Sabbatical 6

I swear I have never worked harder than I seem to be working right now during this period of unemployment. I have certainly found myself wearing a suit this week far more frequently than I ever anticipated when I thought about what October of 2022 would look like, and my pink hair dye and bleach remain sadly unopened. I would love to dye my hair the rich pink colour I bought myself back when life seemed to be centred only around the rooms of my house, my computer, and the occasional stroll to a supermarket, but the inane prejudice towards banality that permeates so much of society tells me without needing to tell me explicitly that hair of that colour is simply ‘not the done thing’ at the sort of places I seem to be getting paid to visit. It really is incredible that places of learning which purport to care about inclusivity are the main place I feel they would be most prejudicial to any brightly coloured hair. Places that still seem to all uphold antiquated uniform policies that speak about prohibited ‘extreme’ or ‘non-natural’ styles of hair. As if bright pink hair might somehow be an obstacle to an education? That said, no one has explicitly said I can’t - the spooks, as Max Stirner says, are entirely in my head - so maybe I’ll eventually overcome the paranoia and do what I want with my hair? I don’t, after all, start any formal employment until January, and there’s a good few months still of theoretical freedom, even if I am doing some freelance dabbling during that time. Take me, take my ridiculous hair? We’ll see.

Monday I had the opportunity to transform a fragment of THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT into some education when I was asked back to run a second online webinar for the philosophers over at Winchester for Black History Month, this time on abolition and the work of people like Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson-Gilmore. It was another great experience with that excellent school and its students, who dealt well with my questions about the justifications for police and prisons and worked together with the abolitionist critique to imagine alternative approaches to dealing with the social problems we currently call ‘crime’. I didn’t have to wear a suit for that, but did the next day when visiting a local school for the afternoon to discuss June’s inaugural conference of the Association of Philosophy Teachers we are trying to set up. A really exciting chat collaborating on coming up with a proposed plan for the event and the speakers we want to arrange. If it goes the way we have devised it, it will be a really excellent event, and hopefully a great way to launch this important professional organisation for teachers of philosophy outside of academia. I also got to catch up with some former colleagues of mine and my wife’s who have, over the years, ended up working at this particular place. It was nice to see what they were doing now and, as I hope to find in January, the renewed lease of professional joy they were experiencing in a new context. Immersing myself in some of bell hooks’ writing recently, I was struck reading her essay ‘Time Out’ in her book, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, how accurate her words were when she wrote about the need for sabbaticals in education. ‘All teachers - in every teaching situation from kindergarten to university settings - need time away from teaching at some point in their career. The amount of time is relative’ but ‘the classroom is one of the most dynamic work settings precisely because we are given such a short amount of time to do so much. To perform with excellence and grace teachers must be totally present in the moment, totally concentrated and focused. When we are no fully present, when our minds are elsewhere, our teaching is diminished.’ I felt like I was reading about myself when I read her say: ‘observing myself become dispirited and tired of teaching, I knew it was time for me to take a break or even leave the classroom forever. And yet it was difficult to come to terms with being a great teacher, loving students, yet feeling a desperate need to leave the world of academe in all its ramifications.’ These last six weeks it has been my experience too that ‘dislocation is the perfect context for free-flowing thought that lets us move beyond the restricted confines of a familiar social order’ and that ‘if one is willing to work without pay’ (or minimal pay) ‘there are many formal educational setting that will welcome informal teaching interventions.’ Indeed, as I left the school I had already booked myself in to deliver two sessions there in November on anarchism.

I also took comfort from hooks’ line that ‘being an intellectual is not the same as being an academic’. The more I have been committing myself fully to a return to secondary teaching and ignoring the former urge to transition into higher education, the happier I have felt about the future. The more I have focused on my work as an intellectual pursuit, and not merely fodder for an academic CV, the more fulfilling it has been.

Speaking of which, I also spent Tuesday reaching the end of my ANARCHIST, ATHEIST, PUNK ROCK TEACHER memoir, which has, incredibly in such a short time, leapt to being just over 100,000 words. A proper actual book. And, having been giving it a read-through and tidy since Wednesday, a book that might actually be found to be readable and interesting enough for somebody to publish. I will definitely be pursuing that possibility over the next two months and will see what comes of it. Even if it ends up being nothing, it is a definitive history of the last decade or so of my life and helped me process a lot. Not only the end of my teaching career at my previous school and the journey back to wanting to teach again, but the deaths of my father and mother that impacted so heavily on the early years of my teaching. There’s also lots of stories about the impact of my anarchist outlook in the classroom, my atheism as a Religious Education teacher, and how punk rock (and wrestling, and comedy) has affected my approach to pedagogy. I am genuinely proud of what has come out of me, and hope someone else will agree it might be worth reading by the general public.

