A letter to Jim Murphy MP

The following open letter from me to Jim Murphy, newly-elected leader of The Labour Party in Scotland, appeared in today's Sunday Herald:

Dear Mr Murphy

As someone who successfully taught English in the state sector for my entire career, both in Glasgow and in Dunoon, and whose sons attended the local comprehensive,  I think I can claim to have a pretty good idea about teaching and learning in secondary schools in Scotland. Right from the early days when a young Johann Lamont sat in the front row of my classroom to the day I retired, I was aware of the excellent work being done by my colleagues, often under desperately trying situations. 

These situations were brought about, not by their lack of ability, but by the attitude towards education of too many of their pupils - an attitude shaped and reinforced by that of their parents, who were either hostile to teachers or uninterested as long as they could get on with their own lives. The behaviour of these pupils frequently disrupted the learning of the more interested with the inevitable effect on the quality of the experience and the final outcomes.

How do you think it makes teachers like me feel to read that you are eager to ensure that “state school pupils in deprived areas should have access to teachers in the independent sector”? (Sunday Herald, 07/12/14) We have always known that there are good and poor teachers in private schools, just as there are in every school in the land. In fact, we have also long been aware that a poor teacher is less likely to have his weaknesses exposed in an independent school, where parental pressure tends to ensure an ethos of industry. 

Before you launch your attack on the private sector, think carefully about the effect your ill-considered remarks have on the thousands of hard-working teachers in the state sector, and consider more carefully the target of your plans. Your words are more likely to have the effect of further diminishing the enthusiasm for the importance of school of any parents who listen to you.

I was a member of the Labour party for many years, but this revival of class envy at the expense of my contribution to society is just one of the factors that will ensure I will never be a member again.

Yours 

Christine McIntosh

Teacher training - some questions

I keep getting into conversations about education these days. What's the matter with me? I've obviously fallen into lassitude to be so easily dragged back to my former self. Today's was about the people who teach the teachers - those aspirants who've gone through the selection process and made it to training college. Now, I'm basing some of what I'm about to say on the assumption that the government don't think the current selection process is sufficiently rigorous, and the rest on my own memory of my year at college. And that, best beloved, was not yesterday, nor even last year. I actually know nothing at all about the people who teach the teachers these days, and nothing at all about how they got their jobs in the first place. But I'm going to toss a few thoughts around nonetheless - and perhaps some gentle reader will be able to lighten my darkness.

I'm going to start with a few questions:
What makes someone go for a job in a College of Education? Presumably they start off in schools. Are college staff significantly better paid? Or do they prefer to work in a less challenging environment?

How are they selected? Are they required to demonstrate mastery of their academic subject? To show how well they teach a class? To talk a storm at an interview? Is there any written examination or practical test (maybe like preaching to a congregation who are looking for a new minister?)

Having got the job, what is their primary aim? To demonstrate how to do the same job as the teachers the students experienced perhaps 4 years ago? To show how to put a lesson across? To discuss new techniques and new media? (I know of at least one lecturer who might well answer in the affirmative to that). To ensure that their students actually like children before they start?

Do they spend much time teaching in classrooms as a CPD exercise?

And I'm going to reflect:
When I was at college, I loathed it. After a 3 year MA course I found it at once restrictive and vague. Quite apart from having to be there from 9-4 and wear a skirt (both, presumably, easing us back into required behaviour for the job) I actually had no idea what I was learning about. This was especially true in my two subject areas. In English, I learned nothing at all. Nothing. In Latin, the nice little man who taught us (a class of 4 students) had such a boring delivery that I routinely fell asleep. It's embarrassing when your head actually hits the desk, in a class of 4.

There were classes in Educational Psychology - which is where I think I heard the instruction that when confronted by an unruly class we were to "exhaust the response". And classes in Drama, which I loathed - I can't remember why, but the lecturer kept coming to look for us in the cafeteria at the start of the afternoon, so we were obviously not keen. And were there discrete classes in Methods, or was that in the subject classes?

In all that time, no-one ever told us that it was essential not to be boring. Mind you, if they had, we might have laughed in their faces; I have never been so bored so consistently for so long. And no-one ever suggested that we had to be passionate about our subject and about communicating that passion. Naturally, no-one ever gave us practical work in demonstrating how we might do that.

