The Secret Teacher Read online

  THE SECRET TEACHER

  DISPATCHES FROM THE CLASSROOM

  To the kids and teachers, with love

  Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

  Success in Circuit lies

  Too bright for our infirm Delight

  The Truth’s superb surprise

  As Lightning to the Children eased

  With explanation kind

  The Truth must dazzle gradually

  Or every man be blind –

  Emily Dickinson

  When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

  1 Corinthians 13:11

  Author’s note: This book is not literally true. The school and the individuals in this book are composites; they owe much to the pupils and teachers I have worked with at different schools but I’ve changed identifying characteristics in order to protect their privacy.

  A glossary is provided to guide the reader in the way teachers and kids talk among themselves and to each other.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s note

  PART ONE

  1 Phoenix

  2 Imperial Death Stare

  3 Go Toilet

  4 Learning Walk

  5 The Library

  6 Painful Observation

  7 Salim

  8 Smile, It’s Christmas

  9 Parents’ Evening

  10 Fanks, Yeah

  PART TWO

  11 Someone Must Think Something

  12 Emily

  13 The Letting Go

  14 Personality Recalled

  15 Go Oxford

  16 Isaac

  17 Triangulation for the Nation

  18 Library Fire

  PART THREE

  19 Please Leave This Page Blank

  20 Personal Statement

  21 Alexia

  22 You Taught Me Language

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  1

  Phoenix

  The alarms went off at 5.30 a.m. I had set three – one on my phone, one on the travel alarm and one on the radio – so when they all went off it was like an air-raid warning. Amy was incandescent; she had been able to get up and out every day without it being such a palaver. She put the pillow over her head and shouted, ‘You’re only going in for induction! What are you going to be like when you actually have to teach? Just get out!’

  That’s nice, that is. I was doing this for her, after all. (She hated it when I said this. OK, maybe it wasn’t all for her. Maybe for her and Dad. And Granddad. And me, kind of.) I was abandoning the world of bohemian flakery and uncertainty to become a man of purpose. A man of solvency. A man who wore M&S jumpers.

  I hurriedly put on my suit, tie and turquoise M&S jumper in the dim, cold hallway. It had been so long since I had tied a tie, I throttled myself as the knot shrank to the size of a peach stone. I went down to the kitchen and tried to eat some toast, but my stomach was churning. I paced up and down, checking my briefcase repeatedly for the bounty from my ‘Back to School’ Ryman ram-raid: yellow Post-its; Moleskine (hello, Hemingway); USB stick (empty); pink Post-its; multi-coloured dividers; orange Ryman Foolscap Square Cut Folder; Ryman Essentials Lever Arch A4 neon-blue enormo-file; lip balm; Travel Card; green Post-its.

  I wonder if Hemingway used Post-its. ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’ would fit on one. Go bullfight. Drink sangria. Write Post-it.

  Lesson #1

  Always Have a Stash of Post-its in Your Pocket.

  Whenever you find yourself at a loss for a Plenary – the last few minutes of a lesson when the kids have to summarise what they have learned – just stick a Post-it on every desk and tell them to write something down. The kids stick them on the board on their way out. I got my job purely on the strength of a jazzy Post-it Plenary. Year 9: Writing to Advise. I said, ‘Write me some advice on a Post-it and put it on the board as you go out.’ One said, ‘Get an Xbox.’ Another, ‘Get a new tie.’ Another, ‘Come work here. It’s the best school.’

  *

  I squeezed my feet into my new brown brogues – déclassé to the City boys, raffish to the Inner-City boys – winced and headed out. There were lots of grown-ups around, heading off to proper jobs, looking at their glowing phones, like monkeys pointing mirrors at the sun. I felt my vertebrae unfurling as I marched along with purpose and pride.

  Here I go. To work. With my briefcase. Full of Post-its.

  I found myself walking alongside kids on their way to school and gasped with joy.

  Here they are! My base metal that I will turn to gold with my alchemy. My empty vessels, waiting to be filled with pure knowledge!

