I think it was being too much of an idealist that blew it for me.
Maybe I didn’t have the right attitude. Who knows.
I’d gone towards the teaching profession cos’ it was security, sure, but there was something else too. There always is.
I’ve thought about it quite a bit since. Ever since I was fired, that is.
Basically, when you go all out for doing a job that is deemed « socially useful » you don’t want to be told you have no right to do it.
Then again, is teaching « socially useful »? What I saw of it didn’t seem so. The great equaliser? What utter bullshit. The French republican ideals of equality and fraternity? More of the same.
A teacher couldn’t do much. The class system stayed the same. And things went on and on...
I suppose I was filled with illusions. Just the same as most of the other trainees. Romantic ideas of « imparting knowledge », sharing with the younger generations. I suppose this is what drove me. And this is how I chose the documents I studied in class. They were things I thought were important. Things I imagined could spark off passion.
I thought back to when I was a teenager, and remembered what had kept me going back then...
and it had been Rock’n’roll. In all shapes and sizes. Good stuff and bad stuff. Sometimes indiscriminately.
In some cases, it was the rock’n’roll I still enjoy today.
People get very aggressive on the popular music front. Probably because of the old « suspension of disbelief » theory that was first developed in relation to gothic literature. The theory stated that to enjoy such a work you had to plunge straight into it temporarily suspending some of your critical faculties. Music gets you on this emotional level. And if it gets you, it really gets you and you adhere to it fiercely.
Today, I’m fairly wary of any kind of strong belief. I’ve been around a bit and I’ve been wrong more than once. I’ve believed in things from new age vibesy dogma to left-wing revolutionary politics and today I’m naturally cautious and unprepared to give my full endorsement to anything.
This applies to the rock and roll front, too. I’m wary of aesthetics. Any aesthetics (although I love talking about this kind of thing). Aesthetics are often a set of beliefs. They’ll set down musical criteria basically defining what’s « good ». The risk is becoming caught up in a particular aesthetic and discarding anything outside it as « crap ». But it happens to all of us. Probably all the time. It’s part of the brain’s process of judgement and selection.
So, hey, nowadays I’m a great fan of the famous « Lester Bangs » school of journalism. Basically, the guy would deliberately choose records and bands outside the basic aesthetic canons of the day and plug them like hell. It was not random. It was part of a coherent view of what rock’n’roll was or should be. Sometimes, however, he would plug stuff that was crap. Or pass over stuff that was great. But he would be free to reappraise the work at a later date. Cos’ of course, that kind of journalism isn’t absolute. You’re allowed to get it wrong.
Whatever, the kind of journalism this Bangs fellow pioneered was probably the closest you can get to an honest approach of pop culture. Post-modern writing where several contradictory realities are allowed to co-exist.
Problem now, of course, is that this school of journalism has become a kind of aesthetic in itself. Budding writers falling over themselves to write « cleverly »: choosing an album that’s either obscure or generally deemed uncool and then spouting something witty about it. Anecdotal stuff is another hallmark of this kind of writing. At some point you’ve just got to « pretend to digress » and go into some little episode from your life, either real or fantasised, but in fact you’re not digressing, just making your point in an even stronger albeit in a bit of a roundabout way.
The problem with this kind of thing today is that sometimes it all becomes what we French call an « exercice de style »: i.e. the way it’s written is more important than the actual original subject matter. Of course, that’s at least part of the point of this kind of writing. But maybe not when the original reviewed album becomes a mere pretext...
Whatever, it’s still my favourite form of rock journalism. And, let’s face it, it allows for some great opportunities for forays into autobiography. And that’s what I like to feel when I’m reading some review. Something personal. I like to see the guy in front of his dilemmas, thinking it out and coming up with the appropriate life philosophy to deal with it. Yeah.