Yes, I learned something in that year at college. But I learned it in the three schools where I was sent on teaching practice - by watching some excellent teaching, by talking to the people I'd been watching, by making mistakes and suffering the slow death of the period when you've run out of material and don't have anything to put in its place.

And 30 years later, I'd say I was still learning. But I always knew that there were still people out there living behind a barrier of worksheets, boring their pupils to death, sending them to sleep in the period after lunch.

So, if you're out there, the person who knows the answers to the above, gonnae put me out of my misery?

Nothing new about teaching Scottish Literature, but.

I was irritated by something I overheard on Radio Scotland this morning - something that had already irritated me when it was first announced in January. I'm referring to Mike Russell's proclamation that Scottish Literature is to be a compulsory part of the school curriculum for Higher English students. Someone else repeated that in a half-heard chat this morning, and I fell to thinking of all the so-called new initiative implied.

I imagine the average punter would assume, since it's being trumpeted, that no English teachers until now have bothered with Scottish writers. Naw - it's all Shakespeare and Milton, innit? Well ... no. Actually Scottish writing has been an important part of the English curriculum from the start of my now-defunct career in teaching, even if, back in the late '60s, Folk Tales of the Borders and The Twa Corbies seemed to dominate. But in the last 20 years of my time in the classroom, I can't think of any year group that didn't enjoy Scottish writers ...

Like the S2 boys who were so taken with the poetry of Edwin Morgan that they wrote him a laboriously-composed letter and were delighted to get a reply ...
Like the S3 girl who loved Morgan's Strawberries so much that she did a solo talk for Standard Grade on it and then sent him a copy of her talk: again, she had a personal reply and was thrilled ...
Like the Higher students, year after year, who shared Chris Guthrie's horror as her crippled father demanded she come to him,  who later wept at the fate of Ewan ...
Like the S2 pupils who learned to appreciate effective metaphor from Norman MacCaig's Visiting Hour ...

...and I haven't even mentioned Robin Jenkins or Ian Crichton Smith or The Coming of the Wee Malkies or The Lament for a Lost Dinner Ticket, or how an S4 boy with quite severe learning problems suddenly understood metre after reading the opening line of one of Morgan's sonnets, with which I think I'll stop:

A shilpit dog fucks grimly by the close

Aye.

Huvtaes no more

I was working today. Well, sort of. That kind of voluntary stuff that has you heading off on the ferry with a briefcase full of papers (and a sandwich!) rather than a rucksack, wearing, if you can picture this, the kind of shoes you sit around in rather than the ones you hike up a muddy glen in. And yes, it was stuff for the church, dealing with the business of lifelong education and distance learning in Argyll and The Isles.

Quite apart from the revisited horror of spending hours closeted in a relatively gloomy and distinctly ecclesiastical-smelling room while the sun was splitting the sky, I recognised the sinking feeling that used to overtake me at Department Meetings when there was paperwork to shuffle and forms to fill in. In particular, I was reminded of the horror of the Modules which used to happen in schools before Higher Still came in and changed everything (again). I realised yet again why promotion to the paper-shuffling (or file-shuffling, if you like) echelons of the teaching profession had never been an option for me - the department would have fallen apart in a welter of missing documentation.

Not that I am incapable of keeping some sort of tabs on things I consider wildly relevant - the carefully-filed Standard Grade folios or the book of notes on Higher RPRs come to mind - but maintaining individual record-sheets for people used to drive me potty and my record of work tended to be composed retrospectively, with the help of the pupils. I long ago recognised that I was a performer, not an administrator, and that living in the moment was always preferable to planning for it - or writing said moment up later.

And so it was with joy that I was able to sit back this afternoon and note that my - what? line-manager? boss? superior? pal? - was going to bear the brunt of all this bumf. I'm retired, I heard myself murmuring (yes, I can do murmurs) and I don't have to do this. I can take holidays, I can suit myself about the hours I work ... but inside the voice of truth was adding its own tuppenceworth. I do what is fun for me to do - and when I'm not enjoying it any more, I stop.

