Brits and Emotions

So here I am,back in France, Lyon this time... trying to do what may be impossible. Have a good time living in France. Why so hard?

Where do i begin...

France is a dream in the English mind. It is a holiday dream, or a dream of the childhood holidays that you had and were most happy. I know the latter is certainly true in my family, where we all have tried to have a stab at living in France on some level as an adult. Other people may come to it via a different route; a lover is a common route and I've done that one too.

As an English woman I realise that we are a rare breed - " funny". English/Irish/Scots/Welsh... we do humour. It's part 0f us. It doesn't make us more sexually attractive even in our own culture but we do it anyway. Because we like to laugh.

The French don't appear to do 'banter'. They are a much more formal civilisation and would check the temperature of the situation between strangers ... the Brits use 'banter' with strangers to break the ice of formality. The good side of this is that it keeps the day to day 'peppy'. Other nations can perceive us as rude. I've even read Sunday supp articles on why the Brits are so humorous about everything and the theory has been because as a nation, we do it to avoid emotions that we cant handle or are uncomfortable with.

Hmm...Mebbe.

I was stuck on a Euro star train for hours last Xmas. In the carriage were Brits, a South African, French, Spanish. Only the Brits made gallows humour jokes about the continuing ridiculous of the situation. We were not avoiding our emotions of frustration and anger. We knew that there was nothing we could do and we needed to keep our spirits up and ourselves mentally occupied i this situation.No other culture said a word - they did not connect with each other and try to offer each other any comfort or solace. I think we Brits used humour because we knew full well that there was absolutely nothing to laugh about. We didn't feel uncomfortable with out emotions. There was nothing to laught about so to be perverse we laugh.

onwards... left that saaf london hell hole and now am in bureaucratic france with horrible arrogant french kids... so not cut out for this job...

So Im back. It s time to update the blog and share my latest trials and tribulations in Edu-land, and this time im doing it ' a la Francaise!'

So i finally got sprung from the Saarf London school and landed a nice little number in a private school in Lyon, France.

Six months in and i'm beginning to focus from the complete whirl that my life has been. There are some positives.... i speak a bit better French and I have a lovely flat, but its hasnt been easy getting this far.

hang on, there was a funny moment today. I has set a task for the girls to impro a scene between  Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta Scott King, in which she wants more of a political career and he is is saying that she should stay home and raise the kids.  ( read it on wikipedia 'so it must be true et'c.)

Two girls did the most ghetto slang version you could imagine. Martin is asking Coretta, " are you dumb?"  and  that she's sket and she is calling him a waste-gash et'c and that he's just after a boomting. In the end I had to stop it and say that I was suprised that they would depict these icons in this way. One girl says " miss, you don't understand. we are doing the Black version!"

Excuse me? Have I missed something here? I am now really worried.

Have all those Black History Weeks you slogged through at primary school been wasted?

" Yeah, we know they're black miss.." (phew!) " but this is is how black people talk"

" So you think all black men talk to women like that. Do you really think that Martin spoke to Coretta like that?"

 This provokes thought. Some are saying yes, others are not so sure...

" Rubbish, he would not have spoken like that to her and she wouldn't speak like that to him. Do your parents talk like that to each other? I doubt it" I say.

"Sometimes..." some of them say. ( Jesus.. i'm thinking...)

More discussion.

"Well its how teenagers talk ..."

Aha, there we have it! 

So then I have to say that it was a bit mental to portray MLK and CK as London teenagers. The whole point was, just 'cos he was a revolutionary, doesn't mean he wasn't a sexist. 

 

I wish that it was my last hour on the titanic. Im at break point. Today, a girl who screamed at me last week for not praising her rubbish work, told me to shut up every time I spoke, that i'm stupid and then repeatedly called me a tramp.  there were many other moment like this today but that topped it. I found it very hard not to insult her back. i did call her a fool. I also learnt that two of my collegues are leaving the department leaving me to do hold up the fort and induct new staff which i will not be paid to do. I now see why teachers go off work with stress. I find the workload almost impossible. I get in a 8.am every day. I work all day til six pm with less than hour off in the day. I leave when the school keeper kicks me out and i could still stay on till nine and only then feel like I have done most of what is asked. I have no life. I'm drinking way too much. My period is over two weeks late. I  have psoriasis on my elbows and ankles.. and i want to leave this profession and say... hey, let someone else fucking do it.

sorry if i cant blog that often. I'm basically too tired or planning lessons.

OK, more news from the front. I think I forgot to say that my school is being closed next year... well this is what is proposed to happen... but local council are still in 'consultation'. They want to merge the school with others and flog 'em off  to Academys. It saves them a lot of money and hassle. I didn't really get the whole Academy' thing until now and its pretty sick that it exists under a Labour Government. But then thats the con, there is no labour.

