"I want" doesn't get.

I think that there are some jobs that if you actively want to do them, you probably shouldn't be allowed to do.

Politician could be one; policing is perhaps another.

I'm not implying that everyone that wants to do these jobs is inherently deranged in some way. I was merely daydreaming idly and it occurred to me that, if you quite like the idea of beating people up and handcuffing them and putting them in prison or something, could it be that being a policeman is a dangerous move for you and for society? Or, if you like the idea of having your finger on the buttons that control society, perhaps you should keep your sticky mitts to yourself. Maybe the best kinds of leaders are reluctant and accidental ones: at least then they are motivated in an appropriate way...

I propose that in order to address this problem, we should have some kind of conscription that dictates we all must do a year or two as policemen and politicians, whether we want to or not. Yeah, there'd be some pretty poor policing and idiotically incompetent politicking going on, but at least it would be well intentioned.

It's just that I was bought up to believe that it's the thought that counts.

Something is rotten in the state of education...

I would like to excuse, in advance, my ranting in this post. As you may well know, I am a teacher working at primary school level, currently teaching year 6 - the last year of primary school.

I love teaching children, but I especially love teaching this year group: there is a real feeling of adventure and journeying about the last year of primary school. There is one formative experience after another - residential trips, leavers' events, SATs - and you know that the children in your care will remember these experiences for a long time to come. However, the major issue in year 6, and in education generally, is that of assessment and how to measure the attainment and progress of children during their primary phase of education.

I have already blogged on my feelings about SATs tests. As I said then, I am in favour of using testing to gauge the level of a child's development in English and maths. Many people believe that the tests cause too much stress for children and teachers alike and that the results are not dependable due to the 'snapshot' nature of a written test; a child could be having an off day or underperform due to some other external factor. Also, it is argued that because many year 6 children spend most of the year in revision for the tests and learning how to perform to the maximum level for them, the curriculum is irredeemably narrowed and subjects such as geography, history and the like get squeezed out.

Whilst I have some sympathy for this last point, I have no time whatsoever for the first one. I went through my views on avoiding stress at all costs in my last post on SATs, and I'll do my best to avoid repeating myself here. It does seem strange to me that we feel the need to avoid any kind of difficult experience for children. Surely we should be teaching children to cope with stress and pressure in a positive way, not avoiding it. Negative emotion is almost taboo in schools: anger, sadness, anxiety are all to be avoided at all costs. Yet I believe that children should absolutely be encouraged to face up to these emotions and learn to accept and cope with them, even turn them into positive things. At the moment, the need to protect children from these things means that some children may never truly understand what it means to be stressed, to cope with the emotion and then overcome it. How will they function when they enter the grown up world of work, relationships and families without some experience of these emotions? Coping with testing in a controlled environments like school is valuable not only for the data it provides teachers and education authorities, but also for the life lessons that can be learned during the process: keeping a perspective on things, setting realistic targets, dealing with pressure etc.

As for a narrowing of the curriculum, I believe that this is not necessarily the case if the teacher is prepared and allowed to be daring and creative in their teaching. In fact, I think that year 6 offers more opportunities to broaden the curriculum than most other years, especially in the last term of the year when the tests are out of the way. Since the tests we have undertaken many projects that broaden the curriculum massively: entrepreneurial projects using real cash to set up businesses; a survey of the ecosystem of the school grounds and a plan to improve the diversity of plant and animal life; studies of London including a trip to the Natural History Museum and various other sights; a week long residential trip to Dartmoor getting involved with a plethora of outdoor sports; putting on a leavers' show with all the dramatic, musical and technical skills required to do so. I'm not entirely sure how those experiences represent a narrowing of a curriculum after they have spent most of the year honing and polishing the most important skills needed for life: literacy and numeracy.

So, yes, I do think SATs are important and that they should stay. I just think that schools and teachers should work harder and be more creative in how they approach them. However, the next big thing in assessment, the much vaunted replacement to SATs is called Assessing Pupil Progress, or APP as educational jargon would put it.

APP is a way of tracking a child's progress in English, maths and, in the future, science and perhaps ICT. Each child has a bank of charts and tables that follows them through school that the teacher uses to highlight specific targets as they are achieved, declaring when they were met and where the evidence can be found for the event. It kind of makes sense - assessment is continuous and fluid rather than a snapshot - until you think about what such a system really entails. The paperwork is hideous: I have not heard a teacher say anything other than that the work involved in keeping up is truly horrendous and that it significantly extends the hours a teacher invests into assessment at the expense of other areas of their job. It is cumbersome and, I am guessing, pretty inflexible. If a target is on the sheet, I have to show that a child has met it and then give evidence for that fact over multiple occasions. So, for example, if I am working with some naturally talented mathematicians, I cannot simply have a conversation with them to ascertain whether they can use, say, short division adequately and then move on to other areas they are more in need of covering; I will now have to make sure that there are several examples of short division in their books to prove their competence in using it. This is proper bureaucracy: needless paper trails that are utterly rigid and have no reflection on the needs of the real world and bypass any kind of common sense decision from the teacher.

