Last Day
A lot of thoughts are floating around as I sit in my classroom for the last time on my last day at the school I have worked at for eleven years. Leaving is my choice. One I made at the start of the year. But making that choice gave me space for reflection and as the months moved towards the date of my departure what had started as a possible intention to quit the profession entirely evolved into something quite different. A recognition that I still love education even if I don’t necessarily love schools. A recognition that not all schools are the same and that different schools might offer different possibilities. Something closer to the real education many schools often only hint at. And that opportunities to educate outside of the school setting exist too and might be compelling.
But also that this school - the school I am leaving - was one of the better ones. That I had been very lucky doing everything I had done here and that I might not be so lucky ever again.
Also coming to the forefront of my thoughts was a sense of the important need to disentangle teaching philosophy from teaching philosophy as part of religious education and a desire to do more philosophy and less religion going forward. Philosophy as its own thing rather than something smuggled into the cracks of another subject which sometimes threatens to smother it. And certainly there is a desire to focus on teaching in future rather than on leading a department. (Even if my own form of anarchist leadership is fairly hands-off and easy-going - there’s still too much pointless paperwork and stress that gets in the way of the important stuff).
Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly given my initial intention to ditch secondary teaching for academia, there was a recognition that universities are just schools themselves, and often offer just as corrupted a form of education as the institutions which prepare students to attend them. Similar to schools, of course, not all universities are alike. Some places offer something closer to real education than others. But my naive idea to move seamlessly from secondary education into higher education, as if the structural issues with the entire project of formal, highly professionalised, education would magically disappear given freedom away from the rigid National Curriculum in secondary schools, was increasingly exposed as false the more I seriously looked into then possibilities of a life in academia.
I had also, perhaps, underestimated just how hard it would be to get a job in academic philosophy after so many years away from it. My PhD, my book, my journal articles, public talks, weekly philosophy website, glowing references and years of teaching experience have thus far not even got me an interview anywhere I have applied to, let alone a job offer. I began to realise that, whatever happens next, teaching needs to remain a part of my life, philosophy needs to remain a part of it too, and that the academic philosophy work I am doing - the personal research, the writing - can be just as easily subsidised by a part-time secondary teaching gig (or even full-time, without head of department responsibilities) as it could be by a full-time academic position. Bluntly, I’m not prepared to move somewhere across the country and disrupt my wife’s career and our entire life just for a one year temporary contract at a university somewhere. That academics have accepted this practice and made it the norm in higher education employment is a scandal, and sign of deep-rooted problems in the academy. I want to write, think and teach, and will do so wherever that can be achieved.
For now though, with no specific job lined up to go to, I am taking an unpaid sabbatical to focus on the research and try to turn it into a book or some papers. Then, at some point, probably sooner than later, I’ll look to rejoin the teaching profession in some capacity, hopefully as a philosophy teacher somewhere. But having no clear plan of what’s next does make leaving a secure and comfortable job all the more strange and daunting. There’s a disruption to the normal narrative. “Where are you off to?” is a question that should be answered with a firm job offer and clear destination not a shrug of the shoulders and “I don’t know?” The idea of taking a sabbatical to do some research and write some philosophy is a hard one to understand because there is no clear connection to doing that and paying the bills.
Mine is, I admit, a position of privilege. The love and support of a wife willing to be the sole earner for a while. No children we have to feed. A house clear of debt. A willingness to live a more frugal existence for a bit. The freedom to prioritise mental health and personal wellbeing over a career. But it is the fact that these things shouldn’t be privileges that make it so disrupting for people to hear and all the more urgent for radical voices to imagine possible worlds far different from our own: why can’t we all make such decisions? Why isn’t following passions and doing more of what we love and less of what we don’t the norm? Why did we make the world as messed up as we did?