All this to say that today I’m a lot more laid-back about the whole rock’n’roll thing. If somebody says to me that the artists I think are the most talented are crap I may get into a discussion with them but nothing heated or violent. Just logic, explaining, discussion. I don’t like getting excited about this sort of thing. You get too religiously hung up on an artist or a style, you’re gonna close yourself and not be receptive to other talent that is maybe just as good.
Of course, when I was a teenager, I didn’t have this zen thing worked out and I was a sucker for at least some of the many clichés about rock music going around. A one that always makes me laugh is: « If it doesn’t have guitars in (prominent guitars) it’s no good ». For some time, at least part of me judged the rock worthiness of any band proportionally to the « savageness » of its' guitar sound.
So, ok, it was more of a belief when I was a teenager. But it was a belief that got me through! It was a belief that did it for me at a crucial period of my life. Something that carried me through when I had little else to rely on. So, to follow through with this belief image, the records I listened to actually saved my arse in a difficult time. How corny can you get, eh? But it was true nonetheless.
I, for one, would have been dead chuffed, as a pupil, if I’d been turned on to any great bands by an enterprising teacher. When I was 13, the music teacher at my school had a copy of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Déjà vu. When I was fourteen, the music teacher at my next school sensed my interest in some old blues but we didn’t get to listen to many of them. In art class, around the same age, we were asked to draw something inspired by an instrumental track from Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets. But that was all! Nothing more. Just a few glimpses.
And then I got to be a teacher!
(Actually, it took me two years to get there, preparing for gruelling exams that only the French can devise and that, furthermore, had nothing to do with actual teaching. Go figure!)
A teacher of English. This was to be English as a foreign language for French kids, of course. Wow. A job. Tenure. Job security. Something « socially useful ». What a gas.
In France, you only learn how to be a teacher, once you’ve been actually made a « trainee » teacher. So, while I was putting together and carrying out my first, trembling, lesson plans, I was also following classes learning HOW IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DONE by those in the know.
Us « trainee » teachers were getting taught by the « super » teachers! Why were they « super » teachers, you may ask? Was it because of their skills of getting it over in a classroom? Maybe. Maybe it was partly that. It was also their skills of getting it over with the hierarchy. The bosses. The people above us. The inspectors and high-ranking education ministry civil servants.
And that is the main factor to be considered here. The power of these civil servants and the way they make their power felt in a so-called democratic education system.

Ironically, we had a certain amount of freedom when choosing what to do. Ok, so there was a curriculum. But that only stated what should be known, by the pupils, at the end of each year. The teaching materials were basically up to us.

There were also a shit-load of instructions. The official instructions, they were called, in true French style. I purchased an edition of the official instructions and it cost me 7 quid. The instructions were part of the dogma, but only part. They laid down a few ground rules for language teaching. I’m not gonna bore you with them too much. Just the main idea. Basically, everything you did was part of a project. A pedagogical project, or teaching project. You had to define the teaching aims of your project (what you wanted to get across) and these aims had to be threefold. There were the communicational and linguistic aims. This was basically the learning of the language taught in a particular way of course, that encouraged class communication and encouraged the pupils to burst into speech and actively participate in their own learning process....blah, blah, blah...
The linguistic part of all this was presumably to get them thinking, or rather to encourage them to think for themselves on the very functioning of the taught language as well as their mother tongue. Then there was the cultural part. Meaning learning something about a different culture than one’s own. As an English teacher this could be anything to do with culture and life in any of the many English-speaking communities around the world.
So there you go. That was the part that was elaborated on a State level and was the same for the whole of France. After that, it was down to how everyone chose to apply this locally.
I don’t mean individual teachers. I mean those who set the rules. The inspectors and higher civil servants. Those who set down the rules for us. The trainee teachers. The people who had the possibility to sack us if they felt we didn’t comply to their instructions. You got a trainee year after which you could get tenure. Then you would be a fully fledged teacher and no crime could get rid of you, short of buggering the kids, and probably not even that. If your trainee year didn’t work out, they might award you another trainee year (this is what happened to me) after which they could legally get rid of you if they still deemed you hadn’t made the grade (this happened to me, too).
This was the situation. At least 50% of teachers with tenure are crap but the inspectors can’t do much about them. OK, they can give them bad grades, which means a slower increase in salary. They can try and give them unwanted positions, but once a teacher’s been in the profession long enough, he has enough points to basically go anywhere he wants. They can’t sack him though. And a good thing too. I’m not saying these guys should be sacked. Quite the contrary. I’m saying that we could be sacked. And I was.
A sign of the times. That would be one way to describe the situation. The onslaught of liberalism in the state sector. Already « the dogma » had incorporated methods gleaned from the business world. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing. Just that it’s a sign of the times. Businessmen realised that their staff learnt better if they were allowed and encouraged to participate in their own learning processes and so the emphasis was put on the dynamics of communication, on stuff like role-playing etc...
In the same way, we were driven, as trainees, to a perfect appropriation of the « dogma » or else! It was a marketing decision. If we weren’t perfect, they’d get rid of us before giving us tenure. After tenure, nothing could be done. So inspectors, wanting to get ahead, imposed an exacting militaristic regime on the trainees. It was good for their career, this « rigorous, exacting » approach. Made them look good in high places. It also put me out of work.
My regional inspector was particularly zealous. Everybody had heard of her, even maths teachers and geography teachers and those who had nothing to do with the teaching of English (she only dealt with English teaching). She had her beady eye on that job in Paris, and it looked like she was going to get it.
She was the keeper of the arcane knowledge. She was the guardian of « the dogma ». It was her job to say the word. To say how it should be done.

