Rummaging in the cyber past

I retired over 11 years ago. After all these years of teaching English I found I was missing the discipline of writing - for when I set essays, particularly to senior classes, I tended to write one myself. It was something I liked to do, to contribute to the discussion, as well as believing you shouldn't ask people to do something you weren't prepared to do yourself. At the time, blogging was pretty new - and it was really the only shared form of communication, the first step in what we learned to call Social Media. My sons were already blogging. I was seduced.

And it was in that first year of blogging that I began to meet people outwith my own circle (there - Blogger doesn't like "outwith" any more than it ever did), several of whom were (another new word at the time) edubloggers. Some of them were Scots, so that I met them physically in Glasgow ("You're Blethers, aren't you?"); some were much further away. And one of the more distant edubloggers I also met, and it's a good story.

I can't remember the exact sequence of events, but it was in November 2006 that I blogged about my input into the classroom work of Anne Davis - allowing her to use my photos as a classroom resource for creative writing, commenting on some of the pupils' work, thoroughly enjoying that little bit of teaching again. Three months later, we met - in San Francisco - thanks to Ewan's social engineering. We were on a month's tour of our American friends, one of whom had just dropped us off at our SF hotel. The cases had just appeared, when the phone rang. You don't expect anyone to phone you in a strange city - but it was Anne, also in town for a conference. Could we meet for dinner?  And we did, and you can read a short blog post about it, though it doesn't mention my recording a podcast for her pupils.

But I must tear myself away from this nostalgic wandering among the archives. The reason I'm doing it appears in the photo at the top: Anne sent me this book that she and a colleague, Ewa McGrail,  have written (and it costs a fortune to send a book from the USA) and it has the most lovely dedication on the front page and several references to me, all wonderfully flattering, scattered throughout the text. I'm delighted to get it, and to relive that time - which in many ways feels like another life. Even this blog post, full of links that take ages to find because I keep reading what I'm rummaging among, reminds me of that era.

Now, of course, it's all short-form communications. Social media rules, and the most unlikely people turn up on Facebook. Blogging is much less of a thing. And yet ... I find myself returning to blethers when I want to say something longer than a sentence, or something that I haven't got a proper photo for (because Blipfoto seems to have turned into my regular blog spot, in a strange way - maybe because of the interest of photographers). And when I was reading the book this morning, and reflecting on how I'd celebrate its arrival, I thought about children's writing and the joy of having it read by more than just the classroom teacher - to say nothing about having comments added by outsiders.

Children - and we've been talking primary school pupils throughout this - still love to have their best work displayed on the classroom wall. There is a place for this sort of controlled online interaction - on the much bigger wall, as it were, of the internet. This book, Student Blogs, seems to me to cover so many of the areas that might worry the cautious teacher - everything from accessing photos to Creative Commons and beyond - as to encourage any teacher to have a go.

Unless, of course, no-one can write more than 140 characters at a time these days. Just like The President ...

The Education debate - a builder's take

I was chatting to our builder yesterday about schools. It seemed to me that this successful tradesman, running the building firm that he inherited from his father, had the secret of attainment in school well sussed. He attended the same school as my children, at the same time, and he told us a story.

He was in a science class - about S3/4 level - who were being taught by a supply teacher. She was pleasant, but deadly boring. He and his pals began to amuse themselves; the lesson was doomed. So, it seemed, was the supply teacher - for all knew well that she'd never regain the control necessary for learning to take place. Ah well.

A week later his father called him over for a quiet word. The essence of it was this: You were in a class being taught by Mrs. Bloggs? And you misbehaved and upset her? Right. Mrs Bloggs is a good customer of ours - in fact, I'm working on her house right now. If I ever hear that you've stepped out of line in her class again, I'll f******g well do you. Right?

Crude but effective. But it contains the seeds of success in many a small town school, where no-one is unknown and where the strangest connections emerge with remarkable rapidity. Pupils, teachers, Head Teacher and parents are linked in a symbiotic relationship in which all have to play their part or be found out. It makes for a relatively enjoyable existence for all - and that is where I taught for over 20 years without any of the negative fall-out which newcomers to a small town tend to fear.

