Sunday 30 August 2015

Nicknames can be hilarious, savage, apt or devastating.

Whenever a pupil is referred to by a nickname, I always ask the pupil if they like being called Snowy, or Babyface, or whatever.  Since nicknames are almost always chosen by others, it is best to check with the bearer of this sobriquet if they are happy with it or not.

Young people are particularly good at hitting their target when it comes to bestowing a nickname on a teacher.  I was taught at secondary school by a maths' teacher who was called Neuter Gender by the boys.  When this curiously colourless, straight-laced man heard his nickname, he had a breakdown.
Conversely, some teachers relish their nicknames, as much as Margaret Thatcher did when she heard that she'd been called The Iron Lady.  Again, I had a teacher we called Ming the Merciless (after the grim villain in Flash Gordon comics). He referred to himself in class as Ming. We were both amused by this and also annoyed that he knew and delighted in his nickname.

Some nicknames can be therapeutic.  As I have mentioned in a previous post, when I discovered that the pupils called me Volcano, it was a warning to calm down.  And the more I relaxed, the better a teacher I became and lessons became more enjoyable.

Sometimes nicknames virtually become the person's name.  I have a friend I call Snake, and to this day I don't know his real name.  I might have known, a long time ago, but now he will forever be Snake.

Sunday 23 August 2015

The funniest thing about last week's post was that it was unfunny, especially since the topic was humour.

So this week, I intend to repeat a few short examples of humour that I experienced in schools.
I recall that my Latin teacher, in 1960, was asked: "Sir, what was Julius Caesar like at parties?" 

A sneer from the teacher was followed by a detention for the boy who asked the question.  Kids have been using this cheeky device for a long time.  One of my pupils once asked me: "What did Richard III say to you about school uniform?" 

I was tempted to reply that he believed that cheeky boys should be smothered in their sleep, but it sounded too awful if you were unaware of the story of 'the princes in the Tower'.  Besides, Richard III has been maligned enough.  Instead I replied, coolly: "He'd never heard of such things and therefore had no comment to make."

Non-sequiturs, usually uttered naively, can be amusing as well as surreal.  In the middle of a fairly intense English lesson, when the students were so involved about the novel we were studying that their questions reached a high level of enquiry, one boy put his hand up and asked: "Sir, where did you buy that shirt?"

At the time I didn't find his diversionary question funny, but I did laugh afterwards.  Then I read that the comedian Greg Davies, during a brilliant drama lesson, when he was a teacher, was asked, out of nowhere: "Can you do the lambada?"  He said it took him ages to stop laughing.

I once asked a primary school boy what Florence Nightingale's moniker was, expecting him to say: "The Lady with the Lamp." Instead of which I got: "The woman with the light," as if she had been a cigarette-girl at the Balaclava Cinema.

One of the best 'howlers' I have ever heard of came from a P.E. teacher I knew in Sydney.  During basketball practice, a boy was severely winded when the ball hit him in the stomach.  The teacher explained to the lad that that he'd been hit in the solar plexus.  The next day, the boy's mother appeared at the school and demanded to know why a teacher told her son that he'd been hit in the sexual polar!

Sunday 16 August 2015

Enough of the heavy stuff!  After the serious blasts of the last two weeks, I thought that I should lighten the mood and talk about humour in school, especially in the classroom.
From my experience, too many teachers see cheek and banter as a disrespectful attempt to undermine their authority, and sometimes it is, but often it's not.  Personal jibes should be dealt with, but I have derived huge amounts of pleasure from humour as a teacher.
When I started life as a teacher, in my early 20s, I discovered that within a short while, my nickname, bestowed by the pupils of course, was 'volcano'.  This upset me quite a bit, and gave me a message to calm down.  I found, over the course of my teaching life, that the more I relaxed, the better the lessons were and the better the communication between the pupils and me.  And humour became a useful tool for both learning and defusing tense situations.


Advice given in staffrooms at the beginning of the new school year, especially to new, young teachers, is often: "Don't smile until Christmas!"  Many teachers feel that if they drop their teacher's demeanour, or smile, or, heaven forbid, laugh, the students will lose all respect for them and then riot.
Such a notion is unfounded, in fact, the opposite is true.  The more you show yourself as a real, fallible person, the more respect you will get.  A recently retired teacher said:
"I never really showed myself to a class, fearful they would rebel.  Now that I know that they never would rebel, I am sorry I never showed them the real me".  Sad, but quite common.