APP seems to me to be a step backwards from SATs: it seems even less creative, even less flexible and teachers' instincts and opinions are even more marginalised in the face of cold, hard and evidenced bureaucratic 'facts'.

The problem is not the tests. The problem is the league tables that are published and put pressure on schools to 'play the game' and get to certain targets. APP won't change that fact - there will still be league tables - it will merely mean that teachers will have to play a different game: a game that will involve huge amounts of needless work to do something that already happens anyway. I think that lots of teachers will go off sick in the face of APP (I'm only half joking here...) and that, as a profession, we will merely get better at 'creating' evidence and cutting corners to keep the authorities - authorities that seem to know little about the every day lives of teachers and pupils in schools - from the door while we go about trying to make school a valuable experience for it's students.

No one has asked me about APP. At no point have my local authority asked our opinion. No politicians seem to have consulted me or anyone I know in education. It's just happening, whether we like it or not. It's not yet statutory, but we'll be starting in September regardless because that's what the authorities want. I'll give it seven years before it's scrapped and we try an entirely new approach. The whole thing feels political somehow, especially since the SATs marking fiasco of last year put the tests in the centre of a politcal battleground.

I just hope that they get the next system right. Maybe we'll just go back to old fashioned tests and try to train talented teachers that know how to do their job again...

Join the dots...

This video shows an animation of the score to 'Giant Steps' by John Coltrane. This is, at the moment at least, my favourite jazz tune - I tend to change my mind about these things and find speaking in absolutes very hard. I simply cannot do those 'top 5' lists! Firstly, I think that this tune shows Coltrane's very real genius: the 'sheets of sound'; the almost ludicrously flexible harmonic structure; the chords shifting like a milling crowd.

Usually, the bass player instinct that is hard wired in me hones in on the rhythm section - the bass and the drums. The guys playing on this track - the great Paul Chambers on upright and Art Taylor on drums - put in an unbelievable performance. They bubble along like a simmering pot on a stove and never lose sight of the tune's progression. It sounds effortless, easy even. Tommy Flanagan on piano almost joins the rhythm section in this case, and, aside from the solo, marks the passing of the chords with guttural stabs. However, for once, my ears are dragged kicking and screaming from the mysteriously arcane and dingy world of the rhythm section and into the strange and uncomfortably brightly lit world of melody and harmony. Coltrane's playing is staggering. He rides over the changes like a surfer on a wave; effortless and yet pushing it as far as he possibly can. I cannot even begin to understand what's going on with this tune, let alone explain it.

So, yes, this is about the best piece of music I can think of right now. What strikes me about this video is how much simplifying has to occur to transcribe what Coltrane is playing. I'm a poor reader of music, yet even I can appreciate how much of Coltrane's playing has gone missing when it is written down. It is very close, but to write every inflection and nuance of what is going on down on the manuscript would render it unreadable to even the most accomplished of readers. Just goes to show: it doesn't matter how much education or expertise one has on paper, real genius cannot be imitated or transcribed. There is simply too much to write down and not enough symbols to give the reader the true colours; a cheap Polaroid of a masterpiece.

Use your ears, folks, and do it for real!

What now?

May I start by explaining that I never intended this blog to be a platform for my political views. I still don't think that it is really; I haven't really detailed what I believe, just what I object to. However, recent events have stirred the slumbering political beast that lies within me. So, here goes...

Well. It has happened. Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons have become the first members of the BNP elected to the European Parliament. For the first time ever, the British electorate have chosen to be represented by a party that is founded on principles of racism - albeit thinly veiled in promises of protecting the rights of the 'indigenous Briton' (see my posts below if you're at all interested in what I think about that) against the onslaught of immigration. In a manner that is like a diet version of the inter-war rise of fascism in Germany - 3rd Reich Lite if you will - the recession, a feeling of injustice and disillusionment and a need to turn inwards and away from the influences of the others that are the phantom cause of all our ills, far right politics is now firmly on the menu of Britain's political dinner party. I've considered the views of the BNP, tried to understand them and listen to the people that vote for them, but I've always found them to be incredibly flawed, ill-informed, half explained and understood even less. They always come back to plain old bigotry. I even heard Andrew Brons on Radio 2 claiming that he didn't know why non-white people weren't allowed into the party as he had only been in it for four years and he didn't make the policy. He is an elected representative of the party, and yet even he cannot explain why he thinks what he thinks. Is it just me, or isn't that just a teeny-weeny bit farcical? If Brons, a former school master, can't explain or justify what he believes, what hope do the voters he is supposed to represent have?

