Extremities

Extremities freeze or drop off. Ranulph Fiennes barely has any extremities left. Often, it can feel like we are working at the extreme edges of our capabilities, pushed by ourselves and a challenging culture to provide the finest lessons, the most productive marking, the best results.

And so it should.

We live in a world of extremes - and I'm not talking about the Marianas Trench or Man V. Food. Although the extreme pressure in one, and the rich, varied diet in the other work well as metaphors for teaching. I'm talking about extreme inequality and extreme increases in levels of inequality, and extreme views held by people in power, and extreme reactions in extreme times.

Kind of. Really, I'm talking about us being extremely good teachers who teach extremely deserving pupils. It's a challenge. We have to get things right, simple things, pure incidental things, like behaviour management, which should be based on relationships, rooted in being a firm authority within the school, and on credible threats and sanctions.

We also have to be flexible. The unexpected can happen. Take high rise buildings. Sometimes, they can burn for hour upon hour, over multiple floors, and not collapse. Sometimes, they collapse after burning for just a few hours. in a suspicious pattern, as if they were rigged to go. It's a funny old world. A class, indeed a lesson, can be like this too - how do you adapt to that?

How do you motivate the complacent high attainers you've done a good job with?

How do you improve your approach so that really independent class receive the high quality input needed to secure their progress?

How do you support a less confident group to take the risks they need to in order to achieve?

Extremism is, mostly rightly, seen as a bad thing. School girls joining ISIS cause a moral panic and we obviously blame their communities. Western governments try to overthrow a government in Latin America and nobody comments or notices.

These are extreme examples of extremism. There is another, insidious and pernicious, form of extremism afoot. When anyone has low expectations of a person who is disadvantaged by any of all of the following factors - class, race, religion, gender, sexuality - they are, blindly perhaps, following an extremist view of society which has become prevalent; that people are not equal, that they do not share equal potential, hopes or dreams, or do not deserve a top class education.

We can counter this through extremism of our own - extreme effort, extreme focus, extreme faith in our pupils. Although this goes against the grain of our society's beliefs in the last forty years, it is right, morally, and should be followed through with extreme prejudice. 

Catchy.

There are seemingly endless buzzwords in education. I use most of them daily. They're usually based in something useful which becomes commodified and codified into that holy grail, good practice. And, indeed, we must choose wisely from this armoury - what works, works, and what doesn't, doesn't.

A simple statement of the blindingly obvious, but one which must be made. Too often, we can blind ourselves at the altar of fashion, neglecting the needs of those in front of us. I was going to call them customers, but I won't because they don't pay, and that's something we should always remember. I digress. When it works, however, we must use it with judicious precision - when we are successful in the classroom, we can taste the difference, the finest lesson is an adjectival feast, a superlative banquet. Only T & L.

Every little helps; those laser guided weapons add up to a successful lesson, which looks how it looks, and sounds how it sounds. Those lessons add up to pupils who feel successful and begin to enjoy your subject, Over time, this adds up to excellent progress, and a slight, yet hopeful, redressing of the imbalances which poison our society. This should be our signature range, our three stripes, our tick (although, please don't tick their work because it isn't focused or specific enough to be good marking),

This isn't easy to do, despite being easy to think and type. But you have a team around you who strive to do it, who often do it extremely well, and who will help you to do it better.

Just do it.

WAR

I am reading a book at the moment. I hope you are, or at least are trying to read a book. It's one of those things English teachers should do - the love of the written word and all that. The book I'm reading is a particularly entertaining historical tome written by some bloke who appears to be a commie.

In the book is a quote, one of several hundred at least, which I read the other day and thought would be worth sharing. It's from Thomas Hobbes, a man so influential his surname has become adapted into the adjective 'Hobbesian'. He is quoted as saying

'War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting: but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.'

This quote can be applied as a metaphor for education in several ways. Whether it applies to pupils or staff, individuals or collectives, it comes down to this. What counts is not just the days and weeks before exams, What it counts is not just the lesson in which you're observed.

What counts are the quiet moments, the lessons taught to a year eight class in May when your mind is on your year elevens and which paper they're sitting. It's the long battle, the drawn out war, the battle without glamour or immediate outcome - that is where the will and the means to succeed are honed and refined.