Chavs rule · Sat Mar 25, 23:37 by Eleri Straker
I’ve taught in secondary schools for many years and fourteen of those with dysfunctional teenagers, so working now in mainstream English lessons, I foolishly believed that I could handle anything the kids could throw at me. And so I have, for a long time. Until now.
This year, I have a particularly difficult Year 10 group. They are the usual mix of teenagers, fifty per cent of whom actually want to learn and the other half busily determined to stop them. This is fairly normal and I’ve been limping along trying to educate them since the beginning of the year.
The problem lies with a handful of students who have decided that they don’t want to learn and see no reason why anyone else should be allowed to either. This little group of ‘funsters’ is led by a chav princess (‘chav’ is a British term for a particularly brainless and world-owes-me-a-living personality). If there is such a thing as a stereotypical chav, then she is it. She actually uses the catch-phrase “Am I bothered?” without any trace of irony.
I’ve tried hard to teach this girl and I’ve tried even harder to like her. I’ve failed in both endeavours. There is something completely unlikeable about someone who spends every one of my lessons turning her back on me and deliberately talking continuously in a successful attack on everything I do. All usual methods at building mutual respect have been like water off a duck’s back.
Things came to a head the other day. I was trying, in vain, to teach The Hound of the Baskervilles to the class. I say ‘in vain’ because the chav princess would deliberately interrupt every time I began to speak. Having endured the deliberate sabotage for some time, I finally gave up and told her to leave. She tossed her hair and flounced out. And I got on with my teaching…for about ten minutes. Chav princess had found a new game. Pulling faces and chewing gum, open-mouthed through the glass panel in the door, she succeeded disrupting the lesson even from outside. So I went to speak to her. Reasonably, I thought. My idea was to appeal to her better nature and care for her classmates. Stupid idea that. I’d made the assumption she had a better nature. That was my first mistake. My second was actually trying to talk to her at all. I asked her what gave her the right to destroy my lessons for all her classmates, to deliberately spoil their education and their chance of decent grades. Her answer left me gob-smacked, something which doesn’t happen often. She told me that it wasn’t her that was destroying the class’ education, it was me. She informed me that she, along with a handful of her friends in the class, thought that I was a very bad teacher. They didn’t like my teaching methods and that I clearly couldn’t do my job. There was a lot more in that vein, but that was the gist of her tirade.
I was stunned. Not by what she had said, because I understood, after I’d calmed down, that her words were chosen in a deliberate attempt to destroy me and what I do. What shocked me was the fact that she felt that she had the right to do so. In the guise of “honesty.” It was a vicious, calculated attack on someone she knew could do little about it, as it was her “right” to have her say.
What made it worse was the fact that I then had to carry on teaching as if nothing untoward had happened and then move on to another class. Fortunately, my next class, a Year 11 group, realised that there was something wrong and carried on with their work (which was actually a group presentation of a poem …which included some hysterically funny exercises, including pin the sting on the scorpion (the poem was Night of the Scorpion) and a competition involving origami scorpions!).
It took me several days to recover my equilibrium after chav princess’attack. It’s fact that no matter how long one has taught, and no matter how good one’s results have been over the years (and without false modesty, mine have been pretty good) a vicious attack on one’s ability and methods shakes one’s confidence. My colleagues were all equally shocked and highly supportive but the chav princess’ attack had its intended effect. In one well aimed salvo she had managed to do what dozens of “problem” boys over the years had never, or more accurately, would never have even thought of doing; deliberately hurting and trying to destroy someone with years of experience and success.
Chav princess’ punishment involves removing her from my lessons and making her study on her own in the department office for as long as it takes for her to realise that she needs to be taught… By me.
I think it’s going to be a long wait.
