Grey's Journal:
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Though the area of London is posh, the students are not. I don't understand how the education system works in the borough but my school, `St. Hedwig's', is the bottom school in the area. This means that if the other (better) schools reject a student, St. Hedwig's is legally bound to accept them. The resulting student body has some interesting students. In one of the classes I will eventually have to teach, a girl was recently removed after proving herself a danger to others by threatening her teacher with a pair of scissors. ``She wasn't intentionally evil,'' said the teacher, ``but the wires in her head were cross-connected.'' That made me feel better. The other issue these additional students cause is lack of space. Even if St Hedwig's had the funds to do so, there isn't any neighboring land to expand onto. The only building not used for teaching is the large priest's house adjoining the school. If enrollment expands much further it will only be a matter of time before the teachers storm the gates with pitchforks, flaming torches and a battering ram to invade and claim the rooms as their own. In my first weeks at St Hedwig's, my role was to sit in the back and take notes on what went on in the classes. This put me the position to see all the classroom activity beyond the view of the teacher: covert attacks, note passing, rude gestures and on one heart-stopping occasion: an escape. The jail break occurred in a wood-shop class. The teacher was demonstrating the use of a piece of equipment, which most of the students were huddled around. Normally apathetic and uninvolved students started asking questions of the teacher to distract him as one of their friends edged his way to the door. Then, when the teacher turned his back for a moment, out the student slipped. A lot of my classroom observation time was trying to look the other way when the students behaved as they shouldn't. My authority over the students at this stage was ambiguous, so I figured if I `didn't see' something happen I wouldn't have to deal with it. But, in the wood-shop class, my seat across from the door made it impossible for me not to have seen the escape. I was going to be in trouble. As the escape happened in my first days of observing and I was so startled at the unfamiliar situation that I was unable to take in what had happened. When I came to my senses, too much time had passed to say anything to the teacher: `Excuse me sir, but a student slipped out of your room two minutes ago' would have sounded pretty lame. `Oh shit,' I thought. I sweated while he was gone, imagining the student leaving the school grounds and getting hit by a bus, kidnaped, or somehow otherwise harmed; I assumed the ultimate blame would fall on me. Caused the death of a child through gross negligence was not a statement I wanted in my recommendation letters when I started looking for teaching post in London. Fortunately, later in the class he snuck back in, again with the co-ordination of his friends on the inside. I was so happy to see him that I would have helped distract the teacher while he entered if I could have. *
* *
My first act of discipline came in an art class of year nines. Again my role was to observe. Like the Star Trek prime directive, I was not to interfere with developing life forms. I stood in the back of the room with my notebook surveying all. Unlike the teachers, whose presence and gaze usually drive bad behavior underground, I was invisible to the students. They knew I had no real power and thus made no effort to hide their actions from me. At the desk before me sat a lone girl and in front of her were two boys. The art teacher left the students to themselves to work on their poster projects, while she sat in the far corner, calling them to her desk one at a time to review their portfolios. The teacher dealt with the obvious getting-up-and-starting-a-fight kind of trouble but I was stuck trying to ignore more subtle behavior. The two boys turned around to talk to the girl. She was new from Germany to St Hedwig's and, as an attempt to win friends perhaps, she mentioned that she had done modeling in clothing catalogs in her home country. ``That's not modeling'' said one of the boys. ``Modeling is when you walk down the runway and everyone takes your picture.'' ``It's called modeling,'' said the girl. ``Just a different kind.'' ``And,'' continued the boy, ``you have to be beautiful to model. But I guess you can do it in Germany because people who aren't from England aren't attractive.'' The implied insult aside, I couldn't help but suppress a smile at the boy's comment, as the general consensus on the continent is that the British are the ugly duckings of the European flock. The boys continued to tease her throughout the lesson and I should have just taken notes as such: 14:07 -- Boy indirectly called girl ugly. But, as time wore on, I grew more and more annoyed with the two boys who continued to wind up the girl. Perhaps this was a 14-year