Reasons to be a [Child Centred] teacher. My Primary Experience

Reasons to be a teacher, and a child-centred one at that. I was reading some people’s accounts about school days being the worst days of their lives. Most of them were mine too. I knew I wanted to be a teacher from the age of 5 or 6. The teacher asked us to draw what we wanted to do when we grew up. I wanted to be a teacher but 1. I thought the teacher would laugh at me if I told her and 2. all the other girls wanted to be nurses, so I drew a nurse. But I remember knowing I wanted to be a teacher. Because of my father’s rather itinerant work habits, I went to 5 different primary schools and 2 different high schools (in 4 different counties, 3 villages and 2 towns) and thus I was an always the outsider, and publicly humiliated and bullied by staff and pupils at all of the primary schools, and hasd a hard time at the high schools. Aged 4 or 5 in Luton, I had to stand by the classroom sink possibly in a waste basket (but I might be mixing Luton up with the Frampton). This was for finding a marble by the sink and putting it on my desk, then denying it publicly. I had only been in the school a few months, didn’t know this counted as theft, but the teacher’s thunderous voice let me know it was not a good thing. In Frampton-on-Severn I was slapped across the face (aged 5 or 6) by Elizabeth, because I got to the toilet first, and refused to get off let her wee before me. As if that wasn't bad enough, when we all got back into school, I tried to go and wash my hands, but was then publicly singled out to wash my hands on my own (mother and teacher had different ideas about hygiene!). But the humiliation was too awful and I never washed my hands again at school. In Whitminster, the next village school, I was so upset one day by leaving my satchel at school, that my mum and I cycled back over the canal, she with my baby brother on her bike. There was no one in the open school when we arrived, and then we saw the stachel hanging up in the headteacher’s office. Next day the headteacher threatened me (aged 7 ) with the cane. He said he would “tan my hide” if I went into his room again. Again I had no idea what I had done wrong. Luckily we only stayed in Whitminster for a few months before the next upheaval. We moved to Tanners Green in Wythall, Worcestershire, and I went to Silver Street School in Drake’s Cross. I think it was because I was tall for my age they accidentally put me in the wrong class! However after being there a few months I came 17th in some exams I don’t recall taking, and was made to stand in hall/on the stage with all the kids who had come first, second and third in their classes. I recall being mystified, and wondering what the effect on my relationship with the class would be. But I needed have worried. They had spotted how old I was by the beginning of the next school and then I had a new set of friends to make, but I was back with Mrs Kidger. I think it was When I was with the older kids that The Great Trauma began. There was to be a a concert. We had to sing and some people would have starring roles. I used to go to the “ballet” class in Frampton-on-Severn and was well used to being on a stage, but mostly as an elf. When I was six I went to the panto in Stroud with the Brownies and sang all of O Little Town of Bethelemen, even though they said thankyou after the first verse. I had tasted stardom and was ready for more. I loved it - the singing, the stage, the applause. I wanted to be a musician, and asked for piano lessons (the mother had her Pohlman in the house, a wedding present from her father). Back to Silver Street School. We were rehearsing For the concert. I was ready for the starring role and hoping be king or queen. When Mrs Kidger tapped me on the shoulder and then tapped Dermot Mackie on the shoulder, and one other boy, I thought great, I don’t need to sing with the rest of the class, I am going to have a main part. After the concert rehearsal finished Mrs K gathered us three together and told us we were singing out of tune, and so we were not be in the show. Went home in floods, mother came to school next day, confessed cheerfully to whoever that she couldn’t sing in tune either, and asked if couldn’t I mime. I mimed, trying to keep the floods back - as I mimed from then on for the next 21 years. Still do quite often. Mimed in assemblies, at weddings, in folk clubs, singing lessons. (I was having piano lessons in Kings Norton at the time, and had been dreaming of being a rock and roll star, but actually the piano teacher terrified me. I never said a word. I just laid the florin down at the top end of the piano, and played every dot infront of me, did whatever she told me. In September I sat at the front next to Susan, and in front of Roger and Yvonne. I was to discover that we were 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th in the class, and seating us like this also mystified me. Was she preparing us for high school? Still I Loved living in the countryside and Yvonne’s parents had a farm, and goat you could tie your scooter to. The following year I finally moved up a school year and met Mr Parker. I blossomed. He gave me all sorts of extra things to do and he would talk to me differently, and when my dad got a job in Leeds and he only came back at the weekends, Mr Parker let me learn a verse a week from The Funeral of St John Moore after Corunna in order to recite it to my dad when he got home and Mr Parker got me to