I'm not entirely sure if I'm being hysterical in saying that this country will never be the same again. The question I'm pondering is whether this will eventually turn out to be a good thing. Obviously, I don't think that it could ever be a good thing to have fascists representing you and me in any kind of democratic assembly, but perhaps the shock - the stomach turning horror of seeing such people and such negativity and hatred given any kind of power - will provoke something very positive.

When it comes down to pointing the ineffectual giant finger of blame, I feel that my generation and demographic has a lot of explaining to do. I simply cannot believe that people would protest the abuse of expenses by MPs or the recession by voting for a party that judges people's rights by the colour of their skin. How could you move from the left-centre politics of traditional Labour to the far-right stance of the BNP? Surely the problem is not a shift in voting loyalties; I think that the problem is with the apathy and laziness of the kind of people who voted for Labour - namely me. I have always voted at every election. I have always made the effort to get down to the polling station and put the cross next to the name that stood out to me. However, could I honestly say that I have taken the time to look into the political landscape into which I am about to walk? Have I done my research? Do I know, really know, if I'm voting for something in which I believe in?

I am a practicing Christian. This means that I believe in things that have far greater power than any politician. It also means that whatever political affiliations I have now depend on the issues of the moment rather than a traditional association with a party. My dad, for example, is a traditional Scouse socialist: he has voted Labour since he was 18 and will probably vote for them forever. When I said to him that I had voted Liberal Democrat in one election, he asked me if my "arse hurt from sitting on the fence". It's good to have loyalties and strong principles, but I think politics has changed now. If I'm honest, I don't see much difference between the centre-left of Labour and the centre-right of the Tories, aside from some differences of opinion on Europe and the economy. I could honestly say that if the Tories were elected tomorrow, my life would not be impacted greatly. However, I believe that if I am to align my faith with a political persuasion, it would probably look more socialist than right: a desire to help the poor; to treat the sick with compassion; in the equality of all men and the prevention of selfishness and greed at the expense of others. Looking at the manifesto of the BNP is like looking at the negative image of these values.

My faith also means that if there is one thing that is not an option, it is inactivity. Standing on the sidelines and claiming "I told you so" is simply not allowed. It doesn't change anything. It merely makes one complicit to the problem, almost as blameful as the perpetrators themselves. Shame on those who stayed at home and didn't vote as a protest: how can someone claim that by not voting they are protesting? If you don't like the way MPs behave, vote them out. Or spoil your paper. Staying at home - a mass display of apathy - merely confirms that the powers that be can get on with things on their own because we're not really interested. How can we suddenly pay attention when it suits us? And how strange that we demonstrate our anger at the system by doing absolutely nothing, en masse?

Whatever: the BNP stand for nothing good. It is apathy that has opened the door of power to them, albeit the slightest of an amount. It will be apathy that keeps it open. So it is imperative that we get out of our comfortable armchairs of casual outrage and start registering our feelings about whatever is going on in demonstrable, effective ways. Doing nothing could perhaps no longer be an option. Therefore, maybe those fascists getting into the European Parliament could result in being a positive thing. I really hope that's the case. The alternatives could be very unpleasant indeed.

Hello? Is there anybody there?

The debate rages. Or at least my side of it does. Following my recent emailed letter to the British National Party, I've heard nothing from them in reply as yet. Which seems a little incongruous and even strange considering their almost feverish determination to mop up the 'disillusioned vote'. A gentle reminding nudge was in order, so I've just emailed the following follow up. I will post any responses that come my way. If they ever materialise that is...

Dear sir or madam,

I recently sent you the query below regarding your policies on immigration. I asked you to define the term 'indigenous Britons' that is very frequently referred to in your party literature to help me understand your philosophies and to cast an informed vote in the forthcoming local and European elections. This leaves me unsure as to whether or not I can describe myself as indigenous to Britain. As I have, as yet, not heard a reply from your office, I am assuming that either there is no satisfactory explanation for referring to anybody as an indigenous Briton - other than the Welsh perhaps - or that you don't particularly want my vote. Or would it help if I sent a photograph?

Every other party I have asked direct questions of regarding their policies has managed to reply or at least pointed me in the right direction to find out more. I am very disappointed that you, as a publicly accountable political organisation, have been unable to do likewise. Surely, as you seem very keen at pointing out the all too evident lack of accountability shown by our leading political parties, you would want to display to a voting member of the public such as me that you care about explaining your policies and philosophies. Or maybe you don't want my vote?