But what else can we learn from this story? Nothing new, actually. The seeds of underachievement are to be found on both sides of the garden: boring teachers who wouldn't inspire the most docile of students, and uninterested or incapable parents. And then there's the growing sub-group of hostile and resentful parents as well, the ones who encourage their children not to let the teacher "get away" with any attempt to prevent their precious weans from walking all over everyone. Any one of these on its own will spoil the business of learning; more than one and we might as well all go home.

So what do you do to ensure that none of these weeds enter the Eden of education? No amount of pupil testing is going to help Mr Tedious to become a glowing enthusiast; no closing of the attainment gap is going to happen without somehow involving the parents in the enterprise. And no political manifesto is going to make a scrap of difference unless a whole generation of teachers and parents are somehow unified in one glowing, aspirational whole where the excitement of maths and the joy of literature and the joy of finding out become more important than a tidy record of work or where the next meal is coming from, or the next boyfriend, or the next fix.

I wouldn't have Nicola Sturgeon's job for anything. But those who advise her, who tell her that National Testing is the way to ensure that every child can have the same chances that she did, these advisors should perhaps begin by pointing at the Sturgeon family. They were the bedrock of the First Minister's success.

And she maybe managed to avoid the boring teachers ...

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?

Testing the teacher

Staving off the tedium of cough-recovery inactivity, I was ploughing through yesterday's Sunday Times when I came across a piece about the proposal to raise entry standards for wannabe primary teachers. (Actually I'm not certain about that last qualification - the paper was certainly talking about primary teachers, but there was a lack of clarity ...) Anyway, I had a flashback to my own primary education, during which I was taught by two men and five women, six of whom were Glasgow MA graduates and one a BSc. They all wore their hoods to prizegiving. They were fiercely proud of their work and of the school, and some of them were also pretty fierce, in a respect-inducing sort of way. The only time I ever saw one of them at a loss was the hapless BSc who taught us in P7, for he became entangled in the thickets of English grammar and had to appeal, in a note home via me, to my father for assistance. Less strange than you might think - they were old buddies, and when I came in with homework that was different from that of the other 39 in my class, he realised he was in unsuspected deep water. (He might not have noticed the juxtaposition of metaphors in that story, but the formidable Miss Campbell would not have liked it).

When I was a secondary teacher, I never felt out of my depth in my own subject. Had I had to teach P7 maths, it might have been another story - though I can still do long division, for what it's worth. Perhaps  a subject-based degree is not such a useful qualification for a Primary teacher - but its possession at least shows a level of study and competence without which an underlying confidence might well be lacking. I still tend to rate people by their ability to write competent and properly-spelled English as an indicator of basic education, and I still expect teachers not to come out with such expressions as "I seen" and "I done" - or, worse still, "Ah seen" and "Ah done". It's even worse when this is a common feature of the speech of the English teacher of one's own child - and when the same teacher, who is also a colleague, tells you "But you're posh".

Posh I am not. But I was well taught, fairly rigorously tested, and instilled with a passion for language that has grown with the years. I cannot say that the similarly good teaching managed to get me beyond the basic competence needed for Higher Maths and Higher Science (remember, if you're older than I am, that that was awarded after a single paper in both Physics and Chemistry; they split the two, if I'm correct, in the early 1960s) - but the MAs who taught me were bright enough to do the biz in Primary and my teachers after S3 had a real uphill struggle against orchestra practices and other distractions.

So: how on earth do you get accepted for teacher training without demonstrating enough ability and education to have room for manoeuvre? And whom does a lack of rigour help? Not the teacher - horrid to find yourself the butt of sneers from a ten-year-old who knows the answer you don't; not the pupils, who have perfectly correctly spelled words marked wrong by the ignoramus charged with their education. No: there are no winners. There don't seem to be teacher shortages either, not right now.

Seems pretty bloody obvious to me.

Visceral learning

It's almost the end of the school holidays, and the thoughts of even this retired teacher turn, once more, to education. Is it my coming to the end of a job which involved setting exams for standardised testing? I don't know. But in conversation the other day I found myself stating the three most important facets of my own education - most important in that they are foundational to the me that is me now, today, the person who recognises her own strengths and is confident in the use of them and in the acknowledging of weakness in other areas.