I guess I was anticipating all this when I was asked by an acquaintance on the ferry if I was still working. (I musta looked businesslike). No, I said, I'm retired from teaching. But what I really meant was that I've retired from huvtaes - all of them.

*In certain educational circles, a "huvtae" is what in Dunoon we called a "Please Take" - the dread summons to cover the class of an absent colleague. I have appropriated it to cover all the compulsory elements of working life - set hours, set holidays and so on.

Loudly reading

I was interested to read Neil Winton's post t'other day, and follow through to this post from Bill Boyd - both of them on the importance of reading aloud in the development - and the proof - of literacy skills and understanding of texts. They coincided with my own leading of a short workshop for adults who read aloud - or might want to read aloud - in the context of a church service, and because I'd been thinking about my teaching days after reading the blogs, I think I hit the ground running in a way I might have forgotten about.

Of course, a big hurdle in reading the Bible - in any version - is the sheer complexity of much of it. And perhaps nothing catches out the unwary reader in quite the same way as Paul's letter to the Hebrews, parts of which have begun to appear in the lectionary right now. With my sights firmly on the person who will have to tackle this next Sunday, I decided to base my teaching on just such a passage. The first sentence was five lines long, with crucial punctuation and a wandering "because" that belonged firmly, but to the unwary surprisingly, to the principal clause which followed later in the sentence. (Gosh: that sentence I've just written would be murder to read, huh?) It was great to see pennies dropping about changes in meaning if you got the "because" in the wrong tone of voice, or the destruction of meaning if you came to a halt before the end of the sentence; about the cause of this last fault in the shortness of breath of someone who doesn't know about support and voice production.

The best moment came when we were all ready to have a go at this passage. We'd talked a bit about the difficulty of church acoustics and the deaf lady who always sits in the back row, but working on that in the smallish confines of the church hall kitchen (for there were aspiring liturgists working in pairs in the main hall and we would have disturbed their composition) had its problems. Reader, I solved it. I shut each participant in turn inside the kitchen while the rest of us crammed onto the landing and listened from there. The effect was dramatic, as each in turn sought to communicate meaning to others they couldn't see, realising that a dropped voice or a slurred syllable would be lost and with it most of the sense.

I hope they enjoyed it. We were all pretty loud and hilarious by the end of the session, and everyone had had the chance to offer their take on what was going on. I felt a sense of satisfaction. It was, in fact, a bit like being the teacher ...

Higher English reappraised - again

Joanna Blythman had a sensible post in Sunday's Herald about the latest flurry in Higher English exam circles. Ever since the last change - when Higher Still appeared and drastically reduced what was actually externally assessed - I've felt the lack of any chance for students who wrote well to capitalise on their ability. It was never the same merely to be told by your teacher that you had reached the required standard to sit the exams - for that, in essence, was what happened. It somehow devalued the whole process to have the person who was teaching you say "yes, all right - you've made it". Even when the folio of the previous system was being prepared for external assessment, it was possible for the teacher to collude in raising the standard by direct interference, and it was presumably to remove that suspicion that the folio system was changed, but it still left the teacher with the say-so on what stage the candidate had reached and deprived the student of the stimulus to show off in an exam. Even after several years of retirement I have a couple of ringbinders filled with the excellent writing of past pupils - kept to encourage others to reach the same standard, or to give ideas to the faltering - and I can still remember the content of many of the essays.

Actually I'd like to go much further back. I agree with Neil who tweeted a wee while ago that he'd like to see the Report brought back to Higher English. This involved the student in assimilating several documents, including sometimes a graph, on a given topic, and then writing a cohesive report which conveyed the facts as contained in the material. Creative it was not. It called for understanding, organisation and the ability to write clearly and dispassionately - skills which are actually more useful to the majority of students than the ability to write a description of an emotion or analyse a metaphor. It gave the less creative, clever mathematician a chance to excel in one area of English, and had an obvious spin-off in other subjects like Modern Studies.

To me, Higher English recently has become less stimulating for pupils and teachers as texts became more prescriptive and the need to stop and examine halted the flow of the year. There seemed to be less space to develop the realisation that if you could do one area of analysis you could do any others, and that to write well was exciting and challenging and a cumulative process. I grant that the all-or-nothing exam at the end of the session struck terror into some pupils - but why is that such a bad thing? Are we all going to sail through life without such moments? Some chance.