So I sit in the classroom I have occupied for so many years (not the only one I’ve had here. My first for several years was in a different building. The classroom where I learnt my mother was dying. The classroom where I cut my teeth as a professional teacher and figured out who I was and what I wanted to be. But this classroom is the one I have been in the longest and where our RE and Philosophy Department was truly forged.) and I feel very strange. I am eager to leave. Have been waiting to do so since January. Since even before that when the idea first started forming. But there is also so much I will miss. So much of myself I have put into the place. So many people I will be leaving behind.
There is a distinction to be made between institutions and people in those institutions. I am leaving my current job because, as an institution, I believe I have done all that I can do there and that there are now too many things about it as an institution that don’t make me happy or willing to fight anymore for them to change. But that doesn’t mean I won’t miss the people I shall be leaving behind. The colleagues, the students. However, as I have always tried to keep a work/life balance, part of that strategy since day one has been to compartmentalise and keep the two domains separate wherever possible. This has meant over the years keeping colleagues at arm’s length and not being particularly social with them outside of school. Getting on in the staff room, sure. Working together on projects and activities, no problem. But I’m not spending a second of my free-time going to work drinks or after-work gatherings that mean spending extra time in the work domain when I could be off living my real life beyond it. Likewise, if I could get a job done during recess or lunch breaks, I’d rather do it then, at work, where I’m paid to do the work, than take the job home with me where it would encroach on my actual free time. I wasn’t at work to make friends. I have friends outside of work. I was at work because, well, capitalism. I was at work to work.
Eleven years later, this approach has clearly been a mistake. While I have not been totally robotic with my colleagues, I have certainly been aloof, and a level of distance was established that made me feel quite an outsider at times within an otherwise fairly close-knit group of people. The further social distance imposed by Covid over the last few years only amplified that sense of alienation further, especially as I took actions to make myself and my family feel safe that others were no longer taking. Couple that with a lot of fairly outspoken criticism about institutional problems whenever they arose and people can sometimes feel like attacks on systems are attacks on them. Then there’s the high turnover of staff in teaching. If relationships stay only in the staff-room then once that person has left the staff-room the relationship is gone too. The cohort I joined with in 2011 all got along pretty well, but I think I’m the only one left from that group now. The rest of them are just occasional faces in my social media feeds.
I just know that when I leave the school for the last time this afternoon there will be a lot of kind words about what I’ve done for the school, for students, for education, but while a small handful of individual colleagues will be sad to see me go and might even go as far as to call me a “friend”, I am doubtful that many of those left behind will miss me in their day-to-day lives come September. While there were several former students along the way who I kept in touch with as they moved on into their adult lives, and it is perhaps more fitting as an anarchist teacher always looking to raise student voices and be on the side of students against the adult “system” that I end my time at the school with more former students as personal friends than I do former colleagues, I regret not letting more of my colleagues into my “real” life or being more involved in theirs. Separating work and life, while useful for mental health in many respects, also made life at work far less pleasant and humane than it could have been. To leave a place of work after over a decade with the majority of colleagues still only acquaintances instead of actual friends is a fairly bleak realisation that I got something quite spectacularly wrong. While that might not be unexpected from a man who wrote the lyric “those who get it, get it, and those who don’t were never worth the time”, wherever I end up next, I will not make that same mistake again.
That said, there is no doubting the impact my eleven years here has had on people: colleagues and students alike. For every carefully planned lesson I have delivered, there were a million off-the-cuff comments that made far more impact on someone than the learning objectives I had been aiming towards. It’s the interactions between lessons too. The break times, the clubs, the cover lessons, the random chat in the corridor. Even the detentions where you treated someone with kindness and listened to them instead of assuming their guilt. All these things have untold impact. You never know whose lives you have touched and in what way, positive or negative. I hated most of my teachers at school, or was ambivalent about many of them at best. The few I liked loom large in my memories for random acts of kindness or one-off moments of transcendence from the norm. I have always assumed going into this profession that many students will hate me too. That it is important that they do. We all need authority figures to hate and develop a healthy disrespect for. We all need those figures that make us recognise injustice and seek to change the world. And we can’t be all things to all people. I know for some students I was their favourite teacher, and for others their worst, but what I hope is that everyone I taught over the years left my classroom at least feeling something new, thinking something new, and moving forward in their continuing journey to become the person they will end up being in some way for the better. It’s the strangest thing about being a teacher, the ripples your words and actions can have on entire existences in ways you don’t even always know. I’ve actually been surprised this last week as people have said their goodbyes and reminded me of some helpful thing I did here or there for them, especially the amount of help I’ve apparently been to the children of my colleagues. Children who I have never met but have offered advice to through conversations with their parents. Or the randomness of which of my students come up to me and tell me they will miss me. Ones I didn’t even realise liked my lessons or who seemed to actively not enjoy them sad to see me go while the ones I maybe expected to shed a tear left their final lessons with me completely unmoved.
