Eleven Years Later - plus bonus Easter Eggs

The following article was published in the last edition of the school I just left’s online e-zine:

It’s a massively edited version of the 4000+ word original stream of consciousness splurge of nostalgia I originally sent the zine editor when he asked if I had anything I wanted to write for the last edition I’d working at the school for.

I like the edit - it does the same thing I intended in far fewer words.

But…

It does, understandably, lack some of the more revealing and heady bits.

I get it. I didn’t expect the whole thing I wrote to be published. It was written in a big outpouring of thought and feeling. Not all of it connects and goes together and it had about twenty different tones across the whole piece.

That being said, here is a section from the middle they cut out that I think is really important going forward regarding some of my beliefs about education:

Ultimately, I think student voice and student choice should be central to what students are doing as education really works best through intrinsic self-motivation.  Forcing students to do anything is usually a recipe for disaster; they should be sufficiently nurtured to want to choose something for themselves or be given the opportunity to pursue something else if the interest is not there.  It was important to me that our new Student Council reflect that, having seen the Council’s previous incarnation when I arrived basically do nothing but organise fundraising days and be very much led by the teacher in charge.  I wanted to facilitate the Council to run itself, rather than run it for students, and was clear when hired about the importance of developing student democracy and giving students a voice.  You might have noticed, if you’ve ever been in one of my classes, that I usually gave each group I teach the opportunity to respond honestly to a survey about my teaching and their RE/Philosophy lessons.  Believe it or not, every good change on our curriculum came from listening to student feedback.  That said, so did every bad one, because one person’s solution is another person’s problem.  Hate our study packs?  Other students love them.  Want more debates?  Other students can’t stand them.  It’s a careful balancing act, but Mr Northcott and I have always tried our best to make things as enjoyable as possible, and a key part of that is by trying to listen to what students want.  It’s one of the biggest tragedies of the covid pandemic that the narrative of “lost learning” and emphasis on exam grades has taken most of the fun out of exam subjects.  Our hands have been somewhat tied in terms of what we could do in the classroom last year and exam boards devaluing their own subjects by reducing them merely to what is, or isn’t, on the exam hasn’t helped either.  I’ll let you in on a secret - the RE and Philosophy curriculum at Aston has never been about only what is on the exam because, since arriving here in 2011, my understanding has always been that this is a high-performing academic grammar school where students come to be big thinkers and the future leaders of tomorrow.  You don’t get that by limiting your experience to only the bullet-points of an exam specification or focusing only on what will get you an external qualification at the end.  Our most successful students, year after year, are the readers, the thinkers, the interesting people who have hobbies, outside interests, and can answer the question “what did you do at the weekend” with stories that show there is far more to them than what they are studying in school.  Remember, when you apply for a university, or a job, everyone in the country, whatever school they go to, is doing the same GCSEs and the same A-levels, taught by teachers trained by the same teacher-trainers.  The only thing that separates you from the pack is the individual things you do beyond that basic universal foundation.  What I loved about Aston when I came here is that it never felt like that needed to be said.  Students were drumming, singing, acting, painting, performing magic, writing poems, running businesses, writing computer programmes and organising events without needing it to “be for something” and with the full understanding that there was more to life than a GCSE or A-level.  Today, those same students are out doing great things in the world beyond Aston’s walls.  Tomorrow, if you find your own passions and hobbies, it will be you….

…I guess what I am saying is that I will leave Aston this summer with a lot of weird and wonderful memories, just as, I’m sure, those of you who have encountered me over the years will have your own strange stories to tell.  It worries me how much I still recall of my own school days - the teachers who changed my life for the better and the ones who made my life miserable.  It is a heavy burden to know that, for some of you, I will be one of those memories you carry with you forever, and I can only hope there are more of you remembering me as the former rather than the latter.  I know I have quite a reputation for strictness, but the thing you ought to know is that I absolutely hate enforcing school rules and the main thing I shall be doing in my life after Aston is academic research on the role unjust systems of punishment in schools create and perpetuate unjust systems of criminal justice in wider society.  I will be looking into prison abolition, and alternatives to coercive schooling.  My hope, therefore, is that every time a rule has been enforced strictly by me, it has made you question whether such a rule should exist in the first place, and whether or not the punishment is just.  That was always my reason for doing it.  Moreover, it is my hope that the inequality of the position between teacher and student in such situations encourages you to remember not to let such inequalities persist as we, the old generation and our historical systems, die out and you get to replace us and transform the world.  Be wary of abuses and misuses of power and vigilant against the structures that maintain them.  It is worth remembering that all a “behaviour point” is and ever should be is a note on SIMS about your behaviour.  You don’t “receive” one.  It merely puts a note against your name about some instance of your behaviour.  It is information, and that note should only be used as an information record, there for teachers to be informed about any possible issues and so that persistent poor behaviour to be constructively addressed.  Note I didn’t say “punished”.  A behaviour point only becomes a “punishment” when the school has a system in place which translates that information into a penalty, such as a detention.  A move which is entirely unnecessary as the behaviour could be monitored and responded to in a wide variety of different ways.  Likewise, a detention doesn’t need to be a penalty either, it could be time used constructively to address the issues that led to it.  The choice to make it anything else is exactly that: a choice.  And all choices should be scrutinised.  Those of you who have felt angry over the years for being given a behaviour point by me, or several, can hopefully direct their frustration towards the proper target now: the system.  “Don’t hate the player, hate the game”, as the saying goes.  I will never forget my first Year 13 leavers day when a member of my form put up posters of my face around the form room with the legend “calls himself an anarchist but enforces school rules!”  As a student, and now researcher in, experimental philosophy, however, he understood exactly what I was doing.  Ultimately, we all know that you behave brilliantly whenever you’re doing something you want to do.  Find what you love to do and you won’t need to worry about behaviour points or pedantic teachers ever again.

My saddest takeaway from my time working at Aston (besides the day I got a call while teaching in W7 telling me that my mother had terminal cancer just five minutes before I had to teach a Year 10 class about the ethics of euthanasia in terminal patients; or learning of the deaths of Mr Parker and, later, Mr Dirnhofer, both massive blows, but neither as massive as learning of the deaths of several former students over the years…  OK, there has been a lot of sad alongside the happy, but I guess I meant sad as in avoidable and depressing rather than unavoidable and tragic) is the number of students who don’t do what they love out of fear.  Fear of disappointing parental expectations, fear of failure, fear of the unknown.  It is sad because, as a sixth form tutor, I have seen these students struggle through a time that should be the happiest of their school-life.  In the sixth form you are the sole person responsible for setting your timetable.  If there is any lesson on there that you don’t want to do, it is on your shoulders and nobody else’s.  Yet students too often get wrapped up in ideas of what they “have to do” or subjects that they “need” and forget that if they don’t love what they do and have that intrinsic motivation for independent work that comes from personal curiosity and interest then they will be very unlikely to succeed.  Each year there are lives I see stalled and made miserable because of poor academic choices, and the list of students taking an unplanned “gap year” instead of going on to study a subject that they adore at a university of their choice grows.  Life is too short for such things, and I hope anyone who has read this far will make sure that they base decisions on GCSE options, A-level choices, and where and what they will study at university on things they love to do.  Our core value of diligence can only be achieved if we also embrace our value of honesty, about ourselves, who we are, and what we want to do with our time.  That is true integrity: knowing ourselves and staying true to who we are even if others try to pull us in the wrong direction.  It would be a kindness, therefore, for so many of our students if they could embrace their own identity instead of having an identity imposed on them by their parents, their peers, or their pessimism.