I taught tango in a nearby city between mid July and mid October of this year. I wanted to hold a party, someone else found a venue and wanted to DJ. That morphed in to being asked to co-teach tango and after that person returned to their country I continued for another month or so.
I quit actual teacher training (of secondary kids in schools) definitively last week. I had been training to teach English up until February last year. It had felt like the last opportunity to get back to a "proper" job.
They asked if I wanted to go back next month. I delayed responding but said no. In some ways it feels like a a shame and a waste. I worked incredibly hard for seven months, my family, my parents everything took a back seat. I got first class marks in the top level (Masters) in both my assignments. The stalker put a categorical full stop to those ambitions. After her last confrontation I ended up in hospital with what the doctor initially thought was a heart attack and then ended up a case of stress so severe I was incapacitated for months.
Teaching was fine. I loved the subject, learned a lot. The kids were always interesting, sometimes challenging, often fun, even sweet. I had dreaded the first placement: a school in a deprived area, notorious for at least fifty years for social problems, but there was no issue. I had great mentors on my first placement. Why didn't I go back? The family need me now more. But also the sheer unkindness of the staff in the second placement, the shocking humiliation I witnessed of a student by someone in authority and the sheer, extraordinary nastiness and lack of professionalism suffered by some other students and probationers, people in vulnerable positions who could do next to nothing about it, who only risked their prospects by speaking up.
Besides that, the design and execution of the course was appalling. It failed to prepare teachers for teaching in almost every way. One or two lecturers made what looked like creepy attempts to blame families for institutional failures in education or for failing to conform to the governent's plucked out-of-the-air (SHANARRI) values - the way the government has decided children should grow up. Our way or the highway is the government's approach to childhood in Scotland, at least since the SNP took over - with disastrous results, all too measurable. Certainly, the idea was to inculcate in students a distrust of parents and families or at the very least to insist on the upper hand when it comes to shaping young minds. Only a few weeks ago my approach to raising my kids was totally undermined by school, not for the first time, in what looks like a deliberate strategy after I raised an issue. That has sadly become a cultural norm in Scottish schools, certainly over at least the last ten or twelve years and it has been my repeated experience.
Not only that - school is a place where kids are fundamentally not safe. They can be bullied usually not only without remedy but with what one award-winning campaigner called the "deny and deflect" (blame the parent) approach. They can be inappropriately supervised and injured. I can attest to both these things. After witnessing, as a volunteer, the utter chaos of the local Duke of Edinburgh scheme I have no confidence they will keep my son safe. Just the fact of planning to send total novices camping for two nights in early March in Scotland when temperatures can plunge far below zero is worrying in itself. He is a good sportsman but last time they put novices in shorts on mountain bikes on gravel he fell, taking the skin off so severely his wounds took weeks to heal. We were constantly fighting infection on what was supposed to be a holiday. It was all avoidable with a little bit of professionalism and competence but they won't admit to mistakes.
On a wider scale and after writing dissertations on them, I don't believe either in the Scottish government's policies for education. Patently they haven't worked as testified by the long-term decline of Scotland in the international PISA tests, something not even acknowledged on the course. Quite the contrary, there was an insistence that everyone was "Getting It Right For Every Child". Despite the innocuous name, this is a fatally flawed, noli me tangere government "framework" that insinuates itself into educational policies. Come to think of it, everything is unarguable when it comes to Scottish educational policy. They refuse to be mistaken. It reminds me of the Reuters Axon story the other day. Confronted with damning evidence that the company had been spinning lies about its origins, Axon responded to one of the world's most respected news agencies with the kind of unprofessionalism and defensiveness reminiscent of corruption and cover-up scandals, local government denials and branches of the Scottish executive: Reuters’ questions are misguided and inaccurate and given the petty nature of their inquiries, they do not merit a response.
On the course there was extraordinary, blinkered ageism from student teachers still living with their parents: Have you heard of TikTok? This was said with a combination of pity, contempt and dismissal. The prejudice and naivety was blinding: student teachers saying that the number one quality in a good teacher was to be the pupils friend and that the advantage of their age was that they could bridge that gap, being in some cases less than five years older than those they were to teach. There was no awareness or interest in ageism from the course directors. Age is a protected characteristic under the UK equality act, but despite affecting far more people it has received less attention than, for instance, transgender as a protected characteristic, which makes for bigger headlines, apart from which, that community is more strident than older people in their demands.
These things aside, the lack of basic grammar and spelling, an inability to use the language competently even among the trainee English teachers, floored me. The intake was 80-90% primary teachers and their credulity, their seemingly limitless ability to lap up, to literally applaud and cheer everything they were told left me gasping. Even the tutors peddling some of the controversial and political views had to tell them to become a touch more critical in their thinking. It was plain that did not mean, by much.
