What Do Teaching And Policing Have In Common?

I realise that with a question like that you could have numerous answers - perhaps it could be an exam question, as long as it's not deemed as being too difficult or easy. My (short) answer would be this:

Everyone has an opinion on how to do the job.

When I hire a builder to do something at my house, I tell them what I need doing and then bow to their superior knowledge on how to achieve that goal. I won't stand over them whilst they carry out the required work, telling them that they are doing it wrong and that a better way of doing it would be a way I suggest.

If I'm not feeling well I will book an appointment with my doctor, and whatever the doctor tells/prescribes me, I will almost certainly do. I won't let them tell me sat their bit then argue that actually I should do something else.

So why do people feel that they can tell teachers (who've done years of training and in most cases have years of experience) and police (who've also done loads of training and often have years of experience) how to do their jobs?

I must admit that I'm as guilty as the next person in some cases. We had a drunk person trying to get in our house at about 1am the other night and duly called the police. Now you have to bear in mind that we have a yound child in the house and that the drunkard had taken off his trousers, for reasons best known to himself. The police were quick to repond to their credit, and were soon outside our front door coaxing the man to dress himself and go home. After what seemed an eternity he was escorted around the corner and told to get back to his own place of residence. A quick chat with the police and we went back to bed, although not straight to sleep due to the adrenelin still coursing through our veins! Not a pleasant experience.

My partner is a police officer and I was quite angry that the bloke hadn't been hauled off to a cell for this. In my opinion he'd been trespassing on our property, been quite abusive (anti-social behaviour?) and had taken off his trousers (indecent exposure?), so why hadn't he been charged with something? It all seemed logical to me, someone with absolutely no expertise in the field. My partner explained that he hadn't actually done anything worthy of arrest, although if he came back he could be arrested for harrassment. As he hadn't got into our house there was no grounds for trespass, still had his boxer shorts on there was no indecent exposure, and actually had sworn on private land (our property) so there was no anti-social behaviour. It just highlighted my total lack of knowledge regarding policing (and the law) as a profession.

We see a similar thing in teaching on a daily basis. Regularly teachers have phone calls from parents to explain that their children are not being taught properly, or that the teacher is doing something that's unfair with regards their child. On what basis do these parents make these accusations? The answer: on the biased account of their child who is probably knowingly in the wrong and therefore embellishing the story in an attempt to make themselves appear to be the party that has been wronged.

As a teacher you find yourself constantly justifying yourself and your actions to parents, and increasingly, line managers, who have little or no experience of teaching your subject. To a certain extent this is fine, as parents should be kept in the loop, if they are interested, but do they really need to question everything?

I had an example of all of this recently when a parent phoned to complain that I wasn't setting challenging enough homework for their child. Fortunately my head of department fielded the call, which went something along these lines:

Parent: My child's homework is too easy and not relevent to their ability.
HOD: How do you mean?
Parent: It's all too easy and most of it is set from a website that neither I nor my child think is very good.

Now I ought to point out at this stage that the parent claims to be a teacher. The fact of the matter, a fact they later admited, was that they used to teach trainee teachers, which is a totally different thing.

HOD: We all put links to our homework tasks, both set on that website and on paper, on the school's website, so I will just go and have a look to see what homework your child has been set.
Parent: Yes, most of it has been on that website - the exam is taken on paper not online, it's ridiculous. And it's nowhere near challenging enough for a child of my child's ability!
HOD: Ah yes, I've found the right page. There have been 17 homeworks set to date, of which 3 have been on that website. And looking through the list of topics, the difficulty range is roughly from A* to B grade. What's your child's target grade for GCSE?
Parent: Their target is a B grade. Are you sure that only 3 out of 17 homeworks have been set from that website?
HOD: Positive. And it would appear that the work is challenging enough for your child In fact, in theory your child should find this work very difficult, so they are clearly tackling questions that are supposedly above their ability level. Is there anything else I can help you with?
Parent (sheepishly): No.

