I recently have moved to the sunny south of England and am dealing with a new curriculum: “an ambitious curriculum” (read: harder than we realistically expect most children to achieve but we’ve found a way to pretend prove that they have so we can get an e-certificate from an online ‘association’, a tag for our school website, a mention at various businesses and can evidence the benefits of that over-priced pointless room we had built)
Nothing really works.
Not the way it should.
It’s all pretend.
Your beef noodles are less than 1% beef. Your leather shoes are composite. That company isn’t really the best at anything, despite what their flashy signs tell you.
Yes I know I know, I should have learned this by now. And by and large I have. I have learned that most of life is one big lie. Designed to control the masses? I don’t know. Maybe the masses are just stupid.
What I didn’t realize, was that there literally is no way of avoiding it. No way of changing it. No way of improving it.
One lie covers up the next… and so on.
I’m starting to see how to ” play the game”.
I might not be able to realistically give every child in my class a decent education. But I can follow the system in place that tells the lie that I am: I can rote teach words and phrases until they’re saying them in their sleep. I can make sure the assessed subjects are taught for most of the day, and those who aren’t keeping up get interventions in those subjects every afternoon. I can put exam style questions in front of the children at every opportunity, it may not be the best indicator of understanding, but the mark in the test at the end of the year is really all anyone is looking at. The children can’t draw in a straight line, stand up properly, whistle a tune, or disagree with each other without crying; but those things aren’t on the test.
I might not be able to realistically improve standards. But I can have a look at what the school is already weak at, survey students with targeted questions that highlight the weakness, run a club or intervention and then survey the students at the end. Hey, Presto! IMPACT PROVEN. When in reality the only impact was goading impressionable young minds to “look this way for 5 minutes” and then ask them what they looked at. Then at the end of the year when I want a different job, I can go into the interview with some good STAR examples.
Even if I do that right, performance management meetings will always focus on what I didn’t achieve, the holes I didn’t manage to plug, the gaps I didn’t manage to close. Whether or not the children in question absorb the information overload or not, it will be down to me to try to improve their chances. Sorry, “find a way to show I’m having an impact”.
School isn’t really about teaching children any more than the NHS is there to heal the sick, or government is there to manage the country.
Nothing works properly because everything is a lie. And everything is a lie, nobody trusts anyone. And because nobody trusts anyone, the world is about proof not truth. And because everything is about proof not truth, nothing works properly.
My job is just like any other. No amount of pretending can possibly convince me otherwise. It mimics every other aspect of life. If I thought for one minute that going into the business of caring and educating would be any different, I was foolish.
Every stupid phrase I’ve rolled my eyes at over the years suddenly seems like the best advice: “fake it until you make it”, “don’t hate the players hate the game”, “You have to be in it to win it”, “If you can’t beat them, join them”.
If nobody is very good at anything, I am suddenly extremely aware of the things I am good at and finding any opportunity to use it to show some sort of impact. It’s what everyone else is doing anyway.
FaerieFalls 