Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

by Kate Clanchy

  Ofsted came back in, and the report was direr than ever. Behaviour in the school had collapsed, just as Jez said, just as it did in Theresa May’s school. The bitterness of the excluded had taken years to establish, and without strong leadership or real belief in what they were doing, it destroyed the school. Jez was right: there was only one place where he could flourish in the British class and classroom system, and that was at the bottom end of the top set of a securely run comprehensive, a place where he could hold on to his working-class identity while stretching his fine brains, where he could see other aspirations while holding his own. Miss Debility did take that away from him; the joke really was on him.

  Oldest One’s Not-Grammar School

  Now Oldest One is sixteen and we’ve crossed town to check out the sixth form in the Famously Good Comp. It’s huge (five hundred pupils). Its results at A Level are among the best in the country. They have STEP Maths and a brass quintet. It’s tempting, much as we love our school. Oldest One’s year group is very small, and the number going into the sixth form even smaller, so the courses on offer are limited. Here, they have A Level Music, two Further Maths sets, Economics, Theatre Studies, and three foreign languages. I can’t imagine how they do it; the funding per pupil in the sixth form has been in decline since the Tories came to power.

  We’re nervous, so we’re early. We tour the facilities, which are pleasingly minimal: battered classrooms and overcrowded bike racks; clearly, teaching gets priority here. I collect a prospectus, and study it. You are admitted to each A Level course separately . . . you must have a B at GCSE in your chosen subject . . . you need to have six Bs overall. It’s well within Oldest One’s range, but it would exclude most of the other pupils in Year 11 at his current school. And surely – this is a puzzle – quite a few in Year 11 in this school too, because it may be Famously Good but it is still a comp, and at least a third of them don’t get their five GCSEs with English and Maths each year. What do they do for sixth form? And there’s another, related mystery: I can’t find re-sit GCSE Maths and English anywhere on the prospectus, but they must be there. They are basic, essential qualifications. Doesn’t every state sixth form in the country offer them? In Essex, they were our bread and butter.

  I keep leafing through, looking, as we stand around in the lobby. My son is watching kids in private school uniforms come in, lots of them, and snarling, sotto voce, for he is going through a purely Marxist phase. We check out the display stands: Oxbridge Entrance, Extra-Curricular . . . but wait, here is a stand from Local Rough Academy, the most disadvantaged school in the whole city, the one that, in addition to the poverty we carry in our school, educates most of the poor white, as opposed to immigrant kids. What can this be doing here?

  ‘Are you looking for a BTEC in PE?’ says a voice from behind the stand, and a chummy lady with optimistic cat’s-eye glasses on a glittery chain manifests herself, smiling eagerly.

  ‘Hruumph,’ says Oldest One. He still hates being spoken to in public.

  But the lady is not put off. Clearly underemployed at this stage in the evening, and also taking slouched and scruffy Oldest One for a disaffected youth, she spiels: ‘A Levels aren’t for everyone! The important thing is to find the course that is for you. We have a full range of BTECs. We have Business! Are you interested in Business?’

  ‘No!’ says Oldest One, who already has highly developed quasi-Marxist views about this subject.

  ‘You can take it alongside re-sit English and Maths,’ says the lady, kindly, and the penny drops.

  ‘Oh wow,’ I say, excited to have cracked it. ‘You’re here to mop up the Year 11 kids who are going to get chucked out of Famously Good Comp! They have to come to you because they can’t do re-sit English and Maths here! That’s what happens to the GCSE failures!’

  ‘And then Famous Comp tops up with private school dropouts,’ mutters Oldest One, Marxist-ly.

  ‘The important thing is to find a course for the individual,’ the lady says, blandly. ‘We don’t all have the same talents.’

  ‘Do you do any A Levels at your place?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘I see! So you’re like the secondary modern sixth form?’ I bulldoze on. ‘And Famously Good Comp is the grammar, and you’re working together?’

  ‘We co-operate to maximize choice for the individual,’ says the lady, firmly.

  Honestly, I can see Famous Comp’s problem. It’s the curse of A Level, again: exams conceived for 10 per cent of the country and designed to be taught in groups of fifteen, now funded to be taught to 70 per cent of the population in groups of twenty. What is Famous Comp to do? To maintain its famous, wide-ranging, excellent sixth form it must have a wide choice of A Levels. To pay for that, including the minority small classes such as Music, the rest of the classes must be filled up to twenty. A full A Level class is stressful on teacher and students, and the demand of the course means even a moderately weak student in such a class will fail. Failing your A Level is no good to anybody, but offering alternative BTEC classes for weaker students alongside the A Level probably won’t work, because they will be seen as second rate and will be very hard to fill. Besides, lots of BTECs demand facilities like kitchens and workshops.

