Stress

Yesterday, inspired by the Guardian's Secret Teacher piece about a teacher who has become so busy he is eating his lunchtime sandwich at the urinal.  http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2014/mar/29/teacher-time-standards  I wrote a blog about stress.

After I read the article in the Guardian I felt angry. I was angry that anyone should feel under that much pressure and then I became angry that these articles are published and then shared amongst teachers, each of them adding their horror stories as a badge of honour.   What I wrote in anger sounded preachy and so I  deleted it. What I'd like to read is more from teachers who do have a life, who aren't feeling stress to the point of breaking because they are the teachers we need to learn from.  I know that I'm not a 'proper' teacher so maybe my experience doesn't count but I thought it might help if I shared, honestly, how I try to avoid stress.

1.  I am busy.  Now, I know that sounds like a contradiction but I find that I faff if I have a lot of time.  If I have a whole Sunday with nothing to do then I can spend a whole Sunday planning lessons and marking work but if I don't then I get it done in a few hours.

2.  I eat lunch every day (even though I do a lunchtime club every day). I don't think it matters how busy you are it is important to sit with your colleagues and eat.  Nutrition is so important and you can't function properly without it.  I think the change of scene does my brain good too.

3.  I make lists.  Lists are important, otherwise it all just swirls around in your head.

4.  I don't worry about what I haven't done.  Lists should never be empty and if anyone asks if I've done something that I haven't and should have done I just tell them, "It's on my list!" or, "I'll put it on my list."

5.  Although, I am bad at saying 'No' to things I have learnt to get out of things by delaying and saying, "I'll check my diary."  Some people never ask you again and if they do you have had time to decide if it's something you really want to do.

6.  I get some exercise.  I'm no gym-queen or lycra-lover but I do walk the dog, swim and dig the allotment.  When everything feels like it's getting on top of me there is nothing like fresh air (or blue water) to improve my mood.

7.  I try to do the things I enjoy more often than the things I don't and when I'm really busy I try to remember that I only have myself to blame.  I could have chosen to do less.  It may be expected that I continue all the extra-curricular stuff I do but if I stopped then I would have more time but be less happy.

8.  I try to think of paperwork as the necessary evil.  It's the thing that needs to be done to do the lovely stuff. I only do what is necessary.

9.  I know that I'm going to feel uncomfortable playing the piano in public but the more I do it the less scary it will become (Maybe one day if I'm lucky)

10. I laugh a lot.  Sometimes not always appropriately.

The Laughing Conductor

11.  I remember that people are funny and the more people you engage with the happier you will be.

"Can I smoke it?" Kazoo playing at an Old People's Home

12.  I remember that my family are the most important people in my life.

Misguided

I like to think that people are always trying to do the best they can. When I accidentally find myself in a group of people who are moaning about someone I like to be the voice that says, "Yes but...." Maybe that makes me a bit of a pushover but I would much prefer to believe that whatever someone did that annoyed me was done with the best of intentions, even if they were misguided.

So this morning, when the dog disappeared from the garden. I tried to think of the reasons why the window cleaner would have not shut the gate.  Maybe it was too stiff for him to shut, maybe he thought I wanted it open or maybe he thought the dog needed free reign of the whole street and I must admit the dog was very happy.

Then I read the papers and found more mis-guided thinking.  People are very cross with Chris Grayling (they often are) and I'm not surprised.  He has banned prisoners receiving parcels of things from family and friends, which includes books.  This has made lots of people (especially writers) very cross and they have reported it as a ban on books for prisoners.  Everyone knows that reading is the salvation for most prisoners and that they should be encouraged to read, they also know that literacy levels in prison are poor.  Maybe he was trying to stop the smuggling in of  things that prisoners weren't allowed to have but surely parcels could be opened and inspected before they were given to prisoners.  A fake book containing a gun and a kilo of heroin would be easy to spot, surely?

The government insist that they are not trying to ban books.  They say that prisoners have access to the library, are allowed 12 books in their room and can buy books from their £10 -£15 allowance.  Maybe it's because I'm a book person but that doesn't seem enough.  I have more than 12 books in my room and although I still haven't read everything in our local library, if all I had to do was read then I might quickly exhaust the books I was interested in and if my literacy level was poor then I may prefer to read a car magazine that my great Aunt sent me in the post.  Some prisoners complete degrees while serving their time and I can't imagine any prison library stocking the specialist books required and that allowance isn't going to go very far.  Maybe Mr Grayling also thinks that prisoners should be properly 'punished' and that allowing them to read is a privilege they shouldn't have.  I agree that reading is a treat but if you could foster a love of reading and improve literacy levels then you might just do some rehabilitation.

