After five years teaching in a place on Humberside that was so obscure even half the residents hadn't heard of it, I decided in 1979 that I was in the wrong career and needed to get back to living in an urban environment - rural communities (particularly in the pre-Internet days) were far too remote for my gregarious personality.
On the advice of a close friend from my University days who lived nearby, I moved to Manchester, consulted a company called Career Analysts who thought that I was right about teaching and I ought to try accountancy ("huh, am I that boring? And legalised theft doesn't sound like me either") or IT.
While I was waiting to get on the appropriate IT retraining course ("Accountancy? You're joking, right?"), I started to run out of money - the usual story of my life, and anyway Thatcher had just become PM, so of course there was no money to be had! Not many jobs to be had doing much else either (Thatcher had just become PM, so of course there were no jobs to be had!), so I ended up for a couple of months .... as a supply teacher - this time in a very affluent suburb of the city.
Totally different world from the backwaters of rural Humberside. Very different world from the inner-city comprehensive in Sheffield where I had started teaching as well. Parents with expectations, a lot of well-shod, very bright kids (not all of them though!). Being fierce and irascible as you had to be to teach in rural Humberside would not work. I was only there two months and never really did acquire the style needed to succeed.
The world of parental expectations and how the kids reacted to them was new and interesting. The one example that I recall in particular. She was 13, very intelligent, effervescent, enthusiastic, positive, physically mature, and nothing stood in her way. And she already was in a steady relationship with a boyfriend!
Her parents were concerned, interested, wanted her to do well, expected her to do well, were very pleased with the results that she was getting (not even two months of my teaching impacted that!). There are a couple of things most teachers will tell you about their profession. One is the number of times children come to you and quietly take you into their confidence about "secret things" that are going on. Why I never found out. The other thing is the way cliques develop and how members of one clique dislike members of the other cliques. In this school it was extremely pronounced.
How much truth there was in the story I do not know, but one day I recall being told by a member of another clique that the girl quoted above "was sneaking off after school every afternoon and having sex with her boyfriend". The usual wry smile from me, the shake of the head that invariably accompanies it (too young - should be careful usw). Anyway given the "clique attitudes" there may have been nothing to it.
This precocity is not an uncommon phenomenon in the UK even now, though. A survey a few years ago indicated that some 40% of kids in the UK are sexually active before their 16th birthday (in Germany it was 25%, which is still on the high side IMHO). And apparently it is not just the dumb, stupid kids from the wrong side of the tracks - it crosses the entire range (except maybe where religion raises its head - I don't imagine that those figures would apply to kids with strict Muslim parents for example).
The question that you feel inclined to raise though. If you are the parents of a girl like the one described above and discover that despite all the success stories, all the pluses, all the Grade As, that there is this one thing going on - that she is already sexually active. What do you do? Tell her that you want it stop. Politely, firmly, not so politely, with a threat of physical punishment (not in Germany you don't!) - what? And will she listen and follow your advice? I suspect not.
I have never been a parent, so I have never had to face this dilemma. It is a curiously un-liberal thing for me to say (there goes my reputation again), but all this is happening far too soon in their lives, and they really should be encouraged (now there's a word that covers all the possibilities - from the namby-pamby to the outright brutal!) to learn restraint until they are older and more mature and can handle their desires better. But quite how you manage it? Good luck, I wish you well.
And for the kids reading this, it is exactly the same as with drugs: "Just say no"!
No comments:
Post a Comment