  Buses hacked up great clumps of kids in Puffa jackets. The Puffas swam together into a large school, moving in formation. I was caught in the current, surrounded, and as the swish swish swish intensified, I began to panic.

  This is it. Snuffed out before I have begun. Drowned by Puffa.

  The Puffas darted right, sucked into the plughole of a school’s gates. I stood on the pavement, bedraggled and relieved.

  I walked along elegantly bombed streets, passing Volvos, delis, and an eternity of jerk chicken, until I reached a coffee shop with distressed architrave – a ghostly reminder that it was once a butcher’s. Outside, hungover young men in stripy Breton shirts were tapping on MacBooks and scratching their half-beards. Yeah, I remember being one of those half-men. Half man, half jellyfish. A budget centaur. Hopeless, purposeless, dangling men, scratching around in the desperate freelance hardscrabble twilight. No structure, no routine, no human interaction, no dignity. Drinking endless coffees, sending thousands of emails, tapping into the void. Whole days spent trying to come up with catchy puns. The last one I did was for a competition to win a bed. I stared at the screen all day. Late in the afternoon, after a revelatory brownie, I came up with ‘Beddy Prize’. My boss didn’t get back to me. I sent him a follow-up email explaining that it sounded like ‘Beddy Byes’. I never heard back.

  I’d like to stick ‘Beddy Prize’ on a Post-it on his face. And I’d say, ‘Look at me now. No longer using my linguistic mastery to sell shit to morons, but selling Language, Culture, Art, Philosophy, Sociology, the Mysteries of Existence, the whole shitshow, to kids who really need it.’

  As I turned the corner, a large girl burdened by a huge rucksack was bent over, moaning in pain.

  One of my charges. A youth in distress. My first act of salvation.

  I asked if she was OK. ‘Yeah, I’m all right. My pussy hurt, dat’s all.’

  I entered the newsagent’s, clocking the sign that read NO MORE THAN 3 SCHOOLKID AT A TIME, before being confronted by a pair of tanned women who were buying bags of Haribos.

  ‘Only way to keep them under control at this time of year,’ said one.

  ‘Why do we bother? I mean, once they’ve done their tests we should just let them go on holiday. I feel like I’m some kind of gameshow host: “And now for another round of Who’s in the Bag?”’

  I bought another pen and a banana. The newsagent pointed the banana at a half-naked woman on the front page of a tabloid.

  ‘I banana her,’ he said.

  I looked at him, uncertainly.

  ‘You teacher?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am,’ I proudly replied.

  ‘Nice teachers at your school. I want to banana them.’

  I pushed my thumbs up in the air and muttered an awkward ‘Cheers’, and left the shop.

  The world is truly vulgar. I must beat it back. My classroom shall be a bulwark against the tides of corruption. An Edenic san
ctuary. And lo, I shall deliver the Innocents unto Purity and Enlightenment.

  I followed the two women up the road. A guy in a passing car wolf-whistled and made a gesture that seemed to indicate that he too wanted to banana them. I thought back to the teachers I had at school: old dishevelled guys with hairy ears and egg on their ties you would see wandering the streets talking to themselves. Here was the new breed: beautiful, tanned, coiffed, corporately dressed young men and women who walked with dynamic swagger to the sexiest job in town.

  At the end of the road, in a crater surrounded by council estates and terraced houses, throbbed a shimmering glass palace. Well, most of it. Half of the old school building and half of the new stood each side of an enormous chasm. On one side of the chasm tottered the 1960s brutalist concrete comprehensive, grey and mournful; on the other thrust the twenty-first-century panopticon, shiny and garish. It looked like a spaceship had crashed into an NCP car park.

  Outside the gate was a shiny zinc sign, embossed like a Silicon start-up’s, with the school’s name, the Head’s name, a large space for an OFSTED quote, and the School Motto: ‘QUESTING FOR EXCELLENCE’.