Then I read about women not being allowed to serve the meals at the Nuclear Security Summit in the Hague.  The reason being that they want to create a uniformity of look and don't want to distract the world leaders from their important work with beautiful women.   This has to be the most misguided thing I've heard in a long time and if it's not then I want new world leaders.  I do not want the Nuclear security of the world to be in the hands of men who can't concentrate if a fully clothed woman hands them a bread roll.  I want someone who could concentrate even if a naked model was giving them a lap dance or popping ping pong balls out of their female orifices.  This is serious stuff.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/why-are-women-not-allowed-to-serve-lunch-at-the-nuclear-security-summit-in-the-hague-9213150.html

And finally, I took the dog for a walk to a local field where lots of people walk dogs.  Someone made my dog even happier.  He ran round the field with a huge piece of baguette bread in his mouth and was joined by several other greedy dogs, while I ran round desperately trying to pick up the other bits of french stick.  Someone had obviously decided that the dozen slightly stale sticks were no good to them anymore and thought that breaking them each into 4 parts and throwing them on the field would be the best way of disposing of them.  Maybe they thought the birds would like the bread.  This is misguided and people should know that they should leave it in their own gardens if they want to feed the birds.  Don't these people remember that a bird shut down the large hadron collider in 2009 by dropping a baguette it could no longer carry?

It bothers me

Several things are bothering me at the moment.

This no-make up selfie thing has been bothering me for a while and I've been struggling to work out why.  It doesn't make sense for someone who only wears make up very occasionally to be worried by it.  No one has actually nominated me, probably because they know how I look without make up but I know that if I was nominated I wouldn't want to do it.

I wear make up if I'm feeling particularly rough, if the person who looks back from the mirror doesn't look like me, if I'm going somewhere special or think that someone might take a photo of me.  I don't like photos.  I think they fail to capture the life, intelligence and inner beauty of any person.  Out of 10 photos you might get one that really reflects the person and selfies are even worse.  To take a good selfie you probably have to be a very confident person and have a perfectly symetrical face and no bags under the eys.  Without a symetrical face, selfies always look wrong because they are reversed and eye bags are always highlighted by a short arm induced camera angle.

I don't like the pressure element, either. People who refuse are judged.  People who take part are judged.  I don't like that people feel they have to be 'brave' to go without make up.  I don't like the fact that it divides men and women and highlights differences between them. Men are now doing make-up selfies, where their make up is overdone and ridiculous, rather than something that accentuates their good features, hides their bad and makes them took a little younger.   Make up helps lots of women to find a voice, as Oscar Wilde said, "Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth."

One of the big reasons it bothers me is going to be a difficult confession to make.  It's the charity thing.  Cancer Research UK didn't start the campaign, although they are not upset about the extra cash they are getting. Why would they be?  They are a huge charity that raised £460million from fundraising last year and they are big business, with a chief executive that earns about £220k a year and a further 165 of their employees earning over £60k. I have a bit of a problem with this charity's message. Last year I walked the Race for Life, wearing a T-shirt that said "Cancer we're coming to get you,"  all the time thinking, "No.  Absolutely not.  No Cancer I'm not coming to get you." I would rather the charity focused on stopping cancer coming to get me, but they do very little research on preventing cancer.  Their funds are all used for research to smash, blast, destroy cancer (and the bit of the person that it has grown in), to put people who have grown a cancer into clinical trials and to grow cancer in animals.  Personally, I'd rather fund a smaller charity that works to make the lives of people who have a problem (whether it be cancer or anything else) a little bit better. I think that probably makes me not very forward thinking.

The Archers is also bothering me.  Ruth has been tired and snappy and then Jill (her mother-in-law who is staying with them) tells her she's pregnant and doesn't get slapped and then David and Ruth are delighted.  She's had breast cancer too, so it really is an unlikely pregnancy.  Not once has either of them said, "My God, what are we going to do?  We're too old for this.  We can't do this. What's the number of the local abortion clinic?"  I just didn't believe it, which I wrote on Twitter and was told to stop listening by someone who spells Ruth as Roof and Brian as Brine.

Talking of Brian, his wife Jennifer wants a new kitchen and has approached the whole thing in a way that no woman today would.  In a scene from the 1970s Jennifer goes on strike and stops cooking for him, leaving him wandering around the kitchen in a state of panic, getting hungrier and hungrier and finally stealing a chocolate bar from his son (who is in his 40s, so it's not as bad as it sounds) before giving in.  This wouldn't work.  Brian would go to the pub, ring for a pizza delivery or get on the internet to have sandwiches delivered from the local artisan bakery/deli.  There aren't many men who can't rustle up a bacon sandwich these days.  The Jennifers of the world, who want new kitchens can't go on strike any more.  Instead, she would have dropped hints, left plans around, asked him to measure things, sought his opinion and eventually he would have ordered the kitchen she wanted because he would have thought it was his idea.