I shall never forget the late Brian Glover, the actor, famous for his role as the sadistic sports' teacher in the film Kes, being interviewed on television many years ago.  He revealed that he had actually been a teacher, before he went into acting.  He reassured the audience that he was nothing like the character he portrayed so brilliantly in Kes.  The interviewer then asked if he missed teaching and he replied:
"Oh yes, heaps!  It was the best job in the world."
"Why?" asked the interviewer.
"Because it was so funny, often hilarious.  Kids are the best audience and the funniest people in the world". 
You can see why I remembered that interview.

Sunday 9 August 2015

Trying to tackle an issue as huge as 'power' was not wise, especially for a short, powerless blog.  However, I feel I must clarify certain points I made in last week's post and respond to several comments.
"With power comes responsibility".  I wholeheartedly agree.  When  children are given power, it should be explained to them that the consequences of their decisions cannot be blamed on anyone except themselves, if the decision was a wrong one.  As I said, the freedom to make mistakes teaches us the real meaning of responsibility, and this should be a vital part of every child's life. But if you are not permitted power you will not learn what responsibility means.
As Adlai Stevenson said "Power corrupts, but powerlessness corrupts absolutely".  Children who have no power, give up caring and seek power wherever they can find it, whether that means killing insects with glee or joining a gang.  This goes to the heart of why gangs exist.  They give power to young people who have little or none.  Of course, this kind of power is an illusion, and a dangerous one at that, but it is understandable why so many are attracted to gang-life - it makes them feel powerful. 
There is nothing for parents and teachers to give up on, except the child as a human being.  All they have to do is give children the power to change their lives, learning along the way how to handle power sensibly.
Many schools have school councils, which is window-dressing on a huge scale.  Most councils have no right to change anything in the school except perhaps the colour of the pupils' toilets.  Neill of Summerhill and Lane of The Little Commonwealth found that many of the most balanced and insightful opinions and decisions were often made at school meetings by the children, sometimes by 9 and 10 year olds.
On the subject of kids' rights and responsibilities, I often encountered this at the last secondary school I was in.  In fact, none of the pupils really knew their actual, legal rights.  They blurted out these comments to stir teachers, something I never responded to, except to indulge in a bit of banter and occasionally to tell them what their rights were.
It is very difficult to set the standard of power with responsibility, when all around are glaring examples of the opposite. Far too many leaders and institutions of our societies have indulged in power without responsibility.  Powerful companies such as Distillers (the Thalidomide case) and Union Carbide (the Bhopal disaster), plus mass-killers, such as Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush literally get away with murder, taking no responsibility for their actions.  So it is not easy to teach a child ethics in a world of hypocrisy, with greedy bankers stealing as a profession and avoiding justice.  So too with politicians who make decisions that are damaging to society and yet never admit to making a wrong decision or apologising to the public.
I could go on, but I won't.  Not for this week anyway.

Sunday 2 August 2015

Most children, even with wonderful parents, have no real power.  They live in an adult-dominated world and are told what to do and what not to do.  Of course, when we are very young, the parents must protect and guide the child.  But as the child grows older, power is denied them, until they leave school and home.
John Holt raised this issue when he detailed how people can give children power.  A child should be free to choose what their room should look like - if they are lucky enough to have one. If the child shares it with a sibling, it is a golden opportunity to teach a child the meaning of compromise and peaceful co-existence.  The child should also be free to choose their clothes, haircut, and even school.
The child should be part of family decisions when possible and not dismissed as too young and too silly.  Ownership of one's private possessions is very important to children, since they have so few compared to adults.  When I saw Anne Frank's actual diary in Amsterdam, I wept at how small, how precious it looked.  Even Karl Marx conceded that private possessions are one's own, not the state's.


If all this sounds as if I always favour children above parents, I would ask you to look at the real damage done by not giving children power.  It is amazing that we allow children almost no power and then expect them to use power as an adult in a balanced and wise way. The more you give children power to govern their own lives and make their own choices, the better they will handle it later on.  They should be given the freedom to make choices, make mistakes, and learn from them.  People who were severely repressed as children tend to grow up ego-centric and undisciplined, living out their rebellion throughout their troubled lives, abusing their power when they can. The more extreme cases of this often earn a place in the history books as psychopathic mass murderers.
Abraham Lincoln, the most reluctant president the United States of America ever had, said of power:
"The real use of power is in its non-use".