9 yr old blethers

I learned to read long before I started school. I can remember the look of a particular book of numbers and letters to which I was devoted - and the setting of my memory makes me three years old, as my mother was in the nursing home giving birth to the sister who is three years younger than me. I can recall all too readily the excruciating boredom of listening to other children in my Primary One class struggling to read aloud to the teacher, of hating one poor girl because of her hesitant voice and the long silences between words ... syllables ... Her name was Carol. What I don't remember is being made to learn letters and words. They seem to have come to me in the daily business of living, and there was certainly no pain or resentment involved. And  by the age of seven I was reading Treasure Island.

For the last twenty years or so, I have known about poetry. That sounds very prosaic, at once sweeping and vague. But I mean I know how poetry works, why it works; I have learned how the right word in the right place can stir emotion in the reader, how a sudden shining image can transform a piece of writing - or a sermon, come to that - and I have explored these exciting possibilities in my own writing. And how did this come about? I certainly wasn't like this as a young teacher, let alone as a student at school or university. What brought about the epiphany?

I think it can only be described as a visceral need to know. Poetry, as my father's wonderful note on the subject began, poetry, like all the arts, is useless. There is no practical need for it - so it's not like basic reading skills. Somewhere along the road, however, teaching Larkin's poetry to seniors, I suddenly got it. And I have this picture of myself, on either a holiday or recovery from a sickie, sitting at the table in our dining room with three books open in front of me - the Selected Letters, Andrew Motion's A Writer's Life,  and Larkin's Collected Poems. For perhaps the first time in my life I was behaving like a real student, reading, comparing, contextualising, making notes - and all for my own enjoyment. There was no reason for this depth of study in terms of the teaching I had to do, but for the fifteen years or so after this event I was aware of the added depth, the insights I was able to share, the asides that would bring a poem to life for someone else. I did the same with the work of R.S.Thomas, buying slim volumes eagerly as they came out, even copying a whole collection laboriously by hand into a notebook when I realised it was out of print. I studied his style as it changed over the years, his subject matter, his autobiographical writings; I read both the unauthorised biography by Justin Wintle and the much more perceptive one by Byron Rogers. Two summers ago I visited two of R.S.'s parishes, and bought another small collection I'd never encountered. Two weeks ago, I re-read some of his work and was able to find the words to write another poem of my own. No purpose here, only enrichment and excitement.

The third leg of this self-motivated learning props up what I am doing at this very moment. From the day when I decided that I wanted to touch-type while my second-born infant had his afternoon nap, I was on the road to being what I am probably best known for now. I asked a friend who taught Business Studies if there was a good way to learn this skill; he gave me an old school text-book to prop up beside my portable typewriter and I started - two fingers, two hands, three fingers .... Then came the day, years later and back teaching,  when I sacked most of the pupils who could use Adobe Pagemaker and had to learn desktop publishing for myself, and my latest forays involve YouTube videos and Google+ hangouts. You could argue that there was a degree of practical necessity in there - the magazine would have died the death had I not learned to format it - but there was no compulsion for me to run it at all. It was fun, though.

And that last sentence sums the whole thing up. It was fun. It is fun. Nowadays, I'll not stick with anything that doesn't engage and absorb me. The idea of sitting for hours on uncomfortable bench seats at cramped desks listening to boring teachers talking about quadratic equations appalls me. (When did you last use a quadratic equation?) What a dreadful penance to impose on the innocent young. What did it do for me? Even in the English class I found a way to opt out and became expert at reading under the desk, where I would stash a pack of Mintolas to sweeten the experience (soft enough to swallow whole to avoid detection). Now, if we'd been exploring our own passions, I could have told you all about the vicissitudes of first century Rome - for that was an enthusiasm of my mid-teens.

And that too was fun.

Twittering respectably

I've been catching up on some old friends' blogs - you can thank the weather for that, chaps! - and came across this post from Neil Winton just as I was pondering again (or anew, as the hymn hath it) the business of officialdom and social media. When I left the classroom - god, it's been six years - I could still look at flickr and some blogs on the school system, though Richard Holloway's work was largely taboo because, it seemed, he'd used naughty words. So NetGear said anyway.  Now, apparently, it is hard in schools to access any of the sites I've grown accustomed to using daily. Everyone and their grannies now know what Twitter is, but heaven forfend that our young should be able to use it.