A Good Choir Member

As part of a lesson today I asked my class to list the skills required to be a good choir member.  I think I need to take note of some of these, as I've been tired and grumpy recently and so have been missing choir practices.

Here are some of their suggestions (I haven't corrected the spellings)

1. Go to choir practice

2. Actually sing

3. Sing the right tune

4. Sing at the same time as everyone else.

5. Sing with the same dinamiks as everyone else.  You mustn't be the loudest person.

6. Have a big mouth

7. Don't slowch

8. Watch the ductor

9. Don't muck about

10. Have fun

11. Enjoy sinning.

I think I should make the effort and go to choir again soon.  I'm particularly looking forward to number eleven.  I'm making a list of sins to start enjoying.

Stereotypical Sartorial Elegance

So, OFSTED are at it again. Teacher bashing, personal insults and comments that help no child to learn more. A school in Camden has been criticised because the teachers don't dress professionally enough. It's such a strange comment. Professionally enough implies that they are dressed in a manner suitable for their profession, which also implies they should dress in a stereotypical way.

If you ask a primary school child to draw a teacher they will invariably draw a woman in a long flowery skirt (possibly with an elasticated waistband) comfortable sandals and a nondescript top. This will happen even if their female teacher always wears trousers or a power suit and 6 inch heels or even if their teacher is a man. She will probably also have glasses.

Most teachers think very carefully about what they are going to wear: no skirts the children can look up, no tops they can look down, something that is suitable for sitting cross legged on the floor, something they can leg across the playground in when little Johnny tries to make his escape over the fence and through the school car park, something that washes well and doesn't mind having paint, glue or bodily fluids on it. After hearing that list you would think the most appropriate outfit would be overalls and trainers but no, there are standards to maintain. Smartness is the key to being taken seriously: a suit, a nice dress and cardigan, twin set and pearls or something that screams middle class affluence.

Staff and pupils criticised for being too scruffy

It seems as though OFSTED aren't talking about clothing suitable for the profession but clothing that makes teachers look like business people.

Mark Twain said, "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence." This is true but I would love to see if there is any evidence to show precisely what a teacher wears has an influence on what children learn. Children certainly notice what you are wearing, "Miss, I love your shoes, you look really pretty in that dress, oooh where did you get your earrings from?" But do my sparkly treble clef earrings help them learn anything?

It has got me thinking, though, about whether the way my teachers dressed had an influence on my learning. At primary school, my focus was mainly on the lower half of the outfit. I remember tan tights, comfortable shoes and skirts that ended below the knee. Baggy Adams was famous for the fact that his beige coloured trousers hung down at the crotch but I don't think we listened to him any less. By the time I entered senior school I must have been much less aware because although I've tried I really can't remember much about my teacher's clothes and I wonder if what I do remember is a Stereotype rather than the reality. If I close my eyes and try to picture the staff room I see a haze of pipe smoke, tweed jackets and elbow patches. I see an awful lot of brown and check, dotted with the occasional blue track suit. I do remember a French French Teacher who had a bag that I really wanted. It was a totally inappropriate bag for carrying school books in and things were always falling out of hers (hilariously one day, tampons and a chocolate bar) but I didn't care. She was beautiful and stylish and different and so I got the bag but I don't think it made me any better at French.

I have three black dresses that I bought at Tesco for £5 each that I wear with leggings (so no one can see my knickers when I sit on the carpet with them) and I paint my fingernails. On Friday I paint them the colour of the winning house point team, so that I don't have to talk to any children at 8am band practice. "What are we playing?" they say and I can reply with a simple gesture.

Today we are playing the Blue Team song

It might be an appropriate gesture for OFSTED. 

Seeing Double

How important is it that people get your name right?

The press prints name corrections all the time, which has always confused me.  How hard would it be to ask someone how they're name is spelt? Elliott Gould, apparently holds the record for the most frequently corrected name in the press and as a very famous actor, with a 50 year career; being an ex- Mr Streisand; Ross and Monica's Dad and part of the modern day Ocean's Rat Pack, you would have thought they would have had plenty of time to work out how many L's and T's his name had. They don't seem very ashamed of it though.  The LA Times recently brag-tweeted that they had gone 260 days without mis-spelling Mr Gould's name.