Above all, it was the tense culture in schools, a simmering of something troubling among staff. I never quite put my finger on it and to guess at its elements: pressure of work, fear, stress, unhappiness and the need to hide all that sounds too much, perhaps, like a good description of my second placement to be reliable. I enjoyed the first placement but even there I could still sense that culture, especially outside our department. It was more than just a need to hide what you felt, which was that there was something fundamentally wrong with the system of which one was part, there was simultaneously a sense of conviction about being right. There was no questioning. Perhaps you can't afford that if most of the hours of the day you are supposed to look like the expert and the rest of the time you are marking, planning, creating resources, recovering, rebuilding your defences. Perhaps this is where the self-righteousness came from, the dogma so evident on the course. Many teachers were not like this, had a sense of humour, had experience, but there was this undertow, this sense of everyone determined to stay on their feet, come what may. These things and the common poor treatment of student teachers and probationers have put me off.
And, I just don't believe in the efficacy of class teaching.
I have looked back to try to think if there was ever a class of any kind I really loved. I enjoyed English at sixth form, and to an extent French but I think that was because we were quite boisterous, we didn't rule the classes but we certainly shaped them. There was a lot of discussion, we were discussing things in French, in English, all the time, less so in history where the teacher just told us facts for an hour. I compare it with the sixth form equivalent at my boys school. For a few weeks I sat in classes there, in Spanish, as an adult pupil. They wear uniform. They are silent unless spoken to. It could not be more different. The only way you will get on like that is if you are motivated and work on your own or find your own guide which is ultimately what I did, what I have always done.
I have been to woodwork class and discovered it was in reality geared to trainee joiners, with experience and I struggled. I have done various yoga classes. You might as well learn from a Youtube video and save yourself the travel, cost and embarrassment. I have done upholstery and been so annoyed at being left, again, to struggle on my own that I walked out. Ditto, sewing. I went to Spanish class when I was in sixth form and was bored. I was bored, frustrated and uncomfortable in tango class.
I was bored and frustrated most of the time through school. Italian, Spanish, tango, the French that has been most useful, fixing windows, laying floors, local history all these things I picked up on my own or through others of my choice. They were all adventures. When you learn this away you keep discovering new possibilities. You don't get bored and you do well.
My kids like secondary school. The oldest says he learns stuff. I know they both do. The youngest likes seeing his friends. His teacher of RMPS (Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies) brings in hot chocolate on Fridays. Besides this, he seems to find the subject engaging. The youngest hated primary school with a passion. The first time we home-schooled was because the school was rubbish and dangerous. The second time, when they finally stabilised the revolving headships was just because he hated going. He could read and they used to spend hours colouring in. But school maybe is more fun these days. Even I have more respect for the individual teachers than I do for the system they are in.
- I know you learn, I said to the eldest. But do you think most people do?
- Yes. If they are motivated. You can't teach people who don't want to learn.
Everyone experiences learning a new skill in a different way. We all have different brains, bodies, characters, fears, enthusiasms and experiences. We have different levels of self-belief, of skill in adapting what we already know, or of knowing when to let that go. That we routinely deny or fail to give the fact that we are individuals when we learn enough weight, astonishes me.
There is a big push in school now to see pupils as individuals and to some extent it works. But I saw a very bright child with initiative who could not read at all, with severe dyslexia being entirely left out. - Don't bother, he can't read.
- What? At all?
- At all.
With remarkable fortitude, he told me later of worse experiences in other classes. I met a pupil with no English, again, totally left to sink or swim since "immersion" i.e. "spend no money" is the preferred strategy for students without English. This pupil had remarkable creativity and insight that went totally unrecognised in the system. They broke down in floods of tears, when they realised I could communicate with them in their language. They were clearly traumatised by this immersion "method".
These are only the extreme cases. What I mean is that while there are now genuine efforts by some teachers to try to teach pupils as individuals, and indeed they are required to do so, ultimately you have forty to fifty minutes with thirty kids. At least ten, if not fifteen of those minutes is getting in, getting out, getting books, getting settled, getting focused, registration, recap, setting homework. Part of that time is crowd control, getting boys and girls focused on work, not each other, halting dramas, disruption, interruptions and a good part of it is explaining the task. You do what you can with the rest of the time - getting contributions or discussion, giving time to individuals one to one or within the group setting.
The future not just of healthcare, but of education is personalised. The classes in school I saw where most work seemed to be going on, certainly where students were focused on doing work were the difficult ones where experienced teachers set up individual learning programmes for each student and went round helping them. I was amazed to find such quiet among notoriously difficult students.
Millenials have told me that when their parents aren't available, they learn from the internet. AI is an obvious next step in personalising education. At present it is often wrong but anyone with half a mind is more than capable of checking facts elsewhere. Perplexity already references its sources whereas ChatGPT, though with a nicer manner, is more likely to make things up.