Stupid logic, of course. I've been using Twitter since, November 2006. An earlyish adopter, then.  I've been blogging for a year or so longer. And I've been evangelical about the power of social media for most of the intervening years. But now I'm no longer involved in schools and education at large; my forum tends to be in church circles. So I've stood up at Synods both General and Diocesan and begged for blogs to be used to communicate and for Bishops to use Twitter. And back then - some 4/5 years ago -  I was scoffed at, either gently or violently. But gradually we saw bloggers doing their slightly risky thing on the sidelines of Synod, and then Twitter took over as comments were tweeted and shared live. Bishops blogged and had Facebook accounts. There were lunchtime meetings to help the uninitiated get over their fears (I'm talking General Synod here - all two and a half days of it) and, finally, official guidelines in the Synod papers for kind and responsible Tweeting. Social media had, on the face of it, arrived.

But we need to be careful here. There are still many, many people who have "no time" for Twitter and "all that stuff" - and that "no time" can be factual or pejorative in intent. And all too often they are the people who run organisations - because suddenly they see the huge potential for ... what? Anarchy? Revolution? Criticism?

Yes. Of course. All of these things. That's why repressive regimes block Facebook. I'm reminded, probably because of the context in which I now operate, of how the Bible used to be forbidden fruit to the common people, and then to women - much safer to keep it in Latin and in the hands of the priests, much more seemly for women to take their men's word for what was in this dangerous book. But hey - we all read the Bible now, if we feel so inclined, and we sometimes find new and exciting things in it, in our unschooled, lay fashion. And the job of the professionals is to help all of us to read sensibly, not to make basic errors in comprehension, to put it in a historical context and so on. The church as it is today, shrinking as it may be, seems to me a healthier and more alive organism for the active participation of its members.

And what, do you ask, has this to do with Twitter? Well, Twitter and other social media exist. People have become accustomed to using them to broadcast their status. Not all people are sensible, and some users of social media are downright silly - they're just people. But you can't stop them making fools of themselves, in public or not. You can assume that people at a gathering like Synod will, for the most part, have a modicum of intelligence and a large helping of goodwill - they wouldn't be there otherwise. I've already remarked on the lack of much tweeting during the last Synod - because someone, apparently, thought fit to warn them off at one point. I missed that bit, so I don't know how it was done. But for next year, I'd like to see a Twitter live backchat channel on the screens, so that everyone in the hall can see what's being said as it's said - and the people up front can have the chance to react to it.

Going back to the trigger for this post - the drive to have social media become normal in schools - I'm pushed into wondering if official blessing is in fact the one way to kill something off. I think our young might well tell us it is ...

The Revolution: a traditional English teacher’s take.

It's that time of the year - exam time, when suddenly the seniors have vanished and the tired teacher has time to reflect but finds she is too jaded to string together new ideas, finds she is thinking of sunlit beaches and cool drinks instead of technology in the classroom. It's still "that time of the year" for me, but now, having retired from the classroom, I find myself thinking about the job I left - and the job I wish I could be doing. This post is the result of that reflection.


"Poetry, like all the arts, is useless."

Thus began an introductory note, written in the 1940s for Higher English students on the subject of poetry – a wonderful note which went on to demonstrate that although a knowledge of poetry would not clothe or put a roof over the heads of those who knew how to approach it, it was nevertheless one of the most fulfilling cultural activities for students of English.


The question for an English teacher who is sensitive to the need both for the cultural aspects of the subject and for the transactional writing that underpins half the subjects in the secondary curriculum is how to achieve a balance within a revolutionised school curriculum. This is one vision – the vision of an English teacher who has bridged the period between “Projects in Practice” and Higher Still, and who sees Curriculum for Excellence as a half-baked attempt to have a bloodless revolution.

1. Transactional English in immersion learning through a central topic:
If a whole school were immersed in a core topic such as Climate Change, dealing with everything from the Physics and Chemistry of the process through the social aspects and physical impact of change to the politics and journalism of dealing with it, then English writing and comprehension would be an integral part of the study. English specialists would have to be timetabled to be present in the area where such work was going on, to be a constant resource on the ground, to enable the best possible communication and expression of what was being done at all levels.