old boy's idea of a courtship ritual (I'm sure I was just as charming at that age) but I didn't like it and neither did the girl. She was one of those girls we all knew in school, the one with a huge bag filled with everything you could ever possibly need: pens and pencils of all colors, erasers, a ruler, a compass, a protractor, glue, highlighters, white out, and a hole puncher. She arrayed these materials before her at the start of the class in a neat fashion and now the boys turned around to steal everything. She threw herself over the desk, trying to protect her belongings, but it was no good. After a class of teasing, this looked to finally put her over the edge into tears. In every episode of Star Trek, Picard spends the first fifty minutes talking about how the Federation shouldn't get involved, then in the last ten minutes the Enterprise and her crew finally step in and save the day. So it was with me. I got off the back desk, trying to project the casual confidence of Picard rather than the awkwardness I felt. I leaned over the girl and her desk and said to the boys in a low voice: ``Give. Her things. Back. Now.'' There was a slight pause and then, much to my surprise, the boys actually returned her belonging with a quick, ``Sorry, Sir.'' ``Is this everything?'' I asked the girl. ``Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.'' And with that I returned to my seat in the back. Then, about thirty seconds later, the boy sitting in front of the two I just disciplined turned to them and, in my exact tone, accent and rhythm whispered: ``Give. Her things. Back. Now.'' He caught my eye, surprised that I had overheard him. It was not the best moment for establishing my authority, but I looked down and pretended to write in my notebook to cover my smile. *
* *
When I am not observing lessons, I spend most of my time in the science department office, either talking with the staff, or feeling like a fifth wheel, or both. The office faces the grounds of the school where the students hang out in between classes. I'm sure the students think they are being sneaky, but, when they are doing something they shouldn't, something about their body language draws your attention. Such a group of year nine girls stood huddled in a circle outside the office. I watched them through the window for a few moments, trying to figure out what was going on. Something was happening below the window, an object was either being passed around or distributed between the girls. One of the girls casually looked in the office, clearly not expecting anyone to be there, and saw myself and a teacher. The teacher was busy marking papers and hadn't noticed the girls, but when the girl saw me looking at her, she exploded into panic, saying silently to me though the glass: no-no-no-please-please-please-don't-tell-don't-tell-don't-tell. This was another strange moment where the students didn't yet realize I was playing for the teacher's team. I had gotten the same kind of don't-tell response the day before from an Irish girl with a long pony-tail in a computer class. Instead of researching the the uses of different salts on the internet as she should have been, she was looking up photographs of a rapper. When she saw me, instead of closing or hiding her window, she just looked at me and held her finger to her mouth. `Don't tell the teacher' the gesture said. I hadn't seen what the girl and her friends standing outside the office had done. They weren't the brightest, failing to realize that if you are going to do something that you shouldn't, A) in front of the teachers' office isn't the best place to stand, and B) light travels in straight lines and stops at opaque surfaces, the wall below the window, for example. As St Hedwig's is a religious school, I expected there to be all sorts of Byzantine regulations on all sort of mundane things: no meat on certain days or no newspapers with unholy images or something else that would seem equally strange and arbitrary to me. Even if I had seen what the girl and her friends had done that broke the rules, I didn't have a clue what the proper sanctions should be. Still, something needed to be done. I glanced at the teacher next to me, as though considering to tell her, but then got up from my desk and walked out the door. The girl's three friends fled, but the one who I made eye contact with remained -- a trembling mess. I stood for a moment, not knowing what to say. Then it came to me. ``Don't let me see you do that again.'' ``Yes-sir-sorry-sir.'' And off she ran. I still have no idea what she had been doing: dealing drugs, killing babies, or just trading makeup for all I know, but with my limited information I think I made the best decision possible under the circumstances. I expect there will be many more of these moments in my future. |
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Leave a comment, send an email or join my mailing list. Copyright © 2004 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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