It’s been a weird week to end on. Climate change causing a heatwave on Monday and Tuesday that cut each day in half as the bus company refused to pick students up once the temperature hit the high thirties. All afternoon lessons (some of them due to be my last) cancelled and all of us in summer clothes to deal with the heat rather than the regular uniform or work clothes. Wednesday was our annual Festival of Cultures event - no normal lessons. I taught improv comedy all day (the first time doing any improv since the pandemic closed down our venue in 2020 and we all noticed we didn’t miss it at all) for my last full day of teaching. No philosophy beside the philosophy of “yes, and…”.
Today is a half-day too. Assembly at 11.30 then a staff barbecue to say goodbye to all of us who are leaving. Myself and seven other colleagues. Some retiring, some off to new adventures and other schools. On top of all this, my wife has had COVID since Friday. Given its virulence, I just assumed I would get it too so every day I tested negative and was able to come in felt like a victory of some sort. I was all too aware each day might be my last and I might never even make it to this moment now, sitting here, moments away from everything ending. That I might not get to say my goodbyes because I could wake up each morning to two red lines that would prevent me from coming in without putting everyone else at risk. The personal is the political - my poignant final personal moments set against a backdrop of climate crisis and pandemic.
The other day I was asked by my department colleague for some of the highlights of my time here. I assume he will be giving my goodbye speech this afternoon, as I will be giving his. We are both leaving to pursue a higher calling. Me: philosophy. Him: to lead his church. His departure was a big part of the motivation to leave myself. We have worked so well together since the start and created a perfect “dream team” that the thought of having to start all over with someone else seemed unthinkable. Like that moment in Groundhog Day where Phil tries to recreate his snowball fight and romantic fall with Rita and it just doesn’t feel right the second time. From next year the entire department will be different. Another reason this feels like such a final chapter: it is undoubtedly the end of an era.
So what were my highlights? What kept me here for over a decade?
They all come down to autonomy. The freedom to start an insane Wrestling Club with no actual wrestling involved, using the results of weekly WWE programming as a springboard to students using their imaginations. The freedom to focus more on Philosophy than on Religious Education in my RE department and plan a curriculum I could be proud of as well as amazing enrichment courses and extra-curricular competitions. The freedom to teach improvised comedy alongside my academic subjects. The freedom to take a teacher-led Student Council and make it a truly student-led council instead. The freedom to play my bass guitar and sing angry political punk rock songs to parents, governors and the school leadership as well as students, and to even record and release a punk rock rendition of the stuffy old school song for charity. The freedom to be the sort of anti-leader leader I wanted to be as Head of Department instead of the sort of leader someone might want me to be. The freedom to bring change to the school, from academic policies to the way we approach equality, diversity and inclusion. And, eventually, the freedom not to wear ties. Basically, for eleven years I have been able to follow my instincts, follow my heart, and bring a lot of myself to work each day despite being someone who seems temperamentally oppositional towards much of what a school has to offer. And, in doing so, my greatest highlight has been the freedom to make so many students think. Those who fell in love with philosophy and went on to study it further, and those who didn’t but could never look at the world again without at least questioning some of it. It will forever fill me with joy that the person who steps into my role in September is a former student of mine. Someone whose journey towards being the philosophical teacher they are today is something I played some small part in, and who will be teaching the students of tomorrow in the same classroom in which they themselves were once taught.
