I'm a Teacher

This book was published, in hardback at least, by Short Books. And they certainly live up to their name. 'Im a teacher...' is a wee slip of a read that can be digested in one sitting if you wish. Not that it is a smooth, comfort read. Francis Gilbert admits at the start that he was something of a rebel against the establishment - with his lank, greasy hair and pockmarked paisley shirt. With nothing but a propinquity for writing agit prop poetry, he realised he could never survive in a normal capitalist job, so like many others who come to this conclusion he opts for teaching. He shuns the orthodoxies of the teacher training year, rubbing his tutor up the wrong way, and deliberately opts to teach in some of the toughest schools in the UK: first in a motorway council estate comprehensive in Coventry (echoes of Ballard) and then, for his probation year, in Truss school in East London. A school that, at the time, was flat bottom of the national league tables with a mere 3% of pupils getting 5 GCSEs. A privileged middle class boy, Gilbert is nevertheless a charismatic, engaging teacher. He is clearly the sort of intelligent, committed fellow that these types of school really benefit from. The kids wind him up like nothing: smoking in class, blackmailing him for touching a pupil during a Macbeth rehearsal, constantly disrupting lessons and, at times, failing to even show up. Nevertheless, when Gilbert finally has enough and bails out to a better school in a leafier part of London (the life span of a teacher in one of these schools is typically very short), the pupils acknowledge their debt to what he has tried to do. The style is swift, brisk and engaging. At times Gilbert can be very funny. The book is part memoir, part novel. Names have been changed (obviously) and characters are composites of real people. All the incidents described are based on real events. As someone on the cusp of entering the teaching profession myself, I was fascinated to read Gilbert's accounts of the day to day ritual of a teacher: the staffroom hierarchies, the smells of curry and toilets, the surreal rabble of the corridor, the need to placate supervisors with evidence of 'differentiation' (targeting work to both able and less able pupils) and the fundamental necessity of keeping body and soul and inner resources together to survive the job. As Philip Pullman (himself a former teacher) says on the blurb, schools like Truss need engaged and committed and tough cored staff in them to turn them round. They also need resources: along the lines of Harrow and Eton. There is a massive educational apartheid system in Britain between the wealthy, selective independent schools and the iner city comprehensives who have to take a large number of pupils who can't speak English well and whose parents can't afford basic uniform. It is a huge, huge inequality - for the government, for the teaching profession, for society - to help redress.