Tuesday night we also went for dinner with my successor at my old job. It was great to catch up and hear how things are going for him at my old place of employ, as well as just catch up as people and eat some delicious lasagne and cheesecake while chatting about anything and everything. There was a sightly weird sense of displacement at hearing how easily life just ticked along without me back at the old place. The standard sense of was it all worth it? at hearing about institutional efficiency and the ease with which new cogs replace old ones and no one person is bigger than the whole. But that was to be expected and is hardly a surprise. We are all replaceable within such systems; hence they are never worth giving our heart to entirely. I think a lot these days about sports-teams. How an Aston Villa player one season might join another team the next, how my favourite wrestler might jump ship from one promotion to its rival, how many Red Sox players I have witnessed over the years end up in another team’s jersey. We have to commit ourselves to the lie of institutional allegiance with sincerity and totality whilst keeping always in our minds the understanding that loyalty can and will change in an instant whenever it is a loyalty under salary. I am not sure that makes it any less sincere an allegiance, even if it is only temporary. A teacher, like a sports-star, will teach in many different schools, bearing many different crests, and will play their part appropriately for the time that it is needed. But a transfer from one place to another is not a betrayal, even if they now find themselves rooting for ‘the other side’ when it comes to inter-school competitions. It is regeneration and revival. A new relationship. When one meets their eventual life-partner it does not negate all the relationships and declarations of love that came before, any more than a widow or widower finding unexpected happiness after the tragedy of loss betrays the memory of their deceased spouse. We can commit ourselves completely, for a period of time, and then stop. Or we can choose to commit forever. But I guess the existentialist in me sees this as an exercise in authenticity: commit to your choices, even if you acknowledge that they are merely that. And it would be to live in bad faith to pretend you have to maintain commitment to a choice you no longer want to make.

Wednesday I had to put on a suit temporarily yet again. This time to pop into my new place of work to show them various ID documents and fill in a bunch of forms with HR. It was a really nice feeling to be there a second time with the knowledge that I would be working there from January. I could look at the place and really see it rather than just being overwhelmed with the stress of an interview, and see it with the knowledge that it would actually be part of my life. The worry here is to then see it and find it wanting. I always remember my first experience renting a house and suddenly what had seemed charming on a first viewing gave way to all the dirt and cracks we had ignored now we knew it would be our home. Happily, that did not happen as I walked around the school for a second time. I just saw more and more good things, and it was nice to do the drive again and start to learn the commute (though I’m sure, like all commutes, I will not be feeling so rosy about the drive by February once I get as familiar with all its bottlenecks and jams as I was with the traffic of Birmingham these last eleven years).

Did you know I do T’ai Chi lessons?

Well this week as we walked into the place where I take them (the same place my wife does some pottery), we bumped into an old friend from university we hadn’t seen in about fifteen years. It turns out they work in the area a few days each week so we plan on catching up with them properly sometime soon. It was one of those weird moments because at university we were all in the same drama society together and it was in that drama society where I met my wife. We were already going out back then, so when we saw this guy it would have felt exactly the same as back then seeing the two of us together, just as it did for us, being together, and seeing him. The fact that we were doing it at an Arts Centre, by a theatre, made it feel all the more normal, as this was exactly the sort of environment we would have been bumping into each other in back at university. Essentially, because of this, despite there being all that time since we last saw each other, we each recognised each other immediately and it was as if the years hadn’t happened. Almost like a temporal illusion.

The rest of the week has been re-reading and editing the memoir, doing some reading around THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT, helping a student with some Oxbridge stuff and doing a mock interview about scientific realism and antirealism, waiting on hold for way too long with Aston Villa to sort out an extra ticket to a match next month for my father-in-law, and enjoying a Thursday working on next week’s Philosophy Unleashed (about Black Consciousness) with my wife working from home too after her school gave her a day to work on some strategic stuff for her department. It was nice having someone to have lunch with for once during the week: I shall enjoy getting back to a staff room and having some colleagues again.

I’ve actually listened to very little music this week for some reason. I think the focus of properly editing and thinking about the first draft of the finished memoir, plus the fact I’ve been doing all these different teaching things or school visits, has meant a requirement for some more silent concentration than usual. I think this ‘zine/blog has made apparent just how very bad I am at actually relaxing. My wife laughed that she couldn’t believe I hadn’t spent at least one day since September doing nothing but playing Nintendo Switch or watching films or something. I think this might be my version of relaxing: Friday mornings spent writing about the rest of the week? But I do think she’s right and I need to make the most of this freedom. The work and self-motivation is important, but I have to also take the time to smell the roses: read a book, listen to some music, watch a movie. To never switch off is a mistake, so I think I’ll spend the rest of the day finishing Keith Ridgway’s excellent book, A Shock, that I have been working my way through after finally getting to the end of Jonathan Franzen’s slow-going Crossroads and maybe playing a bit of guitar? That said, I have listened to a bit of music. Not only the traditional new playlist of the week:

But I have collected all the SABBATICAL playlists on Spotify together into one master playlist that I will keep adding to each week as well:

I did also find the time to listen to PUP’s new live EP, which is pretty cool

And was excited to not only hear the second new Bruce Springsteen track from his upcoming covers album,

But to discover a new Queen track with some long-lost Freddie vocals to enjoy too:

I’m also excited to hear that Jello Biafra has a new podcast coming out soon…

And while we’re on the subject of childhood heroes who never change: Henry Rollins has a new edition of his FANATIC series of books out too, which of course I pre-ordered despite its ridiculous (though completely understandable, given the quality of the first two) price. So I haven’t entirely been work, work, work all week, even if it sometimes feels like it. In fact, coupled with enjoying new episodes of the excellent Welcome to Wrexham on Disney+, The Great British Bake Off and Taskmaster on Channel Four, Mortimer and Whitehouse Go Fishing on BBC, and AEW Dynamite on FITE, maybe I haven’t been working hard enough?

Until next week…