I'd suggest that if - as Blythman suggests - there has been a dilution in the standard of text studied, and if - as I know is the case - too many teachers concentrate on the parrot-learning of the formula which will produce a passable critical essay at the expense of a real understanding of how a writer's craft works, then it's the training of teachers we need to look at. Maybe any teacher entrusted with teaching Higher needs to be regularly appraised and sent for retraining if he falls short of the standard our best pupils deserve. Maybe the time currently spent on internal assessment would be better spent exploring a new poem - pupils and teacher together, unprepared and excited by what they can find. On one-to-one discussion of how to bring writing alive, while others write on, absorbed in what they create. On showing teachers what is possible, and firing them with the need to share it. And then, after nine months, examining the results in the old-fashioned, open-ended way with the excitement of a real end-product to all this engagement and effort.

Bit like having a baby, really.

Single-sex teaching

Well, well. It's a strange feeling to see the BBC Scotland news featuring something I did several years ago and hailing the development as something new and exciting. I'm talking about the "experiment" in Kilsyth Academy's English department, where they have decided to teach boys and girls in separate classes. They are evangelical about the positive effect on the work of all concerned.

Of course, I'm glad about all this. I'm glad someone else has cottoned on to something I've known for years. Because it must be eight or nine years since I first offered to solve the gender imbalance in a yeargroup by taking a boys' class as they started S2, and five or six years since I attempted to publicise the results of this experiment. Of course, we weren't blogging then; the only computer in my classroom belonged to the now defunct Pupils' View magazine and I merely circulated memos - which obviously didn't get very far.

The news story ended with the reporter wondering how their Standard Grade results will benefit - if at all. I can tell them already - at least, if they're anything like my boys. I taught this same mixed ability class from S2 - S4 - three years together for boys whose predicted grades ranged from Credit 1 down to Foundation 5. In the event, no-one achieved a Foundation award: of a class of 30 I had 15 Credits (8 of them at Grade 1) and 15 General, of whom only two were a Grade 4. The most able boys helped the less able without the slightest embarrassment or resentment on anyone's part; every one of them found that they were able to write more effectively and express genuine emotion without fear of ridicule. One boy startled me in S4 by announcing that he had learned John Donne's Batter my heart off by heart because he thought it was "amazing", and offered to recite it to us all. Another became fascinated by Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child and wrote, off his own bat, a critical evaluation of it. So much for the fear that an all-male class would read nothing but so-called macho texts.

Many of these boys stayed with me for Higher English, though for that they were rejoined by some girls, and most of them did extremely well. One of them even comments on this blog from time to time. In all the time I taught them I looked forward to their period in the day as a time of hard work, enthusiasm, adventure and frequent hilarity.

So I wish the boys - and the girls - of Kilsyth Academy well. I hope their teachers enjoy the classes and the opportunity for some exciting cooperation. But I wish someone had told the Beeb about my class - because whatever it is, it's not a new idea.

Strange Meeting?

The photo above shows one of the compensations of having meetings in this part of the world - the sun setting in a sudden blaze of glory above Loch Fyne took us by surprise after a fairly grey day, making me regret that I didn't have the Leica with me. Not bad for a phone pic all the same. But it was after two days of meetings, of sitting round a table struggling to come to agreement over what should happen at an event, or shuffling through piles of papers and balance sheets while the seat grew harder and the room stuffier, that I realised what a great job teaching is. Actually it was when I saw on the news a feature about a firm of receivers, and saw them sitting shuffling papers and talking about balance sheets that it burst upon me that no matter how frustrating or exhausting life in the classroom was it was infinitely more suited to my temperament, and I knew that life in an office environment would have driven me mad.

And there was a pleasing moment before the meetings began, when the wife of one of my Twitter followers turned up at the Diocesan Centre in Oban announcing that she was here to pay for some olive oil. She didn't know who I was, and she didn't seem to know her man's online name, nor the fact that the oil was actually for a third party, also one of my Twitterites, also a complete stranger. And so I have introduced Zaytoun Palestinian olive oil to Oban, recouped some of my outlay, and been confirmed in the knowledge that I chose the right job after all. Can't all be bad, huh?

