ASBO Teacher

An irreverent guide to surviving in challenging classrooms

Samuel Elliott

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781785835377
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Foreword by David Didau.
Samuel Elliott has been the pupil from hell.
He knows what he needed from his teachers in order to turn his life around - and in this book he shares that knowledge with hard-pressed colleagues who just want to do their best for their pupils.
In ASBO Teacher Samuel offers no-nonsense principles hewn from the chalkface of the modern British classroom: ideas and approaches that have worked for the author in the most challenging settings and with the most testing pupils.
Covering a range of issues spanning behaviour management, lesson structure, resource preparation and narratives in the classroom, the book is a blueprint for becoming a particular kind of teacher - one who has high expectations, a concern for pupil well-being, and a knack for ushering learners into more effective learning.
(Note: ASBO stands for 'antisocial behaviour order', a legal order in the UK issued to restrict an individual aged ten or above from harassing or causing alarm or distress to other people.)

13

Chapter 1

EMPOWERED YOUNG LEARNER

This chapter covers my formative years. I recommend taking a short sudoku break at the end of each section to recover whatever IQ points you may have lost. We begin at the foundation level, Key Stage 3, where I deploy a range of misbehaviour strategies to provide opportunities for similar miscreants. By Year 10, I make a positive contribution to the wider life and ethos of the city of Coventry through the medium of television. Finally, I use formative assessment in the form of a textbook and an IKEA desk to secure some life chances for myself.

WHY PUPILS ARE NAUGHTY (KEY STAGE 3)

It was a sunny day in July when I arrived for my transition day at Willenhall School in Coventry. I remember sitting on the hard shoulder that separated the canteen loading bay from what was then the sixth form, which consisted of two holiday homes bolted together.

I had no idea what was going on – all of us Year 6s were so dazed by the enormity of Big School. Then one boy from Year 7 came over and deliberately stood on my trainers, so I wrestled him to the ground and stomped on his head. The boy ran off and some Year 8s came over to commend me for my excellent work. ‘Nice one, mate – we hate that lad. If you need anything, just ask.’

From this one situation, I learned the simple rule that when you’re in school, the more outrageously you can misbehave, the better. On one of my first days in Year 7, I brought in a packet of cigarettes I’d stolen from my mum’s bag. I remember standing behind the Forum Fish Bar at 8am with two mates, smoking, coughing, my lungs channelling black spirits. Game on, I thought. 14

I had been getting away with minor misbehaviours at first. Play-fighting. Pulling chairs out. In art, I picked up a clay sculpture of a giant hand, tucked it into my jumper sleeve and knocked my friend off a chair with it. But I was only ever sent out, spoken to pleadingly, or remonstrated with. Mum and dad were never rung, and since that was my only concern, I just kept plugging away at it.

Then, one day in Year 7 … a detention. My maths teacher saw that my work ethic consisted of drawing either small triangles with tiny numbers above, a circle with pi = mc² randomly in the middle, or x and y symbols stacking up on the page like jumping jacks. I’d watched A Beautiful Mind and was confident that maths was just a bunch of random symbols. So, I got inspired and embarked on the path of the misunderstood genius. When the teacher rang my mum and gave me a detention, I cried.

My maths teacher – Miss Moorcroft – was the only real hard-case in school, and her lesson slot seemed etched in relief on my timetable like tombstone initials: AM. My least favourite time of day, my least favourite teacher, and the two were always somehow entwined. A real mourning subject.

I misbehaved for every teacher except Miss Moorcroft. She was my form tutor and one of the few teachers with the audacity to give me a detention. Thanks to her I had to be clever about skipping lessons, or ‘wagging it’. The rule was that as long as you could get away with something, you’d do it – a kind of Murphy’s lawlessness. In order to wag it, I came in for registration, asked a friend to sign me in on subsequent registers, and hopped the fence with my two mates to drink a bottle of Glen’s Vodka in the graveyard that abutted the school. Once, a vicar accosted us, speaking into a walkie-talkie about how he’d ‘got us’. But he hadn’t. Not unless the Man Upstairs was considering rolling out divine intervention from merely feeding the 5,000 to Key Stage 3 truancies. Other times, we went to KFC, sometimes ‘chilling’ on the roof that stood four stories above the road. My friend