Someone else kindly read this for me, and report back the main points? I scanned it but don't believe my blood pressure can take it if I read the whole thing without mediation. (Oh, and somebody break it to the black boys at school that I'm not fit to teach them? Apparently I'm alright to teach white and Asian boys. I know, let's segregate our schools by colour! After all, it worked so well in South Africa.)
(I promise I'll stop writing about school soon. I know it goes down like a lead balloon. It's just that there's SO MUCH about it, all the time, constantly. Imagine if every time you opened a paper, turned on the radio or the TV politicians and ordinary folk were shouting the odds over your job. Everyone's an expert on it, everyone has an opinion, because everyone went to school once.)
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He seems more concerned about the fact you don't look like black boys.
Fake willy, bit of burnt cork, sorted.
The thing that has been getting to me lately re: so much press about teachers and teaching is all this guff about incompetent teachers and teachers 'having a bad day'. What constitutes an incompetent teacher? Is there some sort of test that teachers have to sit every now and again? Oh sorry - you got 4 out of 10 you are incompentent - you will have to be sent to another school for incompetent teachers - it is such a load of negative nonsense.
Deep breath.
Nnnnngggghhhhhh indeed! xx
"Schools are the only businesses which blame their customers for their own failings."
Did you know you were a businesswoman, Annie? And do your pupils know they're customers?
Four days and Boris has managed to upset transport workers and teachers. He's really hit the ground running!
hey, sugar! found you via istvanskiboy..anyway, my daughter is a teacher out in los angeles, she's multi-ethnic (which in PC language means, she ain't white) but, more to your story...she and every other teacher have the same problem...the students are right, the teachers are wrong...if you're white, you're a racist, if you're black you're an elitist who doesn't understand poor black children anyway, hang in there, keep teaching and perhaps the next generation will understand the reading, writing and arithmetic have no color associations!
i read it and now i'm annoyed too, which is rich given that i only lasted two months as a teacher before running away in tears.
wallpaper your classroom in those portraits the kids made of you. they're obviously more than happy with their teacher.
Geoff made a good point. What are you going to do with your productivity bonus?
Crumbs, no stereotyping there, eh? Also, it's Boris Johnson (if not in person, then by proxy). He went to Eton and calls black kids 'piccaninnies'. I'm not sure he's in any position to have any kind of opinion how schools should operate.
Tim - tee hee! That has cheered me up immensely.
RoMo - I know. They are flailing around like motherfuckers, excuse my french, because they don't know what they're doing, so they're blaming the teachers (who are doing a job none of them would have the balls to do) for their failures. Quite pathetic.
Geoff - good point, I hadn't even picked up on that. It's a fundamental flaw in the way that they view education these days, like you can apply business principles to it. You really, really can't. Though they did propose that teachers' pay should be performance related a while back. Cash bonuses for top levels in the SATS! Hurrah!
Hi Savannah! Hats off to your daughter... That's interesting what you say about 'if you're black you're an elitist who doesn't understand poor black children anyway' - I'm sure that would be the position if we ever did manage to recruit more black teachers here...
The thing is, of course we should have more black teachers, and more men teachers in schools, but blaming the white women teachers who are currently holding the education system together in this country for being, well, white and female, and not black and male, seems positively mental.
Rosie, I really don't blame you. Lots of people have talked to me about retraining as teachers & I keep saying 'Are you mad? Don't do it!' It's a poisoned chalice.
Istvanski - spend it on drugs and booze.
Patroclus - well QUITE. And Londoners have shot ourselves in the foot because that's going to be the response in any serious issue in the future. It's Boris Johnson, what does he know about anything?
More about schools please - it doesn't go down like a lead balloon, it's a window on to a world that most of us don't see any more. Plus, I still really want to hear about strikes where you all stand round an oil drum and shout "Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!" (even if it's not true)
As for that man - he's just a wee misogynist boy who wants his mammy...
And so it begins...
What, pray tell, exactly is "education fit for males"? Something far superior, no doubt, to education fit for females. In what way is the presence of female teachers "unhelpful"? And as for "female teachers who don't look like the boys in their care..."
Another question: why is this man Ray Lewis allowing himself to be used as a tool by the biggest tool in the Tory toolshed?
For God's sake, Annie, hang in there. It sounds like the kids will need people like you more than ever in the years to come.
What I suspect he's worried about Marsha, is the current heavy emphasis in the curriculum on needlework, flower-arranging and crochet; on muffin and fairy cake baking lessons followed by seminars on cake decoration with pink icing sugar, which is an inevitable result of female-dominated education pushed by female teachers with their latent female agenda. How can boys help but fail in this kind of atmosphere?
And yes, SparkleyC, I think you've got a point there... It reminds me a bit of Philip Wylie's Mom-ism, though that was way back in the 1940s...
I'm with sparkley - this kind of stuff is more than welcome. (Uh, that is to say, this kind of post. Stubborn Tory nonsense, not so much.)
Keep up the good fight, etc etc.
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