Reflective pupils?

Edubloggers whom I read and admire, like Mr W and Edublogger ipse, often comment on how blogging has tended to make them more reflective practitioners of the art of teaching. Tonight I have been reflecting on how teaching has made me a more reflective student - because from time to time, in my new life, I find myself in statu pupillari in a small mixed-ability group.

I must've been a pretty awful pupil in some respects. In English, especially, I never in the whole of my six years in secondary had a decent English teacher other than my dad - and God alone knows how he found the energy to enthuse me after a day's teaching. (I taught, briefly, in the same department as one of my former teachers and confirmed my suspicions: she was every bit as dire as I had suspected) But I digress. The thing was that when I became bored I used to read a book under the desk (possible in a class of 40) and eat Mintolas. I simply opted out of the whole process - and this was in the top class in a selective school.

Back to being in a mixed-ability group. In some ways it's quite like the teaching involved when pupils are expressing their ideas about a piece of writing and you're being encouraging and trying to guide them towards coherence and actual understanding. I find myself holding back - not interrupting, for the most part, and trying not to ask the question which will destroy the idea newly presented. There is a huge temptation, when you see the "answer", to leap in with a swift summary to demonstrate your own understanding without necessarily taking anyone else with you other than the "teacher" - but because I've been the teacher myself I know this can't be allowed because the rest of the class won't all be there with you. And there's the knowledge of how irritating it is if a pupil interrupts before a teaching point is properly made - or, worse still, interrupts another pupil so that they almost come to blows.

And all this brings me round, in a circuitous sort of way, to reflecting on the problems faced by our pupils in a class, whether mixed-ability or streamed. Unless a pupil is working solo, there must be long periods of boredom, irritation, frustration - and a sense of how much more rapid learning could be taking place if the rest of the class weren't there. I know this doesn't allow for the sparks generated in a really good-going discussion - but how much of my own enjoyment of this as a teacher was because it felt as if I was doing a good job?

I am happy to report, however, that I learned a new word today: pericope. And I felt as if this was a word I have needed to know and use for all of my life. Wonderful.

Biting the bullet

When I was teaching, I rarely used any prompt other than the text we were studying. Yes, I'd annotate poems, short stories, drama, and I'd stick markers in novels to remind me where important events happened or there was an example of some feature I wanted to highlight, but that was as far as it went. If I was doing something particularly intricate with a Higher class, then I might have some notes scribbled in a jotter to which I'd refer to check I wasn't missing anything, or to ensure that the class weren't confused by poor sequencing on my part, but on the whole I preferred to go where the class and the text would lead me.

Not so with preaching. Until today, when I've had to deliver a sermon I've written out the whole thing verbatim, and read it. Because I'm used to public speaking, I was able to look at the congregation fairly convincingly, but I always felt shackled - and as a result felt the whole thing had been a bit stilted. I did this, obviously, because I didn't feel sufficiently confident in this role - and perhaps also because my audience was always completely silent and apparently attentive. Maybe I always relied on the interaction with the class to make me a good teacher - I certainly valued it and would challenge the passive class to say something, even if it seemed out of place.

Today, however, I managed to move a step closer to my goal. I preached a sermon from a page of bullet points - and I found myself enjoying it. I was able to enlarge on ideas using images which came into my head as I spoke, and I was rewarded by the smiles - and even the nods - of people in the congregation. The theology was simple to the point of being simplistic - but no-one seemed to mind. I shall keep on with the study - but I shall not go back to the written sermon. Cheers!

Teaching, Jim, but not as we know it.

I was chatting at the shallow end this morning - we have an excellent pool in Dunoon - with the former heidie of one of the local primary schools. The sun was lighting up the green water inside and the blue water of the Clyde outside, and we agreed that it was wonderful not to be in school on such a day - for today was the first day of term here. But it struck me that I'd just spent a weekend using the skills I'd accumulated over all these years in the classroom - skills that I never thought about, but which non-teachers seem to find impressive; skills such as being able to command a room without speaking, see what is happening in one corner while apparently looking in another, engage with a roomful of people confidently.

