Mailwatch(ed) Forum

True, dat. All of the "strict" teachers I can remember were, to a (wo)man, absolutely despicable arseholes.

Abernathy wrote: ↑Tue Jul 04, 2023 11:33 pm True, dat. All of the "strict" teachers I can remember were, to a (wo)man, absolutely despicable arseholes.

Often a seriously inadequate streak.
Failed in the adult world, so I'll take it out on the small and powerless.

Arbitrary rules, ridiculous make-work projects, scapegoating and the occasional bit of obvious favouritism.

I was a 'strict' teacher - all my 500 Facebook friends who were pupils say so!

Life in school is a ritual performance. We have little rules and workarounds, blinks, blind eyes and traditions.

I was always fair. There's nothing more important to a teenager than fairness. Even if that meant taking the kid's side against a colleague (though that was done subtly). But I was credited by one pupil as actually inventing the Ferguson hairdryer. If you were out of line you copped it.

And I had a sense of humour. I could be turned by a witty remark or an imaginative excuse.

I gamed the system, just like the kids. When giving a detention (I hated detentions) I always gave the kid the chance of double or nothing on the flip of a coin. The kid always won, which was fine by me, because the symbolic punishment had been administered but no-one suffered. Not sure if the kids ever sussed, but they wouldn't say, would they?

I also had a big jar of lollies on my desk in my office. If you got a telling off you were entitled to one to show there were no hard feelings.

Mostly I liked the kids and enjoyed their company and they way they looked at the world. Mostly. Others were in sore need of an adult coming to help them. Happy to oblige.

In the words of Keith:
"Get 'em in. Get on with it. Get on with them'.

If you don't like kids, you're in the wrong job.

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 12:15 am

If you don't like kids, you're in the wrong job.

And that's it. Everything I read about her makes me realise she doesn't like children - if she cared for her charges she wouldn't bring so much indirect publicity onto them. They're collateral damage in her career path; whether she does eventually want to become a politician or whether she thinks she can make a living on the lecture/book circuit, the children are a means to an end.

She's back with new reasons. The old ones have been apparently dropped, but the new reasons are even stronger.

Would that be the tweet Ms Birbalsingh deleted *after* Jess Phillips and others took her to task over it?

So what if she deleted it when called out on it? I doubt she takes that attitude to kids who misbehave.

I rapidly coming to the conclusion that this woman has serious issues

davidjay wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 1:20 am
And that's it. Everything I read about her makes me realise she doesn't like children - if she cared for her charges she wouldn't bring so much indirect publicity onto them. They're collateral damage in her career path; whether she does eventually want to become a politician or whether she thinks she can make a living on the lecture/book circuit, the children are a means to an end.

She's on a win-win. If her school succeeds, she's proof that her attitude and approach are right, and suck that up, teaching unions, experts, and experienced teachers, If she fails, it's proof that the educational blob is huge and will take more effort to beat.

For the record, I don't think she posted the picture of Ike and Tina deliberately, as an attempt to wind up lefties or anything else. I think she found the first picture of Tina Turner she could, and posted it without thinking. As others have said, if she just backed down gracefully and said she'd made a mistake, that would be the end of the issue. But she cannot apparently admit she's wrong. That seems to be a thing running throughout her life - she was told from an early age that she was a genius and special, and has believed so ever since. Regardless of the evidence.

She's not as bright as she'd like you to believe.

She isn't bright at all. Not many people with her politics are. See eg Fox News having to talk up Trump's "instincts".

I guess she was pretty bright as a teenager, then sat back and expected it to be easy. I knew plenty of people who aced GCSEs/A Levels, then fell apart at university or in the job market, mainly because they'd become so used to being right and praised, they forgot to put in any effort.

As someone who did well in school and university but very badly in work, I don't think she fits that profile. She can't argue properly, and does things like paint up quotes she hadn't checked.

Hence the Tina Turner quote, she saw/heard that everyone was commenting and thought she better get her name out there, but clearly has no idea of the Ike backstory

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 12:15 am I was a 'strict' teacher - all my 500 Facebook friends who were pupils say so!

…

If you don't like kids, you're in the wrong job.

