On teaching

I've been thinking about starting a teaching blog for years and years, following the success of my travelling/living in Italy blogs. Additionally, I know that my frequent teaching Facebook statuses are very popular with a lot of my non-teaching friends, and I enjoy the way focusing on interesting/funny/insightful things that happen at work can move my focus from some of the wearing and soul destroying aspects of teaching towards the important and fascinating. I did maintain a student-teacher blog for a while, but gave it up in my NQT year under fear about anonymity. This blogging profile is openly linked to my real online identity, and I know it's easy for teachers to get in trouble for compromising their students' identities online...I need to seek advice about this. In the meantime, however, I sometimes feel like I have so much to say and it's a pity to limit it to Facebook posts. So here's today's: "Last week I spent a lesson with my year 8 girls watching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk "we should all be feminists" and then asked them to write a response to "are you a feminist?" (I also said "I want to know your real opinions, there's no right or wrong answer..." which was a total lie). One's written: "Yes, because I believe that women should not be judged and not to be touched in a way that isn't right. Women should be very non-provocative and dress in a way where your body parts aren't to be seen!" "

The student teacher that is with me in that class at the moment pointed this student out to me after the lesson, rightly pointing out how fascinating her response is - on the one hand so confident ("women should not be judged" and on the other so judgemental ("your body parts aren't to be seen"). I wonder how much of this response was reaction to the way I structured the lesson: wanting to make sure the students had Adichie situated in the culture we all know, I started with Beyonce, asking whether she can be considered a good role model, before pointing out that Beyonce sampled Adichie's talk that we were about to listen to. We didn't have time/the right atmosphere in class to have a productive discussion about Beyonce, which is a pity as that would maybe have generated some of my students' opinions on feminism to begin with. I just checked that same girl's book to see how she answered the Beyonce question, to find "She dances, I love to dance. She really inspires me. I'm in love with dancing! Since the day I was born I was dancing in my baby cot." So nothing about Beyonce's dancing/provocation/revealing clothing at all...

Elsewhere, the girls who said they WEREN'T feminists all justified their ideas using language of confrontation/competition, which shows that battle-of-the-sexes perspective is still common among today's 13-year-olds..."I ain't sure if I'm a feminist or not because I can be on boy's or girl's side so I don't really know." "No because we don't fight with men for what I want (we want)". The one that bothers me most is "I don't know because I don't stand up for women but when people cuss women or girls I stand up for them. But I'm not one of those people who protest." What is she thinking about? When doesn't she stand up for women, when does she? protest about what? It's partly exciting and enjoyable to introduce topics that I really truly care about into my lessons, but it's also quite anxiety-inducing. My class were restless and silly on Monday during this lesson, which I found sort of personally insulting in addition to the usual stress of trying to impose school behaviour policy on 18 bored teenagers. And then I worry about how much I'm trying to encourage genuine debate, versus simply indoctrinating the students so they agree with me - ultimately, I want them to embrace feminism, but I want them to do it because they recognise its importance and relevance in the real world, not just because I've told them to (or because they had to respond to the question "are you a feminist?" to be allowed to go out to break time...possibly one of the least natural or spontaneous ways of developing a political stance).