recite it to the class beforehand. (Don’t ask why I chose that poem. I just found it in a book, liked the feel of the words and probably the rhythms of the words). Mrs Kidger and her class hadn’t finished with me. There were three girls who took it upon themselves to barge me and my friends in the playground, and then one day they filled all our pockets full of rubbish; in revenge I wrote pig pag and pog and three little scraps of paper and put one in each of the girls pocket. They told Mrs Kidger and she called for me and told me off. I was terrified, and in vain told her they started it. . I couldn’t see the fairness of this, again quite mystified. But she even trumped herself with some proper teacher cruelty in that last week. I was in Mr Parker’s class full time now but the girls did knitting with her once a week and I was making a turquoise and coral striped hot water bottle cover for my dad. However it wasn’t finished, and in order to take it to Leeds, I had to bring some money in. I don’t know why I didn’t bring any money in. Mrs K summonsed me, and publicly handed the knitting over to the bully girls. I left for Leeds. Mr Parker asked if he could keep my composition book, promising to send it on [which he did]. And he and also the headteacher, Mr Matthews, then corresponded with me for two or three years - they were both 60 and retired the year after I left. Mr Parker wrote he thought we had another George Elliott in our midst. It was only years later rereading his letter that I knew what kid of a man this George was, but I alfresdy knew it was a compliment. that he had faith in me, and cared. At Harehills County Primary I brought the house down upon myself with the southern accent. It took my brother 3 weeks to shorten all his vowels. For some reason, I suppose bloodymindedness I kept my southern drawl for decades. I was white, everyone so far in my schools was white, but I had curiously enough been brought up anti-racist by by dad. He was Welsh, crossed Uffa’s Dyke (as they say), and shelved his Welsh accent in his mid teens. One story he told us was that he had been with a group of colleagues, shortlisting candidates for interview, and the boss man said oh we can’t have him - he’s a Taff. Later my dad told us how when he was giving a lift to a hitch hiker once, and the hiker started making racist comments about black people ( don’t think we got the details, but on the lines of Enoch Powell I imagine). My dad stopped his car at the next roundabout, gave him a lecture and chucked him out. I remember knowing, but without knowing properly that Miss Fielding was a racist. She was horrible to me, but at least I didn’t get the ruler. And I knew, without knowing why I knew she was picking on Martin Goldman cos he was Jewish. I was traumatised watching her give him the ruler (not seen corporal punishment before). Two things from my year and a half at Harehills. Alison Phelps-Jones was top of the class and teacher’s favourite. Being clever was not Alison’s fault, nor was her being favourite. By now I was comfortable with having that position and was setting about proving my worth. We had a spelling test. Miss Fielding said ‘tongue’;I thought she said ‘ton’. 19 out of 20! What! I raised my hand, then her approached her on her plinth. ‘Very well then, spell it now!’ Very flustered at her irritation I of course misspelt it. There, she said, you wouldn’t have got it anyway. Distraught at the injustice I resumed my place, still second to Alison PJ. Later that term, I was now sitting at the back of the class and howling “I want my mummy” to the great amusement of my classmates. But worse was to come. I had by now got a friend. She was Dorothy Padgett; she lived in Bayswater Grove and we used to bunk off after being marched along to St Aidans Church Hall, Roundhay Road for our school dinners. Dorothy had lost her mother, and her 16 year old sister had stepped up. School grassed us up and my parents forbade me to see Dorothy. I thought it was cos she lived in a back-to-back and was poor, but I don’t know why I thought that. At first we lived in a flat on Wetherby Road, but we had a social ladder to climb, which sadly included private education. The Greater Humiliation was that entrance exam to Leeds Girls High. I remember taking my 11+, sitting in the school's big Victorian hall rubbing my squeaky new shoes together, half casually wondering what we there. It was really really boring. But my parents thought I could don better than Roundhay School (near to where we lived, and crucially where my classmates and neighbours would all be going). I got through. I don’t know how Miss Fielding found out. I didn’t think she was interested in me. She made me stand at the front of the class and then she made them all applaud me. After I was the poor kid at Leeds Girls High School and then the posh kid at Allerton Grange Sixth Form. When I did my PGSE and the started teaching at Foxwood in Leeds (1980) I wanted no one to go through what I had done, and set about being the most child-centred teacher there could be. Did courses, examined my own teaching styles, listened to the students, and regularly took aprt in residentials, often also dragging my primary age daughter up and down Pen-y-Ghent. And also met up with Charlotte Emery and together we took the world on. And many other amazing teachers. And hundreds of amazing students, some of whom I am still friends with. So Foxwood School gave me the best days of my life, but it was as a teacher.

