Twittering Argyll and Bute

I've just picked up (via AB) on an interesting wee story set in my own local authority and involving some outrage over the Tweets of a teacher. You can read the original tale here. We have the obligatory angry parent who "knows half the pupils being commented on", and the local councillor who doesn't think teachers should be wasting their time on such sites - he thinks it is a drain on public resources.

If the reported tweets are representative of this teacher's crime, then the angry parent is either psychic or has been indulging in extensive research through her child. Maybe she spends her days on Twitter herself. And both she and the councillor seem to think that Tweeting takes up a lot of time, while anyone who knows anything about it is well aware it is the work of seconds to tweet a comment. No, what people don't like is the sudden insight into the life of a teacher, this well-paid paragon who always feels enthusiasm for even the most disruptive class, never blanches at the paperwork she has to fill out every time a child swears, never, ever complains about the lovely children whom the complaining parents have dispatched for the day and whose behaviour and work will always be the very best they can manage.

Teachers have always indulged in this sort of conversation, with each other, with friends, with anyone who cares to listen, on a bad day. This teacher's tweets seem not to name names, and to be, frankly, pretty bland - and two out of the four quoted were made outside school hours. What will Argyll and Bute do to the defiant ones who dare to tweet again? How wonderful if there were to be a deluge of @Argyll&Bute posts - the system might well grind to a halt, given past form.

Goodness, am I glad to be free. Are other councils run by such ignorant technophobes? I feel a Keatsian moment coming on: Tweet to the spirit ditties of no tone....

Perilous poetry?

A piece in today's Guardian caught my eye because it was about teaching English. In fact, it was about the perceived possible effects of teaching a specific poem which might, so the argument goes, lead to knife crime in a culture where such crime is on the increase. You can read the poem, Education for Leisure, here (scroll to the foot of the page). You will see that it might also lead to an increase in crime against goldfish, and you may or may not care for the poem.

But that's not the point. The point is that a piece of literature by a respected writer is to be banned because of its subject, because someone complained and someone else took fright and knee-jerked. That's how it seems to me anyway. And if we apply the same strictures, we'd better not teach Shakespeare at all - the article refers to Romeo and Juliet, but you might think Macbeth a tad free with the daggers. And what about old Larkin? His poem The Old Fools could be seen as offensive to the very old, and as for that magnificent Aubade ... fear of death, worrying preoccupation with dying and being dead: not the sort of thing we want our young to think about at all. No, no - never mind the wonderful imagery, the masterful form - it's the possible damage to young minds we are about.

Literature gives the opportunity to bring the forbidden out into the open, to discuss it, to think about psychology and morality and choices and fears in a safe environment where you're actually seeming to do something else. If I were still teaching, I'd be copying that poem even now and teaching it tomorrow - and I'd tell my pupils why. And I'd remember that parents' evening long ago when a blustering father complained because I was encouraging his child to read Joan Lingard's Across the Barricades (about the Troubles in Northern Ireland). I don't know what he feared, but by today's standards he'd be seeing his boy in the IRA.

Dangerous stuff, literature.