I’m standing in a classroom, in front of a whiteboard I don’t know how to use.
Even though I last saw one in 1995, this surprises me. I write “Hugo”. After
a few moments, I write “journalist”. Then I put the pen down. I am not sure
what else to do.
I am trying, by now partly through mime, to engage Year 10 (average age
15-ish, average reading age, 11-ish) of Park View Academy, Tottenham, in a
debate about the ethics of reporting on marital infidelity, with particular
reference to the tripartite tabloid woe of Harvey (of So Solid Crew), Alesha
(of Mis-teeq) and Javine (of, um, Javine). They may be interested. It is
hard to know.
Certainly an awful lot of them are talking.
“Sir! Oi, Mr. Hyoogo! I fink it’s bad, yeah? Coz he’s married, innee?” “Have
some respect — hands up, Sir said.” “Sir! It’s nosy, innit? That’s wrong,
man. So what do you get paid?”
I’ve always had great respect for teachers. This might surprise anybody who
had the misfortune to be one of mine, but it’s true. I feel the same about
rat-catchers and morticians. So terribly unpleasant, and yet so terribly
vital. Proctologists, too. Absolute awe.
For this hour, I am one. (A teacher, not a proctologist. Not yet.) I am taking
part in TeachFirst Week. TeachFirst is a charity that places graduates in
schools as teachers. For a week each year, they also take people out of
offices and government departments and ask them each to teach a single
lesson. This year, among others, they have Boris Johnson, Jeremy Paxman and
Sarah Teather, a Lib Dem MP. Boris got a nice, safe girl’s school in
Marylebone; I got Park View Academy in North London. I think Boris had it
easier.
In a pub last week, just down the road, I met the usual teacher of this class.
Jan Balon is in his early twenties. Shaved head, fashionable clothes, turns
up in the short-term memory as having an eyebrow ring, although I wasn’t
really concentrating. Frankly, I was scared. Park View Academy is a good
school, mainly in the sense that it is a quickly improving school. Sixty per
cent of the 1,200 pupils here don’t have English as a first language. They
are largely of Turkish, Kurdish, Nigerian and Caribbean origin and have
names such as Meryem, Suleyman and Nnenna. Staring around the room, I see
the children whom we avoid at bus stops, the ones that David Cameron thinks
we ought to hug. Right now their school ties look like camouflage. I wish I
were wearing a tie. I forgot. I am a fool.
Balon advised me to plan the lesson carefully. A discussion was fine, he said,
but it had to be structured. This is what all teachers want you to realise —
that if a lesson takes an hour, the planning takes another hour. And the
marking another after that.
I prepare a handout. It’s a printed sheet, with the faces of a few well-known
figures on it. Saddam Hussein, George Galloway, the Duke of Edinburgh, 50
Cent, John Terry, Gordon Brown, Borat, Ken Livingstone. Everybody knows
Saddam, although with so many Kurds in the class, that’s not surprising.
Most of them know 50 Cent, Terry and Borat. Livingstone does much better
than Galloway, who is, at best, “that bloke from Big Brother”. This pleases
me.
Nobody knows who the Duke of Edinburgh is, although there is a flicker of
recognition when I tell them he is the Queen’s husband.
“Didn’t he kill Princess Diana?” asks a 15-year-old.
“Ha-ha-ha. Erm, no. Probably not.” They’re not scary, these children, not once
you are out there in front of them; it very quickly seems absurd that they
ever could be. It makes me think of the way in which we have suddenly
started to demonise the young. Teenagers have become the hoody demons of the Daily
Mail, and the fodder of movie gang-porn voyeurism, like last year’s Kidulthood.
“Demonise, yes,” agrees Alex Atherton, the school’s enthusiastically weary
headteacher. “Good word.” Atherton is a mere 34 and has been at Park View
for two years. Try as I might, I can’t get him to confess to having been
scared of pupils.
For me, even once they stop being scary, they remain hard work. It’s such a
fight. It’s like the most intensive public-speaking engagement — only the
freezing, the dead air, that doesn’t happen here. This is worse. Somebody is
always talking. It just isn’t always you. One girl answers every question
(about journalistic ethics, celebrity privacy or press impartiality) with a
question about The X Factor, or a soap opera. Others just seem
desperate to find out how rich I am. Both tactics throw me.
“That always happens,” says Treina, the liaison from TeachFirst, later. Last
year they had a City trader in one school and the pupils could sense real
money. Eventually they got cunning and asked about his car. It was a BMW; he
was castigated for not owning a Porsche. My car cost me £600. I’m glad this
doesn’t crop up.
So far as I can tell, the spoken English in the class is excellent. It’s
daunting to think that most of these children can speak another language,
and many can speak two.
Atherton emphasises the importance of his school not just as a place of
learning, but also, a neighbourhood hub. Jan Balon tells me how he asked one
of his classes how much of Britain they reckoned was Muslim. With only their
local area on which to base their assumptions, they settled on 70 per cent.
The school, says the head, has to counteract that sort of thing, but also to
embrace it. I’m told of big, scary boys, pierced and tattooed, who can be
visibly thrilled by an assembly devoted to Kurdish folk dancing. He would
dearly love more Turkish-speakers among the staff.
Affordable housing is also a problem. If you can afford to buy a house around
here, you can probably afford not to have anything to do with a place such
as Park View.
“You remember that thing that Oliver Letwin said?” Atherton says. “About how
he’d rather go out on the streets and beg than send his children to his
local school? A lot of people today, they live in an area, but they don’t
engage. To them, it’s just a place with good transport links.”
I’m probably like that. Must do better. And as for teaching . . . well, who am
I kidding. After a paltry hour, I’d probably still place it close to
proctology. Yet I remain in awe of those who manage it day after day. I’ve
also found myself wondering how many of those who trumpet their views in
Parliament and across the media about sink schools and selection and
curricula and faith schools have even had my hour.
Most, I suspect, don’t even know what you are supposed to do with a
whiteboard. But then, as I mentioned, neither do I.
www.teachfirst.org.uk
