children. Explaining the workings of HIV, I reckoned, would probably be an easy lesson, with everyone at once fairly interested and too embarrassed to talk.
Besides, the AIDS book was well chosen, and the kids were enthusiastic as we read it cosily round the class: a sunny, funny Australian novel about a little boy whose mum is ill, and who falls into conversation with a nice man in the hospital. Until we got to the well-placed twist; that is, when of course we realized that the nice man has AIDS, that’s why he’s in the hospital, and that all his kindly wisdom about mortality comes from a personal source. Page 78. I had it ready marked. I had one of the council-prepared acetates on the overhead projector, which I had booked in advance and even plugged in. The acetate had ‘AIDS’ in big letters on the top. Page 77. Here we go. I swivelled to switch on the machine. It roared cheerfully.