Darren,
I’ve been reflecting on the comments you made both to and about me on Facebook the other week and felt it was
important that I got back to you in order to provide my perspective and
recollection of events of a quarter of a century ago that you seem still so
annoyed about.
As far as I remember, I knew 2 Darren Smiths at Brinky back in the day;
the older one transferred from Chuter Ede in 4th year (Y10 these
days) and was in my tutorial group from January 1989 until he left in the
summer of 1990. He was an ordinary, quiet sort of lad who didn’t create many
waves. I’m fairly sure you’re not him and know you’re nothing to do with the
legendary band of marauding sibling thieves known as the Ginger Smiths. I
believe you actually started Brinky in 1992, which would make you about 36 or
37 now I suppose. This means your leaving date would have been notionally 1997,
though I assume from my hazy memories of your character and reputation for
violence, vandalism and profanity that you were invited to leave well before
that date. That presumably explains why your written English is so full of
errors that it can actually be difficult to understand what you’re trying to
say.
Being honest, I don’t recall even teaching you, or more accurately
having you in my class, though I may be wrong in that. Each year I’d have about
150 learners in my various classes, so you can do the Maths; suffice to say,
it’s almost impossible to keep track of everyone I taught over the past 30
years. As far as I remember you were small, feral and utterly disengaged; alienated
and without any notion of the behavioural expectations of bourgeois society,
like so many of your contemporaries. At the time the ethos of Brinkburn was one
that sought to control and suppress any manifestation of insubordination,
whether by pupils or, and you may find this difficult to believe, staff. In
effect most of my older Alpha Male colleagues were more than content to behave
in a manner more fitting the conduct of US prison warders. On reflection I
realise many of them were weak bullies and intellectual pygmies who sought to
hide their own plethora of social and emotional inadequacies beneath a veneer
of dominance and power. You may find the following statement hard to believe,
but I was implacably opposed to this state of affairs entirely, from the almost
immediate realisation that all the hopes and aspirations I had for teaching and
learning through creativity and imagination were in stark contrast to the lay
of the land.
With the benefit of the three decades of hindsight, I know I should
never, ever have taken a job at that school as my liberal, progressive
pedagogical instincts were at variance to the repressive ideology prevalent.
Sadly, I didn’t think things through; I wanted to be back in Newcastle and I
wanted to buy property as soon as I could. Basically that’s why I took the job,
which was the first one offered to me, but within a short space of time,
possibly less than a month, I was all too aware that my choices were I either
became one of the kind of repressive dinosaurs I’d hated being taught by
myself, or I could crash and burn. If I’d tried to be the person I was, I
wouldn’t have coped as long as I in the regime I found myself working for.
The irony is, of course, that it’s impossible to relentlessly try and
push a square peg into a round hole. I wasn’t and have never been the kind of
ruthless authoritarian figure I was turning into, so basically I didn’t cope.
By late 1993, whereby the 20% of negatively minded learners had assumed such a
false amount of importance in my consciousness that I was focussing entirely on
suppressing their dissent rather than nurturing the 80% who wanted to learn, I
was obviously suffering from a depressive mental illness. These days, social
attitudes and medical intervention would not have allowed me to sink so low.
Holistic healing helps even the most severely depressed to successfully manage
short and medium term periods of mental ill health.
Back then the choice was either leave the job or grit your teeth. Yes I
know I should have left then, but I didn’t; I had a mortgage to pay and so on.
Instead, with longer and longer periods of sick leave, more and more
confrontational incidents of increasing seriousness, not to mention worsening
relations with staff and students, I eventually left for good in December 1996,
in order to return to University to study for a Masters and test my toe in the
waters of freelance journalism. It is a decision I have never regretted, as it
allowed me to travel, to become a published writer, to find out who I really
was as a person and to discover that working in education has far more to offer
than being a kind of prison warder in a South Shields sink school. I don’t
think I became an effective educator until I lived and worked in Bratislava as
the Millennium dawned.
Reflecting on your angry tirade, I can see you are still bothered by
your negative experiences of school; most probably with very good reason. When
I look back and attempt to rationalise the pupils who endured Brinky, it is not
with a sense of anger or hatred that I view the 80% of them who, in my view, I
failed to teach properly, but with sympathy and understanding. I can only
apologise for not being good enough in my job at the time, but emotionally and
temperamentally, I was never a correct fit for the role I was attempting to
play. I’ll admit I only connected with the intelligent, aspirational pupils who
viewed education as a way of mental and physical escape from the privations of
their upbringing; emotionally, though not economically, they were hewn from the
same rock as me. Education, specifically getting away to University, saved my
life as a late teenager.
Never having been nurtured as a child or had exposure to tolerance and
support networks, I lacked any empathy or emotional intelligence. I viewed
those who had grown up in dysfunctional households, with intergenerational
poverty of aspiration, alcohol and drug misuse, domestic physical and sexual
abuse, mental health issues, not to mention a myriad of other problems and
indicators of social deprivation, as a diseased, debased underclass. My view
was forensic and unyielding; I saw those who suffered as an amorphous,
slothful, scrofulous beast. Despite calling myself a Socialist, I probably took
as my text the works of Orwell and the Webbs, as I actually believed it was
their own fecklessness, criminality and devious workshy attitudes that caused
their problems; obviously now I realise that capitalist society was to blame.
That’s why I’m still a Socialist, to try and eradicate such problems. If I
can’t eradicate them, at least I can obviate and salve the problems in a small
way. It is why I understand that Islamophobia, racism & other kinds of dog
whistle reactionary politics are a product of social conditions and
conditioning.
I wish you good luck with your life and sincerely apologise if my
actions have in any way contributed to anger or misfortune on your journey thus
far.
Tusahibuk Alsalama,
ian cusack
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