Either way, it would be great to hear from you before June 4th. At the moment, I am deciding to vote only for a party that is able to explain exactly what it stands for. That seems to me to be the only commonly sensible way to use my privileged position as a British voter.

Yours faithfully,
Liam Owen, Bristol.

An open letter to the BNP.

I have just sent this enquiry to the BNP office in Bristol.

It really is a genuine enquiry; I want to understand what they think. I believe passionately in freedom of speech and thought, but I also believe in integrity and truth. Some of their recent publicity has not really given me much confidence in their ability to show either of these qualities. My suspicions are that they are an organisation of ill-informed, narrow-minded bigots that haven't really thought about what they are saying or what it means, let alone checked the facts of what they are saying in any kind of historical or philosophical context; that they are a group of people that are excusing their racism and prejudices by using pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo. They would certainly not be the first group of extremists to do that and they probably won't be the last. However, I am prepared to admit that I could be wrong on this fact and that their policies are based on sound thought and motive. I look forward to their response and will, in the interests of balance and parity, post it here when it arrives. The letter I wrote them is as follows:

Dear sir or madam,

I was wondering if you could help me understand one of the details of your policies. I have read on your party's website that you are not against people of other communities and immigrants but rather are standing up for 'native British people'. I have also read that you are standing up for Britain's "indigenous population" and not stirring up racial hatred.

The phrases 'native British' and 'indigenous population' confuse me somewhat; what exactly do you mean when you use these terms? Where exactly is the line drawn? As far as I am aware, the term Briton and British strictly speaking refers to the pre-Saxon celtic population of these islands. The Saxons were just one of a group of immigrants (Angles, Jutes etc.) that flooded into the British mainland and forcibly took territory from the 'indigenous' population, marginalising them and forcing them to the extreme west and north of the island. Does that mean that the English - as those immigrants later became - are in fact one of the groups of immigrants that would be offered the benefits of your voluntary resettlement policy? Or perhaps the Scots, who were in fact immigrants from the kingdom of Ulster that overran the Pictish peoples of the far north of the British Isles?

By that reckoning, almost everyone on the island is a non-'indigenous' person. Except for the Welsh (and perhaps a few Cornish). And them only because we can't actually prove where they came from. All we know is that they represent all that's left of the 'native British' that would have existed before the country suffered wave after wave of immigration - from the Romans; the Saxons, Angles et al; the Vikings; the Norman French. And even the Welsh originally came from somewhere else, probably central Europe, in the first instance. Or is it simply because all of the immigrants I've mentioned here are white? They were categorically not of the same religion or culture and all bemoaned the influx of immigrants that came after them.

So where are we drawing the lines? Were all the previous immigrations to this island wrong? Are we not merely in a fluid and transient flow of peoples in and out of the islands?

This is a genuine and serious enquiry; I am not writing a hate mail or making fun. These issues are very important ones for me and I am trying to make up my mind with regard to casting my vote on June 4th. I analyse every party's policies carefully, question them and decide which fit best with my personal beliefs and opinions. I would be very much obliged if you could help me understand this aspect of your party's philosophy. I look forward to your reply.

Yours faithfully,
Liam Owen.

A really really small snail on a quite big beach.

As seen on Southerndown beach near Bridgend in South Wales. He was tiny, but we found him to be fascinating. Upon inspecting the snail, I was struck by how unfathomably complex the patterns on its shell were; struck by how something so small can be alive and need to eat and rest and do whatever snails do all day. He was well and truly hiding up in his shell - I guess waiting for the tide to come and save him from prying, sunburning idiots like me - and wasn't game for coming out.

Total perspective issues then flooded into my mind. I must have as much idea about the universe and how it really works as that snail has about Cheltenham's one way system. That put my egotistical, self indulgent, self interested self in its much more insignificant place. Which reminded me of Douglas Adams's description of the The Total Perspective Vortex in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. It was a device that was used as an extreme punishment for criminals; they were put into the machine which proceeded to show them as they truly were against the terrifying, mind-malfunctioning vastness of space. They duly went mad and were well and truly punished. Except that when Zaphod Beeblebrox - one of the main characters and the very definition of narcissism - was put in, he came out reassured that he was exactly as wonderful as he thought he was.

I think I would struggle in the Total Perspective Vortex. Maybe the best way to cope is go for the snail's approach: I don't think he gives a toss about the one way system in Cheltenham. Or anything other than his dinner, for that matter. Doesn't seem right though - we're not snails and we are wired up to care about more than just dinner, thankfully. Maybe, then, I'll concentrate a bit harder on not believing my own hype and trying instead to just enjoy myself and the world a bit more. There's much to see and do...so many rocks to crawl across.