The Grey Man

Father, husband and teacher of all things Englishy! Opinions and thoughts are mine and mine alone!

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@llewelyn20 @tstarkey1212 If only we had one recording system across all schools. It is the same with the NHS. Multiple MIS means things get missed too often.

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@CWaters_SAFC I have to say the attitude of the SAFC ticketing staff is abysmal. Rude, confrontational and dismissive. If that is what the club count as customer service then they should hang their heads in shame. Season ticket holders being treated badly is not a good look.

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@Strickomaster Can you remember when 32 was a C grade? It just "was" and we knew it. Bliss!

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@SchoolsWeek We need to resist it then. Collective refusal to comply with their regime is the only thing that will make a difference. The unions need to boycott them completely.

[Phil Beadle @PhilBeadle]

Now we seem to have 'Imprison Like a Champion', here is my full(ish) analysis of its parent title: https://t.co/NRWPlb3oFs

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

The British establishment have all ready covered this new Banksy up.

Can we get it Retweeted 10,000 times to show that they can never cover up their complicity in war crimes??

Protect the right to protest! RT!

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Should Nigel Farage's dodgy tax dealings be investigated for criminal behaviour?

Please RT if you think so.

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

This is a gross betrayal of the electorate, fraud of the highest order and gross misconduct in a public office.

People in Britain suffered Johnson sold himselm to the highest bidder.

Johnson should answer for these crimes in a court of law.

RT if you agree.

[Marina Purkiss @MarinaPurkiss]

What utter dickheads we are…

Rayner fought for workers: sick pay, maternity rights, protection from unfair dismissal

Farage and his MPs voted it down

No sick pay from day one. No protections.

Rayner gets binned over £40k in stamp duty

Farage dodges £44k, shrugs & strolls on

Well done bellends, the ultra wealthy win again.

[Jay @jessicamayclark]

This really cannot be retweeted enough.
Really can’t.

So what you waiting for? 🙏👍

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@Brink_Thinker Yes. Absolutely.

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@MrEFinch I would like someone to try to equate how many wasted man hours have been consumed by schools enforcing uniform infringements. Unquantifiable would be the amount of school/child/home relationships ruined by these issues as well.

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@Strickomaster I've never worked at a school that didn't have a rota of staff supervision before school. Never.

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@Strickomaster And most schools have staff on duty before school. Your argument is nonsense. For the sake of clarity, I dont disagree with lineups.

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@Strickomaster Can you explain how you're suggesting that pupils mixing before schools without "lines" is a safeguarding issue?

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@teachwellall Utterly, utterly ridiculous. No wonder people laugh at the education system in this country.

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@naomicfisher I've been questioning our way of doing things for years. Every time I do, I get shot down by colleagues for being a "radical".

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

One of the life-long things we learn at school is how important school is.

In fact, we start to learn this before we go to school, when we tell our three and four-year-olds that schools are where learning really starts, and that they’re too old now to play all day.

Many of us learnt that if we didn’t go to school, we would be illiterate, uneducated, wouldn’t have any idea what to do with ourselves – in short, we would waste our lives. We’d fritter our time away, without doing anything serious or challenging. We learnt that our education is all down to our teachers and our school, that without them we would be nothing.

Perhaps we need to believe that, because why else would we have spent so many formative years of our lives sitting in classrooms, and then in turn send our children to do the same? It must be really important, right?

If we allowed ourselves to think otherwise we’d have to ask some difficult questions about the way that we spent those years, and that might challenge some of the assumptions we hold about society and the way that we treat young people.

The belief that school is crucially important means that we can justify causing misery. We justify making small children sit at desks and copy words, when their bodies just want to move. We justify making teenagers spend months taking exam after exam, dominating years of their lives. We justify testing our primary children on grammar they find incomprehensible.

We tell ourselves that it has to be this way, that this is the way to drive up standards. We do to our children what was done to us, because it’s too frightening to do anything else.

We learnt at school to be scared of ourselves and our motivations. We learnt to think that we must be made to do things or else we’d do nothing at all.

Which is strange, because we can see evidence to the contrary all around us. Small children learn wherever they go, with no need for force. Adults set themselves enormous challenges – writing books, and running marathons – with no need for force. Humans are driven to learn and to participate in the world around them. Until you stop them, and tell that that instead, they should follow instructions and do what they’re told.

Somewhere along our motivation was educated out of us. We lost our self-belief. We’re afraid to do anything differently – but if we continue to do what we’ve always done, we will only learn what we’ve always learnt.

Our children need something better. This has to start with us.

[The Grey Man @bgr1978]

@Kate223110 @teachwellall God, don't!