My daughter is currently training as a journalist and is being taught that your professional integrity depends on making certain that you spell a person's name correctly.  They are told that if they get someone's name wrong it will annoy them so much that they won't speak to you again. When people get your name wrong it can appear rude and can make the person feel unimportant or invisible.  After all, your name is your identity.

This week, my name was incorrectly spelt by the local press - again.  They insist on adding an S to the end of it.  They are not alone in this.  My boss does the same which annoys everyone else much more than it does me. It does confuse me because I have never added an s when writing my name unless it is preceded by an apostrophe and when speaking to the journalist on the phone I have never referred to myself in the third person with the apostrophe.  How odd would it be not to use the word 'my' in an interview?  Much of my correspondence with the local press is via e-mail and my email address is my name without the S.

Luckily, I'm not really worried what people call me. Someone I knew always called me Hilary and whilst I didn't think I looked like a Hilary it didn't stop me answering her. Children at school seem to constantly confuse the teachers with names that start with then same letter and I'm always quite happy to pretend I am that Mrs Someone Else. It does irritate everyone else though and both my Dad and my daughter were pretty cross about this fictional character quoting my words in the press.  They shouldn't worry though, I've worked it out.  They are not getting my name wrong.  It's just that, they, like everyone else, believe that there must be two of me.  They are talking about both of us.  It is the perfect explanation, which also justifies why people think I can get so much done and be in two places at the same time.

Least Musical

I got home this evening to find a message on my answerphone from the local paper, asking if I could help them with a story.  She said that Goldsmiths had done a study and found out that our town was one of the 10 least musical places.  She said that she was sure it couldn't be true and she wanted to talk to people to get a different angle on it. While I was debating whether to ring them back (my last experience with the paper wasn't an entirely pleasant one and I've been a much happier person since I stopped buying or caring about what was in it), I noticed that they had tweeted their story.
Town Has No Musical Talent

I was surprised that they hadn't gone to more effort to talk to me (or any other musical person in the town), after all, they have my mobile number and my e-mail address and our town has a top choral director in one of the churches, a doctor of music who is an expert organist, a top class Saxophone quartet, a thriving folk scene and rock scene in the pubs and has produced musicians and performers by the bucket-load.  Whether you are a fan of X-factor  or not, it is undeniable that Sam Callahan is famous for music and comes from this town, although they did send him a tweet.

I have now read the full research paper and it is fascinating reading if you are a musically inclined Psychology nerd, who is prepared to wade through lots of statistics.  (Oh, how I've missed a good Pearson Correlation) What I am unable to find is any of the statistics broken down town by town, so it seems as though our local paper may have got their story from the Mirror On Direction Star Harry Styles' home town is least musical in UK .

The study Musicality Study was a psychology tool to measure musical sophistication of non-musical members of the general public.  It was a self-reporting tool that was delivered by the BBC Lab UK website.  They had put together a series of tests to determine how musically sophisticated someone was.  They conducted 5 different studies on the data. The first three studies  were to validate the effectiveness of their tests.  I used to work for a Psychology Company that delivered Psychometric testing and they will be thrilled to be able to add Musical Sophistication to their battery of tests.

The forth study looked at the correlation between how musical someone said they were in comparison to the tests score. They found that the correlation was very moderate, although for people who had received musical training the correlation was much better.

The fifth and final study looked at the socio-demographic results. 147,633 people took the online test and for this part of the study they used the results from the 90.474 participants from the UK.  When comparing location of participants they only used the 70,097 (this is 0.11% of the UK population) who had provided a valid postcode.  They analysed the data for age, level of education, occupation and used postcodes to aggregate the scores of each of the 379 British local authorities.  There were some interesting results from these analyses.  Musical training improved all scores (no surprise), women performed significantly worse on beat perception tests and the melody memory tasks were tackled better by older people.  People in creative occupations and teaching (an extremely creative occupation in my experience) did better in all tasks, as did people with higher levels of education. They compared the data from the local authority aggregate scores with the National income survey and found the people from wealthier areas performed better on the tests.

This study raises some interesting questions for me.  I want to know how many people were in our local authority sample.  I am also interested in the idea that you can measure musical sophistication, as if it is an innate ability.  I think that anyone can learn to be musical and if our area is lacking ability then we need more funding in our area for musical education, so that it can reach all children, as it does in London.  I am curious about who took the test.  I knew nothing about it and I love an online test; in the last week I have discovered what kind of animal I am, who I should go drinking with, which president I am, which Jane Austen character I am and which brand of toilet cleaner I am. Maybe the people of our town were too busy making music in the many orchestras, bands and choirs to take the test.