  So Famous Comp is making its A Level classes economic by stacking them high, but workable by packing them only with students who can cope. It is achieving this by excluding anyone, including pupils from its own lower school, who didn’t pass English and Maths first time: a crude, but probably accurate enough measure. The others go to Rough Academy. Rough Academy, in turn, gives up its brightest students to Famous Comp to do A Levels, and compensates by filling up its BTEC classes to economic levels. Nice. The only problems, in fact, are the individual students hurt when their school excludes them for not being clever enough (this is a big hurt); the expectations and academic standards hurt all the way down Rough Academy by the lack of an academic sixth form; the difficulties caused in staff recruitment at Rough Academy because the best teachers will always want an academic range; and the underlying, pus-filled wound of social division which this system so clearly exasperates.

  ‘Doesn’t it break your heart?’ I say to the lady from Rough Academy. ‘When you work in the school. I mean, honestly, doesn’t it?’

  The lady puts down her leaflet. ‘Kind of,’ she says. ‘Yes.’

  Nevertheless, we tour the Famous Comp History Department, and talk to the empowered, informed, highly successful Oxbridge entrance officer. We chat to some of the kids crowding in: Oldest One’s clever contemporaries who left the state system at different points for St Egg’s, for rural comps, for private school, each time impoverishing his classrooms and his life, all flowing back now the Not-Grammar offer is on the table. And we are here, too. It’s not the children’s fault. When Oldest One gets over his Marxism he’ll like them, very much.

  So Oldest One goes to Famous Not-Grammar for his sixth form, taking his best mate with him, thus depriving his own old school, my dear school, of both their fine brains. But he flourishes in the big, fast-moving classes, and he likes his new, posher, intellectual friends. Though he comments that the standard of behaviour is lower, on the whole, in Famous Comp than in our place, and that middle-class kids ‘definitely, definitely drink more and take way more drugs. The kid who takes the most, most drugs? He got expelled from a private school. It’s really simple: the more money, the more drugs. People who think our school is rough? They know nothing.’

  About Teaching English

  Michael and Allen

  When I started to teach English, I wondered if anyone else – in the school, in the district, in the country – was teaching the correct use of the apostrophe, for whichever year group I informed about it, it always seemed to be news. Perhaps all rookie English teachers have the same experience: standing in front of class after class and imparting the truth about the possessive to a row of round-eyed faces to whom it is entirely novel. I was flattered, filled with missionary zeal, and my earne
st evangelizing lasted until I found myself explaining the apostrophe as a brand-new idea to the very same pupils whom I had so carefully enlightened the previous year. Thus, I discovered that all English teachers do teach the apostrophe; the problem is, the apostrophe doesn’t stick.

  Of course, all schooling is a broad brush, all lessons dripping paint. There will always be gaps and corners it is impossible to cover; that shouldn’t stop us slopping on the whitewash. But the apostrophe seemed special; the rule was easy enough to teach, but peculiarly hard to retain. I’d explain it, everyone would get it; then its and didnts, and, worse, acres of grocers’ apostrophes (apple’s and pear’s), would appear in the very next essay. In fact, when I was teaching re-sit GCSE in Essex and my only aim was to get the kids to pass the exam, somehow and anyhow, I would tell my classes on no account to use the apostrophe, never, no, not at all, because I reckoned this created fewer mistakes than the reverse.

  So why won’t the rules about the apostrophe adhere to the mind when, for instance, the line ‘screw your courage to the sticking-place’ always does? They are both arcane and complex; both appeal to lost word forms. Perhaps Macbeth is simply more useful. We all find moments when we need to tighten our determination like a lute string, but no one actually needs the apostrophe to communicate other than the most delicate writers and elegant readers; for ordinary purposes we know what ‘didnt’ means, perfectly well, as a billion txts demonstrate. Most of the time, in fact, the apostrophe is used less to communicate than as a badge of education. Grocers misuse the apostrophe because they are worried about this; they know the concept of the apostrophe matters to some customers, so they add it to their pear’s.

  The grocers are right: people care. In fact, the large bag of stuff loosely called ‘good grammar’ and its prominent markers – the distinction between practice and practise, the proper use of the semi-colon and apostrophe, the decay of certain words – often seem to be the only aspect of English teaching that concerns governments, newspaper leader writers, and men on Clapham omnibuses at all. There was a dramatic example of this in 2016, when eleven-year-olds across England were suddenly, by government edict, forced to do enormous amounts of grammatical parsing in their end of primary school exams. This exam was imposed against the advice of almost all teachers, writers, and educational researchers, but the Tory government insisted that it would raise standards; that for the baffled herds of reading, writing, shouting children, only grammar would do; only parsing could sort the sheep from the goats. The main result was that thousands of children were made very unhappy, failed the exam, and were put off English at secondary school.

  I am not going to argue here that grammar does not matter, because that is rehearsed elsewhere, and besides, it matters very much to me. I treasure the apostrophe. I feel about the decay of certain words – ‘disinterest’, or ‘literally’, or ‘unique’ – as I do about elderly relatives in their final illness: a mixture of sorrow, rage, and denial. I have the greatest difficulty in saying ‘relatable’, though I push myself. But over the years I’ve learned that the best way to teach the apostrophe is by teaching the user to care about it and about all written expression; to teach reading and writing with confidence and love. These are some of the kids who taught me that.