2. Expressive and cultural input – especially from S3 upwards – in English:
This is where the biggest change might be seen to take place. It would be perfectly possible to deliver the kind of lesson that has always brought, say, a poem to life to a much larger group than has been traditional since the days when partitioned classrooms used to be opened up to allow one teacher to take 60 pupils in time of absence of staff shortage. I’m thinking Big Lesson, followed by group work by pupils with teacher participation, followed by plenary feedback with some kind of projected backdrop showing the results of the discussions. This would free up timetable time to allow for more flexibility.
[It always seemed a waste to me to have a whole year timetabled to be doing the same course at the same time when some of the work was suitable for this kind of treatment. It also seemed a shame for some pupils to be stuck with the one teacher for the two years, say, of S grade, when they could easily have a shot of someone who inspired them. There were often instances of pupils of one teacher coming to another for advice which was lacking in the class they were in]


3. Technology as the glue as well as the instrument:
If pupils were not isolated in the womb-like classroom of individual teachers (I’ll speak for English classes now) for up to 6 hours a week, but could because of flexible working spaces have access to technology and subject specialists when they needed it, provision of an adequate number of computers should be less of a problem – and the maintenance of them might be made simpler if 20 computers were not buried in the room of a cack-handed technophobe who didn’t ensure they were properly functional. I think the formative assessment of students involved in both the cultural and the transactional stages of English could be transformed by their doing all their working-out online, so that both the process and the input of the teacher could be publicly visible (whether in the wider world or on a closed school site). This would save teacher-hours in repeating the same mantras (eg about the embedding of quotation in a Critical Essay for Higher English) and allow learning to take place through study of past materials (something I always did, but which was limited by having limited copies of exemplars). Incidentally, it would also facilitate staff CPD - for teachers are not equally skilled or indeed educated in their field, and the open nature of the work I advocate would allow for continuing but not overt acquisition of new skills. Final work could be submitted on paper if required, but I like the openness and accountability of the blog/ning model for ongoing assessment and appraisal. If twitter or other short-form communication were to be built in to the system, the resulting flexibility would expedite learning, mentoring, teaching, assessment and feedback – and none of these would be limited to the physical classroom or the 9-4 day.


4. The integration of the extra-curricular:
When I taught in Dunoon Grammar School, I ran a very successful magazine. Its operational heart was my classroom where the iMac lived, and almost all the work was done at lunchtimes, after school, and in evenings when we were often racing to escape from the building before it was locked up for the night. But before we were deemed sufficiently successful to purchase our own computer, we relied on the machines in the Business Studies department - a situation fraught with the potential for strife.  It strikes me that if something like The Pupils’ View had been a more collaborative activity, we would have had the Business Studies people onside teaching effective skills in typing and layout instead of fighting over when we could use their computers – and there was much useful learning going on with phone skills, advertising, layout & design, sweet-talking advertisers, selling papers. None of that was ever recognised.


Obviously timetabling and resources, school buildings and staffing are at the heart of this, but it seems to me a way of developing new ideas so that the interesting and purely cultural aspects of the subject are not subordinated. And I have taken no account whatsoever of the matter of discipline and the disaffected pupil.

In my experience, there is a great deal of slack time and wasted effort in teaching as it currently stands.

Moving swiftly on: parenting and education

Considering my own childhood - and I realise it must seem odd to many - led me inexorably to think about my own role as a parent trying to encourage children to learn, do homework and so on. I was about to say that by comparison with my own parents' involvement, I was a complete failure - but then I thought about the outcome for both sons and decided that was a tad sweeping. So what do I remember?

The Word Tin. Son no.1 used to produce this, when he was in P1, with a look of doom. We had to pick words out of a tobacco tin (where on earth did I lay my hands on this item?) and he had to recognise them. At the time he was four and a half and it was torture. Later, there was more amusement to be had in thinking up outrageous sentences with which he could demonstrate the meaning of words. And that, I have to admit, is all I can remember from the Primary school years. I have very little recollection of what - if anything - I did to help no. 2 son. He used a thing called the word-maker, and progressed to a sentence-maker, but I didn't seem to do anything. Could this be because by then I'd gone back to work?