I won’t go into it. The « dogma » was no great shakes. It was a kind of « pot-pourri » of modernish educational theories plus a dose of French authoritarianism. She wanted to make it into a theory but it was full of contradictions. Not worthy of real academic interest.
For us it was hell. Since the whole business was so full of contradictions, or incomplete, or varying depending on who was speaking, we never knew what was expected of us. A girl trainee had left a job at a high-flying audit company to do teacher training. During her audit job, she had to work long hours and was under constant scrutiny. Her work was always judged and evaluated. However, she felt it had been easier because at least she knew what was expected of her.
Whereas, as trainees, we didn’t.

It took us some time to realise that maybe « the dogma » wasn’t the bee’s knees in terms of pedagogy. But it wasn’t right because it was the best methods, it was right because the boss said we should work that way. Fuck that French republicanism, those flaunted images of freedom and tolerance. This was the army. They said it: you did it. They said jump. You jumped.
I never could jump, though.

So we had to apply the dogma. However, as trainees, we had no influence on the chosen textbook. These had all been selected before we got to the various schools we taught in. More often than not, the textbooks didn’t apply « the dogma ». Let’s face it, not a lot of people had the « dogma ». So we had to use the stuff in the textbooks real carefully, because none of it was ever conform. Should it have been reassuring to know that all the authors of the textbooks wouldn’t have received tenure in our academy (they didn’t have the dogma)? Or maybe we should have been worried at the state of our inspector’s mind, obsessively intent on rubbishing anything that went before her and determined to make herself a name for imposing something she didn’t really understand and that she didn’t even produce.
In the end, she made a name for herself as a steamroller. A bulldozer. Someone intent to destroy anything alien from her accepted standard. Someone ready to trample lives and careers to protect her obsessive vision. People get their kicks the way they can, I suppose.

So I had to think in terms of projects. We were allowed to choose the basic documents we worked from. The book said they had to be « authentic » documents, that means not made specially for the purposes of teaching.
Eager to share my love of popular music and culture I chose several songs and texts about music during my two years as a trainee.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I didn’t do this all the time. There were other more « high » culture things too. I didn’t just do rock’n’roll although I might have liked to.
In case you get the wrong idea, the book didn’t say you shouldn’t do this. In principle, there was no taboo about popular culture. It was not seen as shocking or unacceptable to study a rock song in a classroom. The bible said we could do it. The bible was a book of projects written by the friends of the boss. The super-teachers. Those in the know. There were two examples of song projects in the bible. One was Elvis. One was Phil Collins. I even did one of them (not the Phil Collins one) and I got to buy the Elvis Memphis recordings comeback cd (the song was In the Ghetto) and it was great. It’s the contribution those four years made to my culture (Four years: two getting the exam, two as a trainee).
In fact it was "frowned upon". But in an underhand sort of way. The inspectors just couldn’t get away from their ingrained prejudices that cut off the « respectable » from the « popular », that cut off the « high » from the « low » culture. High had real content, according to them, whereas everything else had to fight a charge of being « vacuous » before being allowed to exist at all.

When Mrs Miller came to inspect me, I was in the middle of something I shall call « The Punk Project ».

The authentic documents in « the punk project » were a song God save the Queen by the Sex Pistols and an extract from Johnny Rotten/Lydon’s (Pistols’ singer) autobiography.
I won’t go into the pedagogical detail, but I was very proud of « The punk Project ». I still am, in a way, even though Mrs Miller, the inspector, was less than impressed by it.
All the aims of the official instructions were met. It had its communicational, it had its linguistic and, boy, did it have its cultural!
The song was a song that had been banned from the radio. That had caused the band members to be arrested. That had earned the Pistols the slot of public enemy n°1 for daring to disrespect the queen during, at all times, her silver jubilee. The extract from the autobiography described the tough conditions the pistols got themselves into because of this song: animosity and violence from other musos, attacks from nationalist louts ranging from muggings to knife attacks.
Fuck, what a great trigger for a discussion about British culture. This one could go anywhere: the role and image of the monarchy in Britain, the role of art, the rebellious and avant-garde nature of rock’n’roll. The whole question of the relationship between rock’n’roll and society...

<(Was Simon right to bring Johnny Rotten into his classroom? Mrs Miller didn't think so.)
 

She didn’t like it, though. I don’t know what went wrong. I didn’t jump at the right time, I suppose.
She was less than convinced of the subject matter. This was old stuff, she told me. And of course, it was. But that was hardly the point, was it? It was probably the last time rock’n’roll had any kind of massive impact and social relevance in England. She may not have known this. She may not have cared.
In an attempt to demonstrate to me that she was « with it », Mrs Miller confided that she too had been known to use songs in the classroom. Her kids helped her out, tipping her off on what was cool and trendy.
She told me she had recently used a song by Jamiroquai.

Jamiroquai, that figures.

I'd always hated him. Now I know why.
 

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