This is not an uncommon conversation for teachers to have with parents, and actually it's quite insulting for a teacher. On the one hand it's nice that the parent actually takes notice of what their child is learning at school, but the constant justification of what we do in the classroom (and out) is demoralising and shouldn't be required. Teachers in many cases have spent years learning how best to go about teaching their subject informed by experience and training, although many areas will need fine-tuning still and could be improved. A teacher's judgement is almost always going to be better than that of a parent or member of the public who has little or no experience of teaching. A parent can aid their child's learning in class by pointing out things that their child has found tough in the past or learning styles that they respond to, but ultimately it's down to the teacher to deliver the content in any way they deem best. I don't know of any teacher who would purposefully teach something badly.

The notion that "I know better than you" as far as teaching (and policing) is concerned won't change though as it's perpetuated from the very top, i.e. government. Constant interference from ministers and their celebrity "experts" who regularly state that schools are doing things wrong mean that there is no confidence in the profession from the top level, meaning that the general public have no confidence in it either. The spectre of Ofsted and continual changes to the curriculum mean that teachers have to justify their every move instead of doing what they should be doing: teaching children so that they are employable and can function in the world beyond school.

I'm not saying that all teachers are faultless, what I'm saying is that there's got to be an element of trust that they are doing what they think is best for the young people they teach. That's why they entered the profession in the first place.

What it's all about!

A week off - lovely. Don't believe a word of what any teacher says when they say that the best thing about the job isn't the holidays, it's the positive effect they have on the children they teach. They are lying, probably not intentionally, because they may genuinely believe what they are saying. But if the holidays were reduced to 5 weeks per year, they would be doing something else. Those children they've been waxing lyrical about will still require the "positive effect", but no-one would do the job apart from sadists.

I intend to do little, in fact, no schoolwork this half term, although I may venture near the school at some point as I may need to get somewhere nearby. I need to check what my IT class are moving onto having delivered their (frankly awful) presentations in the final lesson before half term. I must admit that having studied the data on my IT class I wasn't expecting great things, but their total lack of listening skills when the instructions were given at the beginning of every one of their last 15 lessons is astounding. Fortunately I can't see many of the class having to give a presentation during their working life, although I'm happy to be proven wrong.

There's a local private/public school also off on half term, where day pupils are charged around £18k per year. They have two weeks off for half term because this is such a long term - it's called the Advent term in public schools. Poor little darlings, but if my child went to the school, and having done a quick mental calculation on hours spent in school, I would question the justification of this 2 week half term. Having said that, the children who go there are almost certainly guaranteed good qualifications (although one can't polish a turd, hence the entrance exam to weed those who will fail exams out) due to class sizes being much less than 30, and therefore the teacher can actually help you if you are stuck. The teacher's don't have their time taken up with pointless stuff such as performance management and delivering formative feedback that is ignored, so the teachers can concentrate on what they are paid to do, namely teach rather than dig their way out of red tape and educational faeces.

I may be off work at the moment, but work isn't leaving me alone. I normally scour my Sunday paper for education-based stories, but the cupboard was bare, until I opened the local rag only to see a still from CCTV footage released by British Transport Police in conjunction with a bag stolen from a local train. The two young girls in the picture rang a bell immediately (or at least one certainly did, with her distinctive hairdo) and I'm 99.9% sure that the girls are in our Year 10. I have informed the police. It's a tactic that our headteacher/deputy headteacher should maybe think about since there have been a number of incidents this term that should have involved the police (drugs and thefts namely) but the school has opted to carry out internal investigations.

You may well ask why the school doesn't involve the police. The answer is this:

BAD PRESS MUST BE AVOIDED AT ALL COSTS

Pathetic isn't it? All it means is that the problem will increase as a 5 day exclusion isn't really a deterrant as they will just practise FIFA12, whereas a criminal record might be. We get back to a lack of consequences for the actions of children who will probably go on to be criminals because they don't understand any different due to the fact that their actions as youths go essentially unpunished. Ok, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but we learn from our mistakes when a fitting punishment is given. We learn nothing is no punishment ensues.

No doubt I'll be chastised when I get back to school for giving the school some bad press, but I reckon I'll sleep easier knowing that.