Our local council has also put a cap on the amount of exclusions you can have per year. Ours is seven. Any more then you are financially punished  12.5 grand plus the 4 grand you are given per year per child. So you have to keep the nutters or lose a teacher or two. Academys don't have a quota or a cap so of course they can  shed the rest.  Nor do they have to have a board of govenors to answer to that is made up of parents. They can put their own in place. They are pretty much outside the jurisdiction of the local council. Nor do many of them recognise the teaching unions and don't have to. Thanks Labour. Ok so the tories created this, but why havn't Labour used their massive power to rid us of this nonsense.

Plus, the local council questions the school way before they even et to their magic 7. I don't think my school excluded 7 last year.

But as the gov't has a legal mandate to educate every child,  thus the normal local school ( also known as a community school) has to take up the slack and thus become crapper.  I read last year that one academy shed 25% of its kids. Eventually when every school in the borough is an academy, the kids will be forced to go into the next borough to be educated and then that borough will go ' academy' too, just to not become a bin. 

So many of these kids have serious emotional problems and there is a minimal service to back them psychologically. So many of them badly need a shrink. 

Oh and did I mention I also got pushed the other week. she got excluded for five days. I had her back in my class  because other staff were out or sick and there was nowhere to put  her. I tried to talk to her before the class but she refused and was rude, let alone saying sorry. She did mention that she would lie to blow up the room with me in it. I eventually has enough and asked her t go into another class but she ignored me and walked off shouting at me to shut up. After that I decided that I would not have her back in my class no way. Last Friday she thumped another teacher. She is being excluded for 5 days again. 

God its been a long week. I am home on a friday too knackered to go out and realising that I am too busy working to have a life.

The week ended well. Three teachers were assaulted by pupils in 24 hrs.  It began on Thursday, when a student punched a six foot female Brazilian PE teacher in the stomach. This morning, the sister of a year 7, sneaked into the school to beat up some kid and pushed a teacher into the classroom in the process. Then by 10.45am, as I was in an assembly about 'harmony and accepting differences,' I noticed a girl scampering up some stairs.

 Then I saw a tall high heeled black woman striding through reception, followed hastily the Head and a few other teachers. I instantly knew something was seriously kicking off.

 I thought, 'ooh praps it's a mum come in to give her daughter a good slap. Sometimes this happens. Teacher's have to take the softly softly reasonable approach to discipline, and I'm a bit ashamed to admit it that I get a certain sense of moral justice when I know that the parent doesn't give a damn about this PC stuff and gives a well earned whacking. Earlier in the year, a parent who found out her daughter had been lying and stealing from other kids clothes in the changing room, came into the school, ( her teef daughter had also told her she didn't have any dinner money and should come up the school to give her some) but when the parent got there, it all gloriously back-fired on her when her mum was told about her daughter crimes. The mother ran across the sports hall, took off her shoe and began giving her daughter a beating in front of the other girls, screaming 'dont you shame me'. ( imagine this in a strong Jamaican accent) Obviously the PE teacher was duty bound to stop the mother, as it becomes a 'child protection' incident, and of course, she did... eventually.

ANYWAY, it was my lovely maths teacher friend. She'd taken a piece of paper away from some girl the day before for some good reason, and so the girl took the teacher's mobile and refused to give it back. She got a temporary exclusion. ( She had been permanently excluded only the term before????) She then decided to come up the school the next day and beat up the teacher ( slightly spookily pre-meditated). She got into the classroom and began her assault. I saw kids being sent out the classroom and other teachers, plus the school caretaker fly in. Later a large burly Maths teacher told me  that everytime he tried to prise the girl's finger away from a large clump of Miss Maths hair and scalp, her fingers snapped back on again. The she gave my friends a thump, before finally being calmed down by her mother.

Only to be followed by.....  a  fight in the afternoon that had to be broken up and one girl locked in the library for safety. The other pupil couldn't be dragged away and began a stake out. Eventually the police had to be called. She refused to stop texting (probably to her older gang lord brother per chance, and i'm not joking) She was finally escorted off the premises having been pinned down and handcuffed by the police. She was heard to be screaming and spitting a them and calling them dickheads. I guess she had stopped texting by this point. A fellow teacher got a pic of it on his phone. It'll certainly be a screen saver on my mobile shortly. The joke is, she had also been permanently excluded last term, but the admin at the school cant get their paper work done and handed in properly and so the parents won an appeal at the local education authority on a technicality and she had to be let back in. 

Last night I had to stay for an open evening for prospective pupils. All these people tuned up with their cute little primary kids, looking for a nice school to place their cherubs. It was my role to sell my department. I felt a shallow fraud, encouraging them, knowing what I know. Wierdly, someone I knew 20 years ago had come with her daughter to view. I couldn't help my self but say to her quietly,  ' take my number' ill give you the low down.