When Authority has no authority and racism trumps all

Of all the various types of student antisocial behaviour, this, that is still happening to one resident in Burley, is the possibly the worst: a group of originally all-white students, not just deliberately keeping the long term resident next door awake night after night with loud music and screeching, but adding racism into the mix. This included mocking West Indian forenames, doing impression of Jamaican accents, and referring negatively to people of colour. And on August 8 the resident managed to obtain this very clear recording of anti-Semitic chanting. This means that the “neighbour” who is a person of colour themselves, can add feeling threatened to the loss of any quality of life. But the situation is made all the more serious because there is no authority apparently in Leeds, not the University, not the Letting Agent, not the Anti-Social Behaviour Team, not the Police, not the Councillors, no one has the power to stop it. The sleep-deprived neighbour has played the tape of the chanting to all the relevant authorities and has now waited through August and September, and halfway through October for someone to make them stop. The police considered it a race hate crime and advised their University as such. The neighbour has worked from home all through Lockdown and beyond; the first students moved into their house on Leaving Day. All but one (the Letting Agent) of the above authorities have spoken to the students, and now they know that Authority has no authority.

The Great Collective University Inertia

My Open Letter to All the Leeds Universities Aigust 21 2020 Dear Universities, This is it. It is 10 weeks of relentless antisocial distasteful partying on an industrial level, by “entitled” young so-called adults who treat us, all year round residents like dirt, and by not pulling them up on their appalling, selfish, life-threatening behaviour, you are treating us like dirt. It’s one excuse after another. “They’re not all from our university. “ “Are you sure it was No 6?” “We can’t do anything until October.” “We don’t have all their addresses” “They’re not back at university until autumn.” “It’s the landlord/lady’s responsibility”. Out of the long-term residents in just one small street there are now three that we know of down at the local surgery on a regular basis, ill, signed off, or unfit for work, who have serious illnesses, all originating in stress-related conditions. The cost to the health service, to social services, just in monetary terms is already stacking up. Then we read there is an article in the local newspaper about why we should learn to love our universities. Apparently it’s because they benefit the Leeds economy, as so many people work for them. In Hyde Park and all over Headingley people’s careers, lives, health, happiness, families everything is in ruins and tatters just so that Leeds can be the best (really!) city in the north. In Moorland Road and Avenue alone we are teachers, university lecturers, doctors, builders, charity workers, retired people, social workers, garage mechanics, musicians, visual artists, university admin assistants, and real students (as in came here to study), a total mix of people who maintain this area the whole year around have been abandoned and left and hung out to dry by an uncaring council, incompetent police force and self-serving, self-seeking, entitled universities. Colleges who are spending their money rebranding themselves as universities and conservatories in order to enhance their status, universities spending millions on fancy new buildings, and heaven help anybody who went to university in Leeds, liked the area, and stayed on loyally to preserve and look after it. Heaven help anyone who mistook a beautiful Moor and beautiful Victorian architecture for a place of beauty and safety in which to pass a decade or two of their post-graduate life. There is a great collective inertia, and one part of Leeds in which society's have just been abandoned. Bad enough in a "normal" year, but inexcusable in a global pandemic.

