Teaching!

Teaching high school! Mmmm, there's a career for you! However, after decades of it, I can tell you: NOT!!!

Let me take you through what it's like:

First year out, you believe everything. All those kids, those personalities, those stories, all those ridiculous power-plays that you don't yet realise are power-plays, it's all so new and you forever imagine you're 'dealing with it', and getting on top of it, and so you listen to the sob stories, and try to be everyone's friend, and try to "make a difference", get involved, ring Children's Services to report abuse, all those sorts of things you don't yet know are major, MAJOR mistakes, and you're juggling forty balls in the air at all times, and it's difficult and challenging, but mostly it's that you believe in them, those five classes of 30 kids in each who you want touch in some deep way so you get them to love learning.

It's no accident that those films about mastering a difficult class - "To Sir With Love", "Dangerous Minds", et al - are all written by first year teachers. After the first year, you know not to let a class get into such a state in the first place. It also, I'm sad to say, stops being even remotely interesting.

Second year out, and you're constantly astonished because it's all deja vu; things constantly happen that make you think "A kid with your face sitting in that exact seat did that exact thing exactly one year ago." and it's mind-boggling. But that's when you realise everything is happening the exact same way it did the previous year. Same faces, same sob stories, same, same, same, and, at first, it's actually great because you know what's coming next and you've had a whole year to think about the "wish I'd done!" and "wish I'd said!" and you actually get to use them, do them, say them, and finally you start to become effective.

Third year out, and you know exactly what's going to happen from the moment those kids hit the classroom. You let them choose their own seats because the same sorts of kid always chooses the same part of the room, and that's when you develop your own set of games, like ... start the year with your desk up-front and middle, and the kids, each with their particular set of problems and particular set of power-games, organise themselves in relation to that desk ... then you wait for two weeks until they've developed a sentimental attachment to that seat/place in the room ... and that's when you move your desk into the corner. It instantly throws off the balance of power, unsettles everyone, and, dammit, you then own the room!

Oh, and here's an excellent tip: when "Charismatic Bad Boy" swops seats with "Roid Rage Bad Boy", you know the work you're doing has caught the class's attention and interest and you're ready to rock!

However, half way through your third year, you realise you really aren't that interested in the kids anymore, because you've finally realised that, in the State School system - the free education system - there are are really only six kids, each year multiplied out to 120, and that only the sixth type - the rare type of completely different and usually gifted individual I used to call "The Meteor" - which, in any given year, you really only have five or six if you're lucky - is truly interesting and the rest are just major YAWNS! All you can think is "Tone down your personality, buddy, because, honestly, I've seen it so many times before and, boy, are you BORING!"

Fourth year out, and you've got it nailed. You've even refined all your "wish I'd dones" and "wish I'd saids" so you are devastating and, almost without thinking about it, you can reduce those power-playing nasty kids to a grotty little pool of slime, which most of them are anyway!

But you also start to notice there are subdivisions in your Big Six Personalities; like "Bad Boys" can be divided into "My Mum's a Slut" angry, dangerous, misogynistic trouble-making gangs of Bad Boys who are invariably unreachable Prison Fodder, (honestly, single mums with teenage sons really shouldn't sleep around. Have you any idea of the DAMAGE it causes?). And then there are the gangs of "The System is Unjust" Bad Boys, who are usually exceptionally bright and are simply processing a great deal of bad stuff.

Must tell you, "Bad Boy Gangs" of the latter type invariably ended up being my favourite people and we often used to sit together at lunchtimes and simply talk about stuff. And, blowing my own trumpet here, I was forever getting these gangs of Bad Boys through school and into university and onto interesting careers. One of them, for instance, is now living in Mexico and working as a Pro-Bono lawyer in the slums; another is based in Turkey and working as a Cultural Anthropologist gathering stories from Nomads in the Middle East. LOVE?

But then, by about the fifth or sixth year, you realise you simply don't care any more, so you start "going jiggy" with it, and so go off to do exotic stuff, like into the Outback to teach Aboriginal children, which quickly becomes tiresome because they generally aren't nice people, and/or into the Private School System, which is amazing because the rich generally ARE nice people ...

And when you first start teaching at an expensive private school, you notice that all the kids are "The Meteor Type" because, well, their parents are usually well educated, tolerant, well read, well traveled, and have exposed their children to the widest possible range of experiences, and, dammit, it all pays off because those kids are FUN to teach. Seriously! And you can do anything with them on the work front and they love it. Like, if you do, say, a lesson on C. Day-Lewis poems with them, you invariably find them in the library at lunchtimes, reading MORE C. Day-Lewis.

And it was just so much fun giving them intriguing mysteries of the kind I adore myself, like "The Spartans weren't actually Greek. They were simply a Guest State within Greek lands. So, dammit, who were they really? And where did they come from?" and let them go with it. (The answer we all came up with, from looking at all the ancient material cultures of Europe and comparing it with the Spartan material culture, was that they were from somewhere north, up near Russia, from the Scythian tribes around the Black Sea, and were actually from two different tribes, one Patriarchal and the other Matriarchal, mixed together.)

But, after decades of that ...

Damn, I hated teaching by the end. Mind-numbing and excruciatingly boring, having that same ol' same ol' year after year after year! And then it becomes all "Cri de Coeur" and "Please, please, please, GET ME OUT OF HERE!"

So, do I recommend teaching as a career? Yeah, kinda. But, you know, Air Traffic Controller is a good job too, and, in airports like Heathrow, not actually all that different.