When your children attend the secondary school in which both parents teach, the experience is somewhat different from the norm. I was certainly involved in helping both sons with English - rescuing one from having to do North and South for Higher by spending a whole Easter holiday studying the Larkin set texts so that he could use them in the exam a month later actually involved me in the most God-awful scene with his class teacher, who happened to be my boss. I did a bit of Standard-grade Latin with both of them. And when no.1 son became editor of the school magazine, he recruited me as the Editor-in-chief because it was more convenient for him - and look where that got us.

Actually it got me into what I see as the most important single piece of education I ever undertook. I don't know how many evenings I spent in the school while both sons in turn ran the magazine, teaching myself to do desktop publishing (Adobe Pagemaker) when they left and the boy who knew how to do it let us down, sharing hilarious pressure with successive generations of student journalists when the photocopier jammed/ran out of ink/got too hot, going off with them to competitions in Edinburgh and to the Scottish Parliament, sitting in on interviews with Frank Pignatelli, then Director of Education for Strathclyde, and John Smith, leader of the Labour party. Pupils who were shy learned to use the phone, to contact advertisers, to sell advertising; others learned touch-typing without ever taking Business Studies, coaxed ancient Macintosh Classics to work years after they should have recycled, learned to use the scanner and the value of white space on the page.

Did this make up for the fact that we had television on every night? That there was a small telly in the older son's bedroom, linked to the ZX Spectrum but also to an aerial? That they both had radios and listened to music incessantly, from an early age? That we allowed an 11 year old to have a modem and a year's subscription to BT's precursor of the internet (what on earth was it called?) so that he would come and beg: "Can I go online now?" before he was in secondary school? At the time I felt I was failing, when I'd find one of them sweating over something for the magazine the night before some important exam, but now I'm less sure.

But there's so much more to think about in this early exposure to the medium I'm using now that I think I'd better leave it to another post. It's a long way from the Word Tin ...

The parental role in education

The radio was on this morning, wittering away in the background, when I caught a few sentences and realised that Call Kay was inviting us to consider the role of parents in their children's education. I didn't listen for long, lest I be tempted to contribute (I have phoned this programme twice in the past - don't want to get a name for myself) but it started a train of memories. Hence the photo. It was taken - by me, as I'm not in it - in Paris. I was 14 at the time, my sister 11. I know this because I can recall my mother telling some French waiter that we were "onze et quatorze" - and so right in the age range that I can remember most vividly when it comes to thinking about school, homework and study.

The chat on the radio today was looking at the perceived failure of state schools adequately to prepare their students for the competition to enter the top universities, and asking how much parental pressure/support/coercion was needed to supplement the work of the school. As a teacher, a parent and - a long time ago - a child, I think I have quite a rounded picture of this - but in this post, I'd like to share the part my home played in ensuring that I succeeded in what I set out to do.

By the time I was ten, we lived in a Victorian terraced house in the West End of Glasgow, with four bedrooms and two public, as well as a large kitchen, a wash-house and a lined loft. Loads of room into which one could vanish - but in winter it was cold, and we tended to live between the dining-room and the kitchen. That meant piano practice was less assiduous than it might have been, but was generally done before the evening meal - perhaps on the premise that food would replace the heat lost during practice. Dinner was over by 6pm - both parents were teachers, both home at the same time as us. For the next three hours, my sister and I sat at the dining room table and did homework - and there was always a great deal of this. (We were at a grant-aided selective school, and we could be asked to leave if we didn't work). Until about 7pm, we weren't allowed to make a noise. In fact, I got hell once for throwing a pencil down on the table, as my father had fallen asleep in his chair and I woke him.  Once his post-prandial kip was over, however, we had two hours in which both our parents took a hand in our struggles.