  The Receptionist buzzed me through and handed me a laminated card, which I struggled to fix to my lapel as I read the three letters that were to define me for a year: NQT. Newly Qualified Teacher.

  ‘I thought it said RIP!’ I said.

  ‘I give you those on your way out,’ she said. ‘Now you have to go and have your finger scanned.’

  ‘My finger scanned? What did I do wrong?’

  ‘You gotta use it to open doors, photocopy, eat lunch. You need your finger to do everything round here.’

  In the Canteen, a long queue of new staff waited to be registered. Embossed. Uploaded. One of the chefs was manning the till. She laughed at my nervous approach.

  ‘It won’t bite! Just put your finger on the scanner, darlin’.’

  As I placed my finger warily on the scanner, a buzz of electricity rushed through my body.

  Buzz.

  I looked up at the screens hanging from the ceiling.

  Buzz.

  A graph appeared.

  Buzz.

  A pulse flickered.

  It lives.

  *

  Having been validated, I walked out to the playground feeling discombobulated. Maybe this was because ‘DISCOMBOBULATED’ was the Word of the Day, and had been flashing on the screens. More likely, it was because I was beginning my new job when everyone else seemed to be finishing theirs. I had come in for the final week of the summer term to learn the ropes, but everyone else was in Summer Wind-Down Mode. Sixth formers lay on the grass. Tieless teachers in sunglasses drank tea nonchalantly in patches of sunlight. Sweaty boys with their shirts conspicuously untucked bashed a tennis ball all over the playground with abandon, while joyous girls hopped over skipping ropes. It reminded me of the video for ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’.

  I stood in a huddle with the other NQTs, swapping war stories from teacher training. We had all taken different routes – PGCE, GTP, TeachFirst, Schools Direct. No matter which route we had taken, we all had to have experienced at least two different educational environments. This usually meant one nice place and one, ahem, ‘challenging’ school. You could tell instantly from the way new teachers discussed their placements how they really went.

  ‘My first placement was at Lady Margaret’s. Which was lovely. So lovely. Really lovely.’

  My first tour of duty was a private school, where all the kids and staff were really polite and nice to me, and I taught mindfulness on the cricket pitch at lunchtime.

  ‘Then, for my second placement, I was sent to St Swithun’s. It was … good. Challenging, but good. I definitely learned a lot.’

  My second tour of duty was in Helmand. It was hell. I’m still suffering from PTSD. I couldn’t control the kids, who were feral. Boys wanking in the playground over their phones. Sawing off chair legs at the back of the classroom. The staff didn’t offer any support. I had to be parachuted out of there.

  ‘Hi. I’m the other NQT in English.’ A tense young woman shook my hand with brittle urgency. Before I could say anything, she bombarded me with a nervous spiel. ‘How are you finding it? Where did you train? How was that? I knew someone there. Cat. Cat in Art? Where else? Oh, right. So how was that? Was it good? My second placement was great. I mean, really good. Outstanding.’

  Oh, I’ve got your number, Little Miss Outstanding.

  Our guide was a sixth former, who was among the most personable and confident people I had ever met. The tour of the old part of the school was brief and apologetic. We stood in an old classroom that had been cut in half, and gazed down at the men in hard hats shouting over the digging and drilling. Giant tendrils of steel wept from the floor, cascading over the chasm. Piles of old exercise books lay pell-mell around the shelves, stacked alongside old ravaged Ladybirds. Post-it notes sticking out of Arden Shakespeares fluttered in the breeze. Laminated posters with slogans like WE ARE EXCELLIN! slid perpendicularly from single blobs of Blu-Tack down the wall.

  Then we toured the new building. It was like walking round a cruise liner: a vortex of steel and glass, surrounding atriums, gyms, music studios and science laboratories. Along every suspended hallway, screens blazed with photographs and graphs of sanitised success.

