First of all, I should warn you that if you're expecting to read a load of child psychology drivel, you've come to the wrong place. I have no sympathy whatsoever for kids or adults who claim to suffer from so-called ADD/ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). In fact, I have so little sympathy for these people (zilch, to be honest), that I prefer to use my own term to describe their condition:
ASS (Attention Seeking Syndrome)
I see that some of you are gasping in horror at my blatant lack of political correctness. That's tough! If you want to wander through life with rosy-coloured spectacles covering your eyes, that's your decision. But maybe you should search for a different type of blog; one where the harsh realities of life are never discussed and where everyone sleeps well at night in the misguided belief that the world is full of people who are innately kind and loving. Adios amigos!
So let's get back to the 'desert of the real':
These days, many (if not most) schools in the UK - and in many parts of the world - are more like battle grounds than education establishments. I'm not exactly sure when this happened. Maybe it has always been this way. Kids can be extremely malicious when they want to be (as can all humans). But a couple of decades ago, something started to go terribly wrong. The very thing that promised to give us access to unlimited information at the touch of a key, also brought war games and other violent roll-playing activities to our computer monitors: The Internet.
Now please don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the Internet is a bad thing (although in the wrong hands it undoubtedly is). What I'm saying is that the Internet has given greedy, immoral companies and individuals the opportunity to worm their way into the lives of vulnerable (and not-so-vulnerable) young people using criminality, weapons and blood-thirsty violence as a means of attraction. Add to this the fact that a great many parents are so wrapped up in their own self-absorbed lives that they no longer care what their children do in their spare time, and you have a recipe for catastrophe.
I've been teaching for 33 years. I qualified in 1976, taught in UK state schools for 4 years, and then left Britain in 1979 to teach English as a foreign language. I returned to the UK (albeit temporarily) in 2001 when my father's health (he had been ill for some year) started to deteriorate rapidly. He died later that year.
When I was a kid, I had a sadistic maths teacher who kept a thick leather strap concealed under the left shoulder of his jacket. But this was no ordinary strap. It was a 'tawse' and it was split half way along its length with the specific aim of inflicting as much pain as possible when it snapped together on making contact with the skin of your hands or backside at 500 miles an hour. The man is probably dead now, but if he were alive today and attempted to use that thing on his pupils, he'd either be locked up on the spot or the kids themselves would lynch him.
Other 'weapons' that were willingly used by many teachers to inflict pain on us were the slipper or pump (running shoes), the belt and the flat, or back, of the hand.
When I first started teaching, the cane (and many other tools of corporal punishment) were still employed in schools. Quite often, though, teachers used their bare hands as their chosen instruments of frustration and anger release. On one occasion, I had to prevent a fellow teacher from beating up a pupil in the school corridor. Nowadays, it's the teachers who are more likely to get beaten up.
Throughout my career - most of which has been spent teaching English to university students and business people throughout Europe - I have also worked as a supply teacher at, at the very least, 40 different state schools in the UK, three of which were at the very bottom of the rankings for the worst schools in Britain. I also worked for half a year at a Pupil Referral Unit for 16-year-old boys. It was the most valuable experience I've ever had (apart from running with the bulls in Pamplona!), and during those 6 months, I learned more about the dark side of human behaviour, and how to deal with it, than at any other time in my life.
Schools are dangerous places. I've taught some truly crazy kids in some truly awful schools in my time. Even though I'm a big guy and I've got a lot of experience dealing with difficult situations, I've been physically assaulted twice. But none of this compares with the terrible shootings that take place in schools in the USA on a regular basis. And now it's happening in Europe, too (as I always knew it would).
In 2002, a 19-year-old called Robert Steinhaeuser, shot and killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two students and a police officer before turning his gun on himself in the Gutenberg high school in Erfurt, Germany.
A few weeks ago - also in Germany - a 17-year-old youth burst into classrooms at his former high school in Winnenden and gunned down students in a rampage that ended with 15 dead before he took his own life.
There was no immediate indication of motive, but the gunman's victims were primarily female (eight of the nine students killed were girls, and all three teachers were women). Three men were killed later as the boy fled into the town. He shot two people who were walking past a psychiatric clinic, killing one and wounding the other. He then hijacked a car and forced the driver to head south. The driver swerved off the road to avoid a police checkpoint, but the suspect fled into an industrial area in the town of Wendlingen - about 24 miles from Winnenden - where he entered a car dealership and shot and killed a salesman and a man shopping for a car. He later shot himself after running into a dead-end street.
In December 1995, headteacher Philip Lawrence died of stab wounds when he intervened between a pupil and youths outside St George's Roman Catholic School in Maida Vale, north-west London. The man convicted of his murder was released from prison last year.
Should bouncers be employed in schools? Absolutely!
Kids have always believed that they know it all. I certainly did, and I defy anyone to say that they didn't. But things are different these days. There's something perverse in the air; something out of control. When I was a kid, I always knew in the back of my mind that I didn't really have all the answers. If I'd had all the answers, I wouldn't have made so many mistakes. These days, however, kids really do believe that they know it all. And why is this? The answer is simple: Because adults no longer step in to say 'enough is enough'. Parents, teachers, the media and the all-wise child psychologists have given kids the power to do and demand pretty much anything they want. Fasten your seat belts, folks. We're on a roller coaster ride to hell, and it's only just beginning.
If you go into any number of state schools in the UK today, you'll come across some truly nasty specimens. They'll try anything possible to disrupt your lessons and your life. They'll do anything in their power to make you feel that you'll never succeed as a teacher. That's one of the reasons why many thousands of teachers in the UK are on permanent sick leave, and why so many supply teachers are in urgent demand. I know of several cases where teachers simply didn't turn up to school one day and were never heard of again. This is what malicious kids can do to a person.
I'm totally against corporal punishment and I've never used a cane or other 'weapon' in my life, but there have been occasions in my teaching career when I would have given almost anything to have a cattle prod in my hands. In fact, on some teaching assignments, I would have felt much more comfortable if there'd been a transparent, bullet-proof wall between myself and the pupils. I suppose that's the way it will go eventually: every classroom will have a transparent bullet-proof divide - the teacher on one side and the pupils on the other.
I like the music of David Bowie very much. He has always been ahead of his time. In most cases, I agree with his sentiments. There are, however, four lines in one of his songs that, at least in part, I do not agree with. The song is called 'Changes', and I refer to the final four lines:
I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence and
So the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through
I'm not sure that children consciously try to change their worlds. Doing something consciously implies an awareness of one's environment, one's own existence, and one's thoughts. I'm not sure that many adults have this ability, never mind children. It's a rare gift to be conscious of one's environment and one's own existence. Naturally, in their own complex, yet naive, way, children 'do' try to change their worlds, but very rarely with any preconceived plan or strategy. The process is usually of a more spontaneous nature - as and when needed, so to say.
As for the last two lines: I think it's true that children are generally immune to the rantings of adults (unless intense anger or violence are involved), but I'm quite sure that they have absolutely no idea what they're going through. Again, I'm not sure that most adults know what they're going through, never mind children. Life's tough, no matter what age you are.
Nowadays, far too many teachers (both the good and the bad ... and there are a lot of bad teachers) spend at least 70% of their lesson time on class control and disciplinary matters. The decent kids are losing out.
It cannot - and should not - be allowed to continue this way.
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