Ultimately it’s true what they say: teaching is amazing because it’s always different. Fun and fulfilment can be found in all kinds of different and unexpected places each and every day. The problem for me was that it had stopped being fun and had instead become stale and routine. Same place, year after year. Time to find that fun again elsewhere: another gift of autonomy. The freedom to tap out and leave when I felt it was time to go.
I imagine they’ll strip the walls of my classroom to give the new team a fresh start. I’ve always kept them quite manic - like my own study at home and every childhood, teenage, and young adult bedroom I’ve ever had. Posters everywhere. Collage art. I put up the massive slogan “RELIGION IS NO EXCUSE FOR HOMOPHOBIA” in big bold letters printed on rainbow coloured paper across one wall after too many students used RE lessons, and their faith, as an excuse to say vile things. A statement of fact and also of intent: not in my classroom it won’t be.
I wonder if it will stay? I think of the hours I have spent climbing ladders to fill every available space with thought-provoking images, words, art and ideas. I also notice the gap along the far wall from where, the day before, I took down the large student drawing of Plato’s cave made on massive sugar paper back in my first year at the school. My first A-level class here. A simple exercise: read Plato’s analogy and see if you can accurately draw it to describe its meaning. I kept this particular drawing up because the student who drew it died a few years ago. We named a philosophy prize after him. I couldn’t bear the thought of it just being binned over the summer though, so have taken it home for posterity. Sadly, he’s not the only former student of mine to die. Some have gone in road accidents, some through illness, others have taken their own lives. Whenever I think of those who didn’t make it though, I remember the students who found solace in my classroom. The ones who could have been just another statistic of the crisis in young people’s mental health but who are still here today because they found someone to talk to in me. We all have those students. The ones whose successes can’t be measured by examination results or university acceptances. The ones whose continued existence are success enough and who we continue to worry about long after they’ve left our schools. The ones we are grateful we were there for. In my own case that simple act of putting up a poster - “RELIGION IS NO EXCUSE FOR HOMOPHOBIA” - made all the difference for some students. They are here today, and happy, because I bothered to put up those words on my wall. They were able to be themselves because I was able to be me.
I hope they don’t take them down.
It’s later now. Days later. I am no longer sitting in that classroom on my last day looking at the walls and thinking about the past. I am no longer a teacher. Right now I am nothing. A liminal state between what I was and what I will become. Just a guy in a room typing some words about someone he used to be.
The final assembly was interesting. The reason I decided to record a punk rock version of the stuffy old school song all those years ago was because every summer I would leave for the break with the tune ringing in my ears and imagining it to be better. I particularly loved how the song got quiet and respectful in the third verse, remembering all those former students who had died, before picking up again for a rabble-rousing final verse that was loud and shouty. I always thought it would make a good punk song with big gang vocals at the end and was spurred to finally rework it that way when the Student Council planned to raise money for Cancer Research and I thought it would be a fun way to get donations: a charity single. The last few years though, students have been intentionally messing up the song. Singing it too fast, not being quiet and respectful in that third verse. A real mess. This last time I would hear it would also be the last time for a colleague about to retire after thirty-five years at the school. A special request was made by an Assistant Head, near to retirement himself, that the students sang that third verse correctly, respectfully, and, of course, they did exactly the opposite and sang it louder than they had the first two.
That sort of humour is not to my taste. It’s stupid and it’s cruel. The retiree and the near-retiree were both clearly upset about it and it left a sour taste in the mouths of all the adults in the room. It reminded me of the day a few months ago we took a whole-school photograph and so many students were acting like football hooligans that it got embarrassing. Ugly and abusive chants aimed at teachers and younger students. Delays caused by people unwilling to cooperate for the greater good despite the foul weather. The photographers were clearly unimpressed. I bought a copy of the photo to not only memorialise my final year at the school, but to remember not to always look back through rose-tinted glasses. The picture looks great but it was a freezing cold day with a lot of forced smiles, and that sour taste from the final assembly already brewing in the back of my throat.
