Guest Art­icle by MisEducation

Some­times I des­pair at my job. You try your damnd­est to teach each class of kids that are plonked in front of you twice a week some­thing use­ful about life or the world, talk until you’re blue in the face repeat­ing the basics of the Eng­lish lan­guage, only to be left with gems such as these.

“In the play, women are put on a pedal-stool by their boyfriends”

“I was green with ivy when I saw that she had a bet­ter dress than me”

“Bul­ly­ing leads to low shelf of steam”

“In Macbeth, Mal­colm is Prince of Cumbernauld”

When you add in the amounts of dire spelling and bad punc­tu­ation that grace the pages of the graffiti’d jot­ters every day, its hard not to start banging your head off the desk and mut­ter­ing to your­self about verbs and nouns whilst rock­ing back and for­ward like some asylum-bound nutbag.

I’ve tried sev­eral times to work out if kids are get­ting more stu­pid (or stu­pider as they’d say..) and I can’t work it out. I remem­ber clearly that when I was at school there were people who were ‘chal­lenged’ (hoo­ray for wishy washy teacher speak.…OK, so I mean they were fuck­ing thick) but the lack of gen­eral know­ledge that I see on a daily basis is shocking.

They have in depth know­ledge of fast food out­lets, who is see­ing who in the super­fi­cial won­der­land of Hol­ly­wood, how many cal­or­ies are in a dough­nut or who is num­ber one in the charts. How­ever, they don’t know who the Prime Min­is­ter is, why the Holo­caust happened (or in some cases that it happened at all and isn’t just a story that some guy made up), who the first man on the moon was, or more import­antly, what mar­zipan is. One of my fourth years took a stab at it being a coun­try in Europe, but the rest mostly just looked blank.

If you sug­gest that they per­haps pick up a book and read, you should duck quickly or you might get hit in the face with a Jane Aus­ten novel as it flies across the room. OMG, read­ing is abso­lutely not some­thing that any nor­mal per­son wastes their time doing, FFS. Read­ing is for losers. Or poofs, who might as well be losers apparently.

Ask them about celebrit­ies though, or where they can get Botox, or who won Big Brother for the last eight years run­ning (or is it nine? Or does any­one care…?) and their eyes light up as they clam­our to give you the gos­sip, fresh from the pages of Heat. Now, don’t get me wrong…I like to read Heat some­times and find the kind of car crash celebrity stor­ies they tell fas­cin­at­ing from a soci­olo­gical point of view. It’s hard to see why we care so much about some of these people. It seems that we love to hate them for their life­styles, glam­our and suc­cess even though we can’t look away and there­fore feed­ing their fame. The pathos that we used to feel as a res­ult of art, music or theatre in the past is now evoked by read­ing about the lives of people that we don’t know. The worry is that kids see these celebrit­ies as their new idols. They want to be like Jordan, Brit­ney or Posh, but not to be sing­ers or mod­els, just to be famous.

Of course I’m doing the hard­work­ing and intel­li­gent pupils down, but some­times these seem like the minor­ity. While there are some highly intel­li­gent young people out there who are mature, engaged and curi­ous about everything and who suck up know­ledge like the pro­ver­bial sponge, I could prob­ably count on one hand the num­ber of pupils I have that are pas­sion­ate about learn­ing or about par­tic­u­lar sub­jects or top­ics. It’s a sad situ­ation. I worry that if things carry on this way then soci­ety will degen­er­ate into a store for mind­less, sur­gery enhanced twats who don’t know what a book is and are PROUD of that fact.

But who’s to blame? The media? Par­ents? Obvi­ously the lat­ter have a huge influ­ence on things which is a pain in the rear end for teach­ers. To have a child dis­rupt your les­son and be pun­ished for it, only to have the par­ent com­plain and over­turn your pro­fes­sional rul­ing on the grounds that “little Jimmy would NEVER behave like that” is under­min­ing and frus­trat­ing. A col­league of mine recently gave home­work to a class near­ing exams to aid revi­sion, only to have five of her pupils’ par­ents write in to say that their little angel was not going to do it because it was “too easy”. Later, when she asked them to under­line all of the adverbs in a piece of writ­ing, they didn’t know what an adverb was because they had failed to do the home­work. My solu­tion? CCTV in classrooms. That way if any par­ent doesn’t believe that their child’s beha­viour is what a cred­ible, pro­fes­sional adult said it was, we can show them the tapes of Junior being a cheeky shite.

Maybe I’ve just had a bad day. I’m not say­ing that my job isn’t often good fun and reward­ing, because it is. Teach­ing is a var­ied job where no two days are the same. And edu­ca­tion is a change­able beast by nature. Of course we should move for­ward and do things to help young people as the world itself changes, but I can’t ignore the nag­ging feel­ing that our kids are get­ting more ignor­ant when it comes to things that are his­tor­ic­ally import­ant. Same goes for any­thing cur­rent which is, as we speak, mould­ing our soci­ety and planet into some­thing new. Cli­mate change is when mum turns on the heat­ing and credit crunch might as well be a new dollar-shaped cereal.

Who knows? Maybe the future is exams in the cor­rect use of text speak.

“txt the emoticons for Ngry, sad n cnfuzd”

:@, :( :$

CORRECT!

Or how to bag your­self a foot­baller and be fam­ous (be blonde, have face like fizz, get tits done).

The text­books would be celebrity weeklies and our teach­ers would be the likes of Paris Hilton and the afore­men­tioned ex-Big Brother win­ners, here to give their hil­ari­ous and life affirm­ing tales of how fuck­ing awe­some it is to be vapid and famous.

All I can say is I hope that this ver­sion of hell is all in my dystopic, jaded head.

And now I need a beer.…..;o)

MisE­du­ca­tion is a qual­i­fied, full-time High School Eng­lish teacher work­ing some­where in Scot­land. She has, for obvi­ous reas­ons, chosen to remain anonymous.