It Shouldn't Happen to a Teacher

It's a turbulent time with my year elevens. I can never be sure who's going to be in the lessons. Partly because some of them have at best poor attendance, and partly because the set list seems to change by the day.

Today a new boy joined our group without me having any prior warning. This is always a shock to the system but is especially annoying when you have enough resources for twenty-four pupils and suddenly find twenty-five people in front of you. Thankfully the aforementioned poor attendance solved that issue. Incidentally our school recently decided to reward pupils who had improved their attendance from atrocious to simply mediocre. This caused uproar from the pupils who had great attendance anyway and even more ridiculous was the fact that they had to come out of their maths lesson to receive certificates. One girl actually had a certificate rewarding her for improving from 78% attendance to 93%, and written on the certificate was her target of 95%. I'm all for praising pupils when they improve at something but the whole thing seemed a little ludicrous. One of the girls receiving a certificate was on an unauthorised holiday the next week.

My group really is all over the place in terms of who'll be there. We've lost one boy because he's been moved to another school after giving his friends spacecakes one lunchtime. We've also had a girl moved down to us from the top set because her relationship with her teacher had deteriorated to George Bush/Saddam Hussein levels. Bizarrely I actually get on quite well with her, mainly because she's really quite bright and it makes a refreshing change from wanting to bash my head against the board when I'm explaining Pythagoras' Theorem. I actually felt quite sorry for her last week when an assistant head came in and told her to sit on her chair properly. She wasn't really doing any harm and left the room in tears. She's completely highly strung because an assistant head should pick up on any little issues and she should just get over it, but it didn't do her any favours. Ironically it might actually have aided my rapport with her as to her I look like a hero for saying to the said assistant head how well she's actually doing.

I'm hoping the one-in-one-out way of thinking will now have the knock-on effect of removing a girl who I just can't seem to get on with. She throws a huge strop over everything. Today she stormed out when I told her that if she didn't complete her work she'd have to catch up at break time. Even her friends looked at her as if she was nuts.

In happier news we have a new Posh and Becks in the class after two of the pupils got together at a party recently. Alledgedly they were up to something behind a bush that a year ago would have been concerning but now they're sixteen is perfectly legitimate. Quite what bearing the earth having been around the sun sixteen times since they were born has on their readiness for such relations I'm not sure, but I guess lines have to be drawn somewhere. More to the point surely they could have found somewhere better than behind a bush. A cider-fueled fumble in a prickly bush on a cold wet November night isn't exactly the stuff of Mills and Boon.

At least they turn up to lessons, don't storm out when they get in trouble, don't bring drugs into school or deploy Gobs of Mass Destruction against their maths teacher.

Each term we have to do 'Tracking'. This involves giving each pupil a grade for attainment and one for effort. Due to a fool-proof system in the maths department the attainment part is easily dealt with. However the effort grade, or 'Behaviour for Learning' grade, is a little trickier.

I really do question how a teacher can accurately assess how hard someone has been trying. Okay you can have a good stab at it but when there's four grades - A, B, C, D (plus an X if you don't think the pupil has been in enough lessons to judge them) - to pick from there's a good chance you'll get it wrong on a good few occasions. It was easier before because we had a simpler A, B, C system.

This time though I think I've got it horrendously wrong. Plenty of form tutors have come to me querying grades their tutees have been given, including one where I have failed to give a girl in year seven a National Curriculum level, I would put it right but she doesn't actually have one. She's not even on the scale yet.

One form tutor said a pupil was upset I'd given him an X. He's not been in that many lessons so I did find it difficult to tell how hard he'd been working, that and I wanted to play with the new grade X.

My year tens were particularly upset over it. One girl was really put out that I hadn't given her an A and to be honest I was struggling to think why not. She even did an impression of Puss-in-boots from Shrek looking all sad. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing so got her to wait back at the end of the lesson so I could give her some Milky Way Magic Stars as compensation. An out-of-court settlement if you like.

In my form there's a girl who is pretty much perfect, unfortunately her art teacher gave her a B and she was quite down about it. From experience of my form producing posters for competitions I know she's not exactly Rembrant but she always gives it her best shot. I know 100% that she really deserves an A in art, even without having seen any of her work because she's that sort of kid. She's got the right attitude though and is determined to work even harder in art. Though I reckon it'll be difficult to change her teacher's view as we're terrible for forming an opinion and sticking with it despite new evidence to the contrary.

It all makes me think that the notion of grading our pupils in this way is absurd bordering on cruel. We need to have some method of highlighting if there are any issues but it doesn't make much difference if we give them an A and B. All it seems to achieve is to make them feel bad and me feel guilty.

Next time I'm just going to give them all As and be done with it.