They’re not bad kids. It’s not a bad school. But there was a sense of something slipping that needed some greater attention. I’m sure it will get it. Maybe it already is. But I’ve grown weary of giving it mine.
The goodbye barbecue for staff was a nice send-off. Some moving words spoken for each of us leavers, especially for those who were retiring and had given so much to the school. The speech I gave for my colleague was well-received (and well-deserved by him) and the words the Head gave about me got me very emotional. So emotional that I was a bit of a wreck when delivering the speech for my colleague and couldn’t stop shaking for some reason.
As is tradition, they gave us all the expected leaving gift. “Oh good,” I said when given mine, given all my history fighting against wearing the things. “A tie”.
It got a big laugh.
It all felt very surreal though, like I was watching the whole event from outside of myself. I’d felt that way the whole day - like the entire eleven years I’d been at the place was now with me in every room I entered. The years layering on top of each other and events coming and going in my memories: the past encroaching on the present. As I stood inside from the rain, watching people fill their plates with barbecue food I could both smell the onion relish currently in the air and the smell of ancient muddy September mornings spent at this same part of the school - the sports grounds - watching a new cohort of sixth formers embark on ill-fated team-building exercises. I could remember being here too last year, watching kids play bubble football and participate in T’ai Chi. I’d been so inspired by the T’ai Chi sessions I watched that day that I found some local adult classes and have been studying it myself since last September.
I had been worrying all week about what I might say in my goodbye speech.
The goodbye speech had long loomed in my memory. When I first came to work at the school I had started in the last three weeks of July back in 2011 and got my first taste of them then. I will never forget the tirade one incredibly bitter leaver went on, pacing up and down the old dining room and airing every grievance that he had been bottling up for so many years. I knew early doors I did not ever want to give a speech like that, though at times over the years I had feared that maybe I would. Part of my decision to leave was the decision not to end up bitter and twisted like that guy was.
But the goodbye format seemed to change every year and became hard to get a handle on. Sometimes staff leavers spoke in assembly to the students. More often than not they only said their goodbyes after the final bell to the staff in the staffroom. I had always imagined the former - being able to share my feelings with the people I spent the most time with every week and for whom the whole thing was for: the students. But the powers that be had already decided we wouldn’t be talking to students this year. We didn’t even have a whole school goodbye as there were too many of us going to fit it all into a single one. Instead, we had groups of us split up for different mini assemblies across the weeks. Our school captain team gave a speech about each of us and we sat and smiled as everyone clapped. But there was no right of reply. The speech I was given was great, and the student someone who genuinely knew me (even if he did make up a fake anecdote about me quoting Star Wars that never actually happened). The years who got to see it - Years 10 and 12 - were year groups who knew me well and who I had taught the vast majority of. It was nice. But not everyone got that. Some were given speeches by these same students despite them not really having ever taught them, in front of year groups they maybe only knew a handful of. So I guess I was lucky. But it wasn’t the goodbye I had always imagined.
Many years ago, I imagined hiring a clown to come in during the middle of my speech. I have always used clown-horns in the classroom as a way of getting attention in a noisy room. I had a few hanging around from my improv comedy days, but if students asked me where I got them from I would always tell them I killed a clown for them. It got to the point where a whole mythos was born: I had killed a clown for their horn and one day a clown would likely come and kill me for it too. I imagined standing in assembly on my last day and laying out some goodbye platitudes and the door to the hall flying open. A clown slowly walking up to me without speaking as I looked on in fear. “I knew this day would come”, I would say as they brandished a plastic gun at me. When the flag popped out saying “BANG!” I would clutch my heart and fall to the ground, releasing a horn hidden in my jacket pocket and they would quietly stoop down and pick it up before leaving the room as silently as they had arrived. Why not end a career on a crazy bit of performance art?