There were many reasons why I stopping teaching tango in the city. It felt like a relief, but this problem of class teaching was the most fundamental reason. People turn up expecting a one size fits all approach, without realising that they are all different and all need different things - essentially one to one time. We have a culture that has so little practice in questioning that people rarely consider what actually works best or what, with only a smidgen of thought, is clearly not going to work so well. Like those credulous student teachers we just buy into the status quo every time. It is the easy option. There is a related problem: I belong to a local Facebook group for women with thousands of members, for recommendations and so on. The number of people who want the simplest of products and solutions off the peg or done for them rather than trying to do it themselves, is astonishing.
I wish I had had more methods like Cacu's to try with the class but there were other reasons it was difficult to do that.
He did not exactly teach. He proposed an activity and let people explore and then brought people back for discussion. I wish too, that I could have seen how he taught a tango class rather than a tango-contact class. When I see teachers look at students and try to tell them what - in their opinion - is wrong without actually feeling how they dance, I know this cannot help. This is something else I never saw Cacu do.
That is why teaching steps or technique is such easy money. You don't have to think or care about the student at all. It is so easy to design a six or ten week class. That is to say, it is easy, convenient for the teacher. It might go something like this
2 - Staying connected, posture, stillness, common problems in the walk.
3 - Dancing the phrase
4 - Personalising dance: pauses, rebotes, double time
5 - Walking outside the line of dance. The cross
6 - The ocho cortado
7 - Forward ocho
8 - Back ocho
9 - The giro
10 - Sacada
At our school Christmas concert this year, there was an interesting reminder how just how teacher centric teachers can be, rather than focusing on the people they are supposed to be helping or guiding. It is easy for this to become the school culture, especially when espoused by the head themselves. Our local head is obsessed with uniform. A people subjugated by e.g. a uniform is easier to control. He has a missionary zeal for it and his letters regularly have some semi-veiled but nevertheless offensive criticism of parents, how they are failing the school for not making their kids toe the uniform line. Of all the things he could choose to focus on: service, kindness, broadening achievement, the environment, even litter - his star is that everyone must look the same, presumably because in his eyes that must cure all other evils. Now this man, in his infinite wisdom, in a cathedral that is used every year by the school, presumably because he was so wrapped up in himself and what he had to say, rather than on who he was saying it to, totally failed to realise that if he didn't use the excellent public address system of that building, he would not be heard by a good half of the congregation. Right at the back, none of us could hear a word he said so the hard of hearing grandparents didn't stand a chance.
The schedule I listed is not one I used but I might. Personally, I think the giro is much easier and more useful to start with, but most people insist you need to know ochos to do giros. So this is a teacher-centric schedule: easy to deliver.
Imbibing that class schedule, the student goes away thinking what a lot they've learned and that tango is hard, which it is, if you learn this way. Actually, a lot of teachers might condense points 1-4 into one or two lessons. Many don't actually bother with listening to the music at all.
The "best" bit of all this for the teacher : the student doesn't even realise they are being told what is easiest for the teacher, not actually how to learn. They copy what they're told and think they've learned something. But it's mechanics, a mechanics they try to repeat even when touching another living, breathing human being, which, when it doesn't work, becomes force.
I experienced a recent instance of this when I introduced a guy to dance this year. He came to a special event because it was close to his home. He had a sense of music, he had an embrace. He was doing OK. But he had to do it his way so he couldn't dance the other role much. There were cultural reasons. He tried, but psychologically, emotionally I could feel he had to be in charge. This was the main block to improving his dancing but given the stress of trying to navigate a ronda, the sheer strangeness of the idea that actually, you don't need steps to dance, I thought it might iron itself out in time.
He continued coming out to the milongas, picking up experience that way. We danced there eac time. Initially, he loved the no-teach way. But eventually he said he was going to classes. I didn't see him for a few months. When we caught up again in the milonga he said yes, classes were going well. His dance, for me, had not changed one jot except that he tried to make me do ochos, which were not well executed, were uncomfortable and would have risked my knee, so I just didn't do them. He got genuinely annoyed. "You aren't following" he said. "There is no collaboration". I have enough experience to find this kind of thing funny. I think I just said "Well, if you knew how to execute them, I might do them". This did not improve matters, but there comes a point where you need to stop taking shit. The only reason I didn't walk off the floor was the memory of the friendship, of his initiation into dance.
A class schedule is not personalised because of course if you want personalised dance you pay for private lessons! The problem there is that if you think dancing tango is made up of music and feeling between two people, how do you teach that? I have always been an "extremist" on this point, out on a limb compared to most people's views. I felt that paying for private lessons was not unlike prostitution. But I am not so sure now. It is something to do with experience. I've danced now with so many new people for so long, getting them started in the milonga. I can't find much good dancing in the milongas although I did find an extraordinary number of good new dancers when I was "teaching" tango and that was fun.
But you give and give and give and sometimes just end up feeling empty, vacia, triste y vacia.
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