  The Ineffable Genius of Michael Egbe

  To begin with, a poem, a whole poem, because that is the way I always begin a lesson. I don’t apologize for this in a classroom, even if – especially if – the poem is complex or ancient, and I don’t apologize now. This is an exciting piece of writing, the best thing you’ll hear all week, I say. Also: brace yourselves; this is going to be wild. Though now I add: bear in mind that this poem was written by a seventeen-year-old from Nigeria, a boy, who like so many others, was left behind with an aunt when his parents first came to England to work in the NHS, and who only joined his family when he was fourteen; a boy who did a lot of dreaming and a lot of longing, and who had to grow up very quickly. Buckle up and feel his velocity.

  Cape

  By Michael Egbe

  When I was a kid, I was always waiting for that freak accident,

  the one that would cause the awesome explosion, that

  would spread gamma rays down my blood stream; for that

  rush, that rage, as my cells fused with this strange element.

  I could see myself on a hospital bed surrounded

  by doctors unable to explain the marvel I am.

  I knew I would feel no pain as a needle tried

  to pierce my skin, impenetrable as a turtle’s shell,

  and that soon I’d wake up and see my flabs

  turn to abs, my biceps bulge out of my sleeves

  and I’d try to walk but end up defying gravity and

  – quickly forgetting how terrified of heights I am –

  slip into that skin-tight costume with the silky cape

  that moves and rustles with the wind

  as I stand at the top of the Empire State Building

  glaring into the clear blue sky, and

  (momentarily ignoring the beautiful brunette reporter

  who was going to fall deeply in love with me

  when I revealed my mysterious secret identity to her

  and asked her to be my bride)

  swoop down to the street to that small fat kid

  who’d just been dipped in the toilet by his high school bullies

  and give him courage to fight back not with violence

  but with the aim to change them for the better, and

  fly him around in my cape and tell him that I’ve got him.

  When Michael first wrote that poem, and I found myself typing it out and correcting only the spellings (quite a few of these – to be fair, I think Michael may be a little dyslexic, like so many of my poets), it seemed so good that I worried I might be losing my mind and sense of perspective, becoming my fear: the poetic equivalent of a crazy cat lady who thinks each puss is a genius. So I sent it to Professor K, up at the university, to check; then read it again, putting in, mostly for fun, the brackets and the final stanza break.

  But that was all I could add to it. Everything else was perfect. It really didn’t seem possible or natural. The poem had been written, entirely in front of me, in less than an hour. Michael had chatted for at least twenty minutes of that; giggled to himself through most of the composition process; and added that brilliant title, with something like a smirk, only at the very last minute. It was even stranger because, though Michael was a talented musician and could tango, he was not, officially, clever. He was always losing things. He scraped a B at English GCSE. He got an ignominious U when he attempted the AS in English Language. But this poem, this poem was –

  Ping! So moving. So sophisticated, came the Professor’s assessment. So much to say about contemporary masculinity. The yearning! The way he rescues himself at the end! And then the sounds scheme, those full rhymes only for the cartoon self. And the tone – he’s sort of playing with us throughout. Swooping – like Superman. Yup, this really does it for me. How did you get him to write that?

  How did I? Well, there was a trick to it, but a very simple one. I’d started the workshop by handing out the poem below, which is by Lorraine Mariner. (Lorraine Mariner is one of my favourite poets for many reasons, but one of them is that she comes from Essex, and went to one of my sixth-form college’s feeder schools just before the college itself came into being. Her deadpan, loving, hilarious accounts of Essex life, and her powerful vein of self-deprecating, ironized fantasy, remind me of Liam.) It’s a rich poem, and particularly appealing to teenagers just emerging out of childhood, and rueing, as they always do, the loss.

  My Beast

  When I was a child I worried

  that when I got my chance to love a beast

  I would not be up to the task and I’d fail.

  As he came in for the kiss I’d turn away

  or gag on the mane in my mouth

  and the fair-haired prince

 
; and the dress that Beauty wore

  on the last page of my Ladybird book

  would be lost to me forever.

  But now I see that the last thing my father

  driving home late from work

  would have on his mind is the gardens

  flashing past and he would never stop

  to pick a rose for one of his daughters

  and if some misfortune such as

  his Volvo reversing into a beast’s carriage

  did occur and I ended up at the castle

  as compensation, the beast would probably

  just set me to work cleaning and I’d never

  look up from scrubbing a floor and catch him

  in the doorway admiring my technique.

  Still, as I’ve heard my dad say,

  he and his children may not always

  be brilliant but they always turn up,

  and in time when the beast comes to realise

  that I haven’t tried to escape

  he’ll give me leave one Sunday a month

  to visit my family and access

  to his vast library and in bed at night

  reading by the light of a candle

  I’ll shut another calf-bound volume

  and hear its quality thud

  with something like happiness.

  And you can see that Michael’s poem is like Mariner’s in some ways: they both have that ironic tone Professor K admired so much, and the overlong, tense sentences, bounding from stanza to stanza; they both appear to have regular stanzas and iambic lines and in fact burst out of them; they are both about childhood stories and fantasies; they both have unexpected, moving endings and marvellous, deadpan titles.