But there would be no speech to the students, let alone an opportunity for dramatic hijinks. And as the years had progressed I’m not sure if any of them even remembered the weird clown stories I had told them in their younger years. Instead of Pennywise’s majestic floating red ones, in 2022 the bit would have gone down like a lead balloon.
Then I had hit on the idea of an impromptu gig for students. My final “Angry Man With a Bass” show. I had planned to do it for Festival of Cultures. Just put it on during lunchtime and see if anyone came. “Those who get it, get it…” and all that. I would sing some songs, say a few words… But on Monday I tried to change the strings on my acoustic bass guitar for the first time in four years and discovered two of the tuner heads had broken and I couldn’t get replacements to repair it until Thursday.
At least there would still be the staff speech after school though. That was the one I was fretting about when I woke up wide awake at five in the morning on the last day of term. I knew whatever I said would have to be improvised. If I tried writing an actual speech then I would end up writing a book (don’t believe me - remember this epic piece started out as “just a few words”). But I had managed to spend various moments considering some of the ideas I wanted to hit along the way. My gratitude and thanks to the place and the people who’d made the time there so enjoyable, perhaps a few pieces of advice for those I left behind? Share a few stories and shatter the distance caused by my aloofness? I was going to frame it around the four school values we had introduced that year. Diligence, Integrity, Honesty and Kindness. I would use each one as a jumping-off post to build a speech around.
But as it turned out, the worry was all for nothing. The right of reply here, too, was curtailed, only this time by mistake and politeness. The first person given a goodbye speech set the wrong pattern: where in the past the goodbye speech to the leaver was followed by a goodbye speech from them, this person just said thank you and sat down without offering any further reflections. So too did the person that followed. And the person after that. While I did manage to get in my “oh good - a tie” line following the Head’s speech about me, it didn’t seem appropriate to start a whole new speech of my own considering no one else had done so. I just shook his hand and sat down like everyone else had.
I guess that’s why I ended up finishing this weird little reflection I started writing on my phone to distract my whirling mind on the last day: to bring myself the closure I never got from saying goodbye formally to either students or colleagues after eleven years of service?
It’s long enough that I guess I’m glad I didn’t try to say it out loud. People did, after all, have homes to go to and as I shared the goodbyes with seven other leavers, three of whom were retiring and several having had much longer tenures at the school than me, my departure wasn’t that special that it warranted an hour of anyone’s time. Also, even now, with so many thousands of words typed, I have still barely scraped the surface of anything I really wanted to say that day. (A good job I’ve been working on a proper memoir for the last year or so then!) This was more about retaining the memories for myself and processing this strange and life-changing week than about saying goodbye and thank you. But then, I don’t think any speech I could have given would have done the place, and my time there, true justice. Nor would any speech have been able to be honest about all the frustrations I had there without descending into the bitterness I was seeking to avoid, or about the joys I experienced without feeling false in the absence of noting all the frustrations too. That said, having previously given the eulogies to two difficult parents I had very strained, complex, but ultimately loving relationships with, I think I do know the exact tone to set when saying an honest goodbye that is both kind, yet filled with integrity about how things really were. It would have been nice to try for a third.
Instead I have this. An almost reflection. A record, a fragment of something. I don’t quite know what. An attempt to put into words what can’t really be put into words and make sense of the senselessness of mixed and confusing emotions. An appropriately unsatisfactory way of memorialising an inherently unsatisfactory ending because it is so very hard to feel satisfied about something happening which ultimately brings me no satisfaction. An ending I chose, but did not want to ever feel like I had to choose, until I did.
Once the speeches were done I said my individual goodbyes one-on-one, got some goodbyes said to me, and then, fairly quickly, it was all over. I was driving out of the car park no longer a teacher. Certainly not a teacher at that school anymore. A whole chapter of my life come to an end to the soundtrack of a Chris Jericho podcast talking about how he survived a pulmonary embolism in my ears. I called my wife, releasing this was the first summer since I started teaching I wasn’t peeling out of a car park to the sounds of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out”.
“It happened.” I said. “I did it.”
“Come home,” she said. And I did.