  Every classroom was a fish tank, surrounded by high glass. Senior Managers looked into classrooms on regular ‘Learning Walks’ around the school, in order to establish there was no bad behaviour or irregular teaching taking place. The glass was occasionally obscured by sugar-paper presentations, olde-worlde epistles that had been dipped in tea for historical verisimilitude, poetry, slogans, Punctuation Pyramids and literary or motivational quotes (‘To be or not to be’ – Hamlet; ‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’ – Wayne Gretzky).

  We walked on.

  The silence.

  There was only silence, purposeful silence, occasionally punctuated by the beeping of computers, photocopiers and security doors. And in every classroom, dynamic, beautiful staff were standing before dynamic, beautiful slides and happy, shiny pupils, caught in this palace of light.

  On the stairs, where kids moved in silence in lines and there was not a moment of jostling – most behaviour issues start during transitions between lessons – there were poems, essays and photographs of authors, rappers and entertainers. Everything smelt vaguely of chlorine. ‘Like a patient etherised on a table,’ I thought, and then was confronted by a photograph of T. S. Eliot looking constipated. An image of a dusty, cracked landscape. Underneath, in tiny pencil lettering: waste man. A picture of a desert island next to ‘Island Man’ by Grace Nichols. A photograph of Sylvia Plath on black sugar paper; in silver Trebuchet:

  I am silver and exact

  The students’ art, stark and beautiful: androgynous figures prostrate before broken trees; globular mouths wailing through fish-eye lenses; fists of defiance. At the bottom of each of these cris de coeur were emblazoned the blue letters of the corporate sponsor of the school.

  We descended into an atrium to admire the sofas and chairs.

  ‘And these are our chairs. What do you think?’ asked the sixth former, as if this was the highlight of the tour.

  To be fair, they were pretty natty. The main body of the chair was transparent plastic, but they had these unforgiving white leather pads on the seat and back. Chairs that screamed, ‘Sit on me! And work! And don’t get up until you’ve finished!’

  Standing in the middle of the atrium, looking up towards the glass roof, I felt the overbearing sense of being watched. I could be seen through the denuded library shelves; from gangways that laddered upwards to the roof; from the very seat of heaven.

  Along a corkboard partition, the Head of History was putting up a poster of all the key events in English history: a timeline of all the kings and queens. Posters of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Gandhi lay on the floor behind her.

  ‘The sponsor
s are very keen on history,’ she said, with a mischievous wink.

  At the end of the tour, I asked the sixth former what he really thought of the school. (I mean, really.)

  ‘It was the crucible in which my soul was forged,’ he said. ‘It saved my life.’

  *

  Back in the old building, the English Department was a comforting oasis of chaos. Amid the cascade of old essays, notes, sugar paper, tennis balls, boxer shorts, half-eaten granola bars and Zumba leggings were broken-spined copies of York Notes to ‘Macbeth’, The Poetry of Langston Hughes, A Guide to One Direction. At the back of the room, by the window, perched the coffee machine on a table, dripping hypnotically into its tray. A murky puce liquid overflowed the brim, from which emanated a smell of dank cow juice, barely masked by perfume.

  A portly middle-aged man stood imperiously, tea in hand, staring out of the window, surveying his dominion. The Head of Department in repose. Out in the playground, the Vice Principal was standing on a bench, gesturing with her arms like an air-traffic controller, bringing an entire group of unruly, sweaty kids, pumped and excitable at the end of break, to total silence.

  ‘Like Caesar quelling the Gauls,’ muttered HoD.

  He pushed the button on the coffee machine for one last jet of water.

  ‘Ah. The newbie is here. Ahhh. Delicate little wallflower.’

  Lesson #2

  Don’t Sit Down in the Department Until You Have Established Yourself.

  Departments must accommodate many people, but tend to be small. Teachers get very possessive of their chairs. They have a brief window to plan or mark, and woe betide you if you are in their special chair when they charge in between lessons.

  *

  HoD ushered me into the seat he had just vacated as he grabbed a bunch of papers.

  ‘Where’s your Mentor? Teaching, is she? Silly cow. Sit down.’