Do we ever consider these attributes, I wonder, while we're being called to exercise them day in , day out? I don't know that I did - there was so much going on, and latterly we tended to engage in other forms of interaction with pupils and in fact might not have been up there in front as often as in the past. But I have to say that it's the old-fashioned leading from the front that is most useful in life beyond school, and as I stepped up (being a bit of a short-arse, I had to use a step) to the lectern for the first time in that conference room I felt quite a frisson of enjoyment - and of recognition. But there was another aspect to enjoy. There was no-one trying to stick a pencil into their neighbour, and no-one writing obscenities in their jotter. Everyone was looking at me with every appearance of wanting to hear what I was going to say.

And there wasn't a spit-ball in sight.

10,000 hits

A self-regarding post: my 10,000th visitor arrived this morning through Kelvin's blog. I'm sure this was an appropriate referral, complete with blessings. It's taken just over a year for this number of hits to mount up, at a current average of 34 per day. Not many, when I look at the numbers on other blogs - but not bad for retirement maunderings.

Actually, I've had an interesting proposition from Liz the other day: that I should post more about the actual business of teaching English. I'll look forward to this - but for now I'm going off-blog for a bit. Watch this space - I'll be back!

Prelim preparation

Anyone with the patience to read the comments on this blog will have noticed that I've been having an interesting chat with Liz O'Neill about the teaching of textual analysis. This evening I scurried back from a very civilised lunch in the Rogano in Glasgow to see my two private pupils for the last time before I vanish to foreign parts for a bit and they vanish into their Higher prelim exams. In both cases we were discussing how to construct an effective Critical Essay under exam conditions: ie choose a question that has some connection with one of your texts, work out exactly what it is asking you to consider, plan how to use your knowledge of the text in order to answer the question and then write about 700 words - all in 45 minutes. Then do it again for another question and a text of a different genre from the first.

All this - and it's hard work, at this level - had me thinking further about the effective sharing of ideas on literature. It seems to me that the most meaningful learning happens when the student begins to make the connections for herself (both my current students are female, so we'll stick with that pronoun). This takes time and patience, and sensitive probing and leading to help the insecure to a place of confidence. But what if a pupil arrives in your class with four years of less than satisfactory experience of literature? (Not the case with my current pair, but a possibility) What if they've never read any particularly complex stuff until they fetched up in a Higher class? Suddenly you've got to get them to a pitch of expertise that will enable them to pass a demanding exam in January - and you've got about five and a half months to do it in, with four weeks of holidays in two blocks to break up the rhythm.

I don't feel like solving the whole mystery right here and now - the nice lunch is still affecting the brain - but would suggest the following for starters:
If you can, make sure they read a novel over the summer holiday before S5 really starts. Something big, like "Sunset Song". Start analysing it with them in week one of the first term. If they can't hack it, they'll realise something about themselves. If they find themselves passionately reacting to the situation of the heroine in the middle of discussing her home life, they're hooked. Real literature is really involving - and there is so very much to say about it. Anyone who has failed to do the reading suddenly realises that they've dealt themselves out of the conversation, and either gets the finger out or gives up the ghost.

If you leave something as big as that till later in the term, you'll never do it. They'll get bogged down in Maths homework (it was always maths) and have no time to sit and read an extended text. You'll be stuck with short stories or jounalism for the Prose option - and that's not always ideal. My aim was always to have the novel plus, say, two of Doris Lessing's short stories - Lessing because she is such a superb crafter of language that every word and phrase tells and nothing is redundant. But what you absolutely must build in is the opportunity to talk about these texts - with you, with each other - so that they own them. It's not enough to set them questions to wrestle with in writing when they haven't the basic personal understanding that is only achieved through discussion and turning back to the text to back themselves up. And it is we the teachers who have to ask the hard questions, the whys and the hows, the whats and the what ifs, that will set their critical faculties working efficiently - and it is we who have to be the first to react with enthusiasm when they start to get it. You can do this in class time - because when you're with them it's a better use of your time that sitting doing your own thing while they write. I used to do it orally - with them all joining in, I hoped. Now I'd perhaps do it differently - a blog might involve everyone simultaneously.

But I'd really miss the chat.