When all the students come back

Well , who is looking forward to the students returning to their uni towns? I will tell you who: university finance departments, landlords and ladies, Sainsbury’s. Once this list would have included bars and pubs, and local shops. Once it would be local residents looking forward to new trends in music and art, and even philosophical debates down the Royal Park Pub. Most, if not all university lectures can be online. Practicals obviously need equipment, but possibly students could to access that at a local home university. Quite this a drastic step I realise. This would involve cooperation between institutions, but hey, this is a global pandemic, but I say where there’s a will... It seems that the exasperated parents have already dropped off and got rid of the most determinedly antisocial partygoers, probably a thousand or so, given the reports we have from Moorland Avenue, Saint John’s Avenue, Hyde Park Road, Cardigan Road, the Norwoods, Victoria Road, the Broomfields, the Langdales. But many more thousands are set to descend on the city. We hear of one uni has actually asking students to come back early. Is to this ensure they will get their fees, or to get them inside the city boundary before lockdowns return? Hopefully these are students who have come here to study. Nonetheless they will have been looking forward to freedom, freshers week and meeting up with old friends. To have them all descend on Leeds at once is the recipe for an almighty spike and heaven help the students and the unis when they get the blame for Leeds’s first football game in the Premier League to be behind closed doors and when all the pubs get closed again. We suggest that the council and the universities get together, be creative and come up with an intelligent plan.

Open Letter to All Leeds Universities

Open letter to All Leeds Universities

As one university spokesperson wrote to us, indeed your students are not solely responsible for the situation. In many ways the students are just victims, collateral damage in a system, an infrastructure which which has evolved, consisting of entitled students and their entitled parents, lazy and unscrupulous landlords and ladies, and the criminal drug pushers who work for themselves at the expense of us all. (And of course it isn’t all landlords/ladies, it isn’t all students, but it is all druggies.) Let us also add in a council and a police force who either genuinely don’t realise just how bad the situation has become, or don’t have the will or the capacity to change it.

However, as far the students are concerned, they may not be solely your students, and it is not all students, but the party-goers are all students. And the students are only here because the universities are here. And this gives the unis both the responsibility and ability to do something about the situation.

Presently there are two distinct types of party-type antisocial behaviour. The raves such as the one that happened on Woodhouse Moor were not organised by students and were mostly locals and nearly all from other areas of Leeds. But in the late afternoon the organisers were conspicuously walking round the back streets round our way so presumably they were looking for students to invite. And students’ parents and the universities should be really worried about this.

 Only five years ago my daughter came back from work at the pub to find that someone had climbed the tree in our front garden and then dropped onto the pavement where she then died. Only later did we discover that she been persuaded to take drugs for the first time and, the very next day, was going away to university to do a post-grad course. How tragic this was was brought home when her parents came up from her hometown to see where she died and meet the person who found her. As they stood in the garden looking at the tree and described the life she had been about to lead we just felt that their daughter was our daughter or sister.

But this letter is not just about noise, parties drugs and alcohol abuse. Anti-social behaviour also includes incompetent  waste management. Students either don’t care or don’t know how to recycle and, for example, don’t realise or care that you can’t, in Leeds, put glass into a green bin, and that you should not leave bins out on the pavement. Also, on Leaving Day just wheeling mattresses and sofas out onto the street for someone else to deal with is the disgusting height [or depth] of anti-social behaviour.

Hyde Park Road Leeds

And then  there are few things more insensitive than parking in front of a neighbour’s drive. Obviously the council hasn’t helped by painting white parking lines down some streets (eg Moorland Avenue), but you would think that the presence of a parking area, especially if there is a vehicle in it would be a giveaway. The implications for anyone who has to drive to work [and arrive on time] are frightening.

In general the graffiti and the fly-tipping (apart from the aforementioned mattresses) aren’t directly the students’ fault, but by treating the neighbourhood badly you invite others to regarding it as a dumping ground.

Local residents who live here all round keep the area afloat - just. We keep the shops, the takeaways and the pubs (what’s left of them] ticking over. Without us the area would die altogether. So when the two entitled parents told one particular resident on two separate occasions within one week in July 2020 that she living in the wrong area, said parents should realise that without us, their children would not last the distance.

 

What are the Lettings Agents' Responsibilities when their Tenants Take Anti-social Behaviour to these Heights?