Father was always deeply critical of the teaching in the English department of our school, so we had a great deal of incredibly thorough input on texts we were studying. That went without saying. What was more remarkable, I thought, was that he would also work out from first principles what was going on in the Physics problems I had such trouble with - sums involving moment, I recall with horrifying clarity. My mother, meanwhile, would sit down with my tiny, battered copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars or, later, Virgil's Aeneid (Book 2) and, as she put it, "break the back of it" before I set to work on my preparation for the next day's terrifying oral translation session round the class. She also pushed us to work at French, which I personally hated because of the accent involved, and made several visits at parents' evenings to ask why we had so little written homework in French (lazy teacher; fluent as married to French woman but no fire in his chubby belly). That holiday in Paris, by the way, was by way of encouraging me at the end of S2 - I can still remember the chagrin when the lift man in our hotel corrected my pronunciation of "quatrième".

All this must have taken an enormous amount of dedication and energy on the part of two people who had already taught for a whole day - or even the half day done by my mother, who would then have had to shop (no car, so limited to what she could carry each time) and deal with our sizeable and dusty-corner-ridden house. There was no thought that my sister and I should do housework, other than during a holiday. But perhaps the biggest single contributing factor was the absence of a television. Despite my sense of deprivation at never having seen Quatermass or Emergency: Ward 10 my father refused to have a set until I had graduated (I lived at home when I was at Uni). He said I'd become an addict and that would be the end.

How right he was. I'll return to this subject - I want to think about my own deficiencies when it came to fulfilling the parental role - but for now, I'll indulge my latest addiction. Another go at Bubbles HD before I head out?

Loud twittering

Is Twitter the big thing these days, then? Yesterday a media job was advertised through Twitter and the applicant twittering about his success later on in the afternoon; the BBC website advocates using Twitter to keep up to date with Swine Flu news and advice.

In education, of course, we have the fear factor – the recent furore over the twittering teacher is proof enough of the success of the medium – and it remains for twitterers in educational circles to make the breakthrough that everyone else in the know has made already.

Over a year ago I suggested that Twitter would be a great way to keep us up to date with the peregrinations of our bishop, only to be told that there was no time for such stuff. (Sadly, many teachers still think this. And cooncillors.) It’ll be interesting to see how persuasive the communications people (pity they’re using a Twitter virgin as their advocate) at the SEC Synod will be this year. But I shall be in the Big Smoke - I shall have to rely on Twitter to find out.

Back to school

Tower housing stairs
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Spent the later part of this afternoon indulging in some nostalgia with a visit - my first - to Scotland Street School, now a museum of school life during the 20th century. The classroom which stirred the strongest memories was the 1950s one with the double desks, joined by iron tubing to the simple hinged flap of wood which was the seat and with a shelf under the lid on which you could park the books you might need during the lesson. The ceramic inkwells were missing from their holes - remember the bottle of ink with the long pouring nozzle? - but the inkstains showed where they had been, and we were amused at how small even the larger desks were. We had, perhaps, grown.

I was amused at the sudden memory of going back to school for the start of a new term and finding that the simple conical glass lampshades had been replaced by larger, inverted-tulip-shaped ones with grilles over the wider end - and there they were, the new ones, in the 1950s classroom! It seems that the brown varnished dado and conical lampshades of my earliest memories had been there at least since the 1930s, although we had lost the stepped classroom which had apparently been a health hazard for all - especially the hapless teacher with her barked shins. And the high desk and chair of the teacher - replaced, it was claimed, in the 1960s - were nevertheless an important feature of my first teaching job in what, in 1968, was the oldest school building still in use in Glasgow.

I was struck, actually, by how incredibly dull teaching and learning was in the past: those dreary textbooks with the lists of words to learn at the end of the passage you had read, the huge classes crammed together, the repetition and the retribution if you strayed. And yet we learned stuff, and I can still do long division (and a fat lot of good that does me now). And I thought of disorder among the raked ranks of the oldest rooms, and of how the failure with a class would still feel as bitter then as now. I looked at the belt/tawse/strap in its glass case (two strands: probably a Lochgelly, as the Glasgow Corporation regulation belt had three and was black, not brown): I was a competent belter in my day (technique was all-important when you weighed less than 7 stones and had to belt a large boy) and yet I would have hated to do any such thing in my later teaching career.

The final pang of the past struck at 5pm when the bell rang to tell us they were about to close - and was reinforced by someone asking us if we knew it had gone as we dawdled on the way out. "Did you not hear the bell?" was usually asked at the other end of the day. I'm glad I at last made it to this museum - it's a gem.