To me, Malc, it sounds like you were an excellent teacher. Kids (such as my own daughter) often use strict in a different sense - specifically a ‘doesn’t take any shit’ sense. But that certainly doesn’t always mean bad or unfair.

The thing I took away from school though is that if a teacher themselves specifically told you they were strict, it was also a very specific meaning - that they were an authoritarian wanker and probably unfair with it. In my case, the centuries out of date music teacher who’d scream and yell when we didn’t know a composer or couldn’t read music despite him never once teaching us a single thing, the disabled and extraordinarily bitter maths teacher, and the power-loving RE teacher who also boasted about being a magistrate and owning shotguns. All of them would never accept they were wrong about anything once they had made a decision. The last 2 were on occasion also a bit racist for good measure.

Birbalsingh is 100% in this latter group and could easily slot immediately into the current Tory lineup. Entitled, petty, mean spirited, thin skinned, utterly incapable of accepting criticism or blame, unable to retract a statement, and above all else unable to differentiate between people fearing them and people respecting them. And as they never earn the latter they demand and attempt to impose the former at any and every opportunity through abuse of position and intimidation.

Birbalsingh is absolutely a role model. A model of what you hope your child never turns into.

From the experience of my school days, the best teachers combined the following three things...

* Fairness
* Firmness
* Friendliness

...especially in how you deal with pupils/children. Fair in that you treat your students on the same footing, at least initially. Firm in that you lay down what you expect of every pupil, and friendly in that you are approachable by a student at the very least about their class work & bonus points if you can develop rapport's beyond this (without getting too involved). Someone whom is very strict isn't necessarily fair, as they may not be taking into account certain circumstances of a student or students that can be beyond their control, for example. Someone whom is very strict isn't necessarily firm if a student appears to be arbitrarily punished for something they didn't realise was wrong nor were they responsible for, or that new expectations are introduced depending on the teacher's mood. As for friendly, strict teachers rarely are and likely enjoy their aloofness among the students they teach except to possibly pick "pets" which in the longer terms doesn't do such students many favours either in the long term at school or elsewhere. In their teen years, boys & girls are growing up and want to start being treated as grown up with responsibilities that come with it - gradually throw them such bones as they grow and with most students will respond positively & give you respect in return. An important life lesson for them.

Thankfully, the secondary school I went to had very few teachers, maybe two out of about thirty, where the students as a whole had an near universal negative opinion of them. Some of the stories I heard about some sociopathic teachers in Grammar schools however... I put it down to the difference in that if your child is not doing well in their work set by their teacher in Year 9 at a Grammar school, it's almost always implied that it's the child's problem that they're not able to keep up with their peers academically, whereas in a non-selective school if your child is struggling with their school work at the same age, there is more onus on the teacher to see if something else might work for the student given that the teacher in question should, unlike their Grammar counterpart, be teaching to a wide range of student abilities, before the child has the finger pointed at them. In turn, it means that "inadequate" teachers tend to have their school teaching abilities masked better if they're teaching in a Grammar school - only when a significantly large percentage of students in a class start showing problems, compared to students in the same year group being taught by other teachers of the same subject, will any suspicion start to fall on just how good/bad a certain teacher is - and in less popular subjects where they might be the only teacher of a subject in a year group, this can be masked even more.

I suspect that had Ms. Birbalsingh taught at my school during my time there, the nickname she would have got among the students would not have been a pleasant one as almost no one would respect her.

She's increasingly reminding me of Karren Brady - good at self-publicity, able to project herself as fighting for a minority in a white man's world, uses public ignorance of what she does to make out she's good at it but not all that bright when she's under the microscope.

I read too many football autobiographies, and Brady seems to be respected enough as a football executive, which was no mean achievement at the time. But business guru she probably isn't.

I teach business management (new job, folks!) at university. I can give you chapter and verse on theory and what works, but you wouldn't trust me with the proverbial whelk stall.

Watchman wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 3:35 pm Hence the Tina Turner quote, she saw/heard that everyone was commenting and thought she better get her name out there, but clearly has no idea of the Ike backstory

Is this an example of somebody attempting to establish some popular culture cred, on the basis on near-zero knowledge.