This is us at Moorland Residents Inc writing to the letting agents, wondering what their role would be regarding their tenants and their tenants' behaviour. 

We are writing to you as you are the letting agent for a number of multiple occupancy houses in the area.

As you may be aware from local newspapers [Yorkshire Evening Post, Leeds Live, Radio Aire], a number of students are regularly hosting loud parties, often starting in the afternoon and continuing into the early hours of the morning. This has been going on years at the weekends, but the parties and attendant anti-social behaviour escalated at the beginning of June when students who had left Leeds at the beginning of lockdown returned to their student accommodation.

The anti-social behaviour includes hiring sound systems, partying in the gardens and in the streets, stealing wood to burn and chairs to sit on from other houses. It includes overt drug taking and excessive alcohol consumption, and screeching with laughter until 6am.

Apart from the partying the students leave the bins in streets, overflowing, with no differentiation between recycling and landfill rubbish, and this rubbish includes glass bottles. The state of the bins encourages rats, invites the regular fly-tipping of white goods and broken furniture, some brought out from the HMOs themselves.

The noise levels are at the worst they have ever been. Longterm local residents are suffering from the psychological and physical effects of sleep deprivation, made worse by the fact that many residents are having to work from home. Plus some students are ignoring rules regarding social distancing and limited numbers in houses. In some instances, they are also causing property damage to the houses they are renting.

Since March 23rd the police have acted on multiple noise disturbance and lockdown breaches, and then on July 1st, the Council brought in a Public Space Protection Order and I’m reporting a breach of this PSPO at [as well as instances of flytipping. This has made the area unsightly and created health risks.

To make matters worse, some students have come already come back to Leeds, almost as if for a holiday. They are certainly not working themselves, and the universities aren’t back yet.

While the police can act on breaches as they occur, we would like to know how yourselves as letting agents will act to ensure that PSPO orders are obeyed as well as dealing with repeated breaches. Besides impacting on the health of residents, the breaches are damaging the resident-student relationship and the marketability of the properties themselves. We residents are keen to restore good relationships with student occupants but in order to do this, steps do have to be taken to resolve the problems caused by non-compliant individuals.

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Landlordism 21st century in Hyde Park Leeds

There is more to the nuisance neighbours than the student neighbours themselves. They are almost collateral themselves as the unwitting agents of landlordism.

In pre-Covid times the student parties would reach antisocial heights shortly after exams then would continue until Change-over day, then we locals would be able to relax over summer.

But not exactly. With summer, come the letting agents, the builders and cleaners. The house owners don’t actually get their hands dirty themselves. In fact some of them don’t even live in Leeds

The un-builders, on the house owners’ orders, via the agents have quite dismantled and looted the beautiful Victorian buildings of Hyde Park Leeds. These houses were built by their predecessors from an age of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and said predecessors worked till they dropped to install all the beautiful banisters, architraves and ceiling roses. These days, with the removal of the banisters and the stairs themselves there is space enough to create another little flat in what had been the entrance hall, and is now just another money earner. And the age of Victorian architectural facades is exactly that today, not just looking at the difference between the backs and fronts of our houses, but the front exteriors and all interiors.

Besides the builders there is another subgroup which you could call cleaners but with a by-line in fly-tipping. The ex-tenants-to-be themselves start by leaving unwanted possessions in and around the bins. The fly-tippers take the rest and just leave them anywhere in the street. Most astonishing of all is that in our particular area they leave filthy sofas on St John’s Grove which is a private road and a cul-de-sac, where there is absolutely no passing traffic or trade. And there they stay until a local long-term resident neighbour calls the council. This has a knock-on effect on Moorland Avenue, the in-effect back street to Moorland Road and Avenue, being the street that outsiders dump their unwanted fridge-freezers in, as well.

There is a convention whereby, if you want to recycle some items you leave them at the bottom of your path or garden, and if they’re not taken within a few days you just take them to the tip yourself. But to leave rubbish of this size and unquality on the one street which no vehicles were supposed to go down and goes nowhere is mind blowing. And to think that is acceptable to drive to the through road backstreet and leave tall freezers ready to topple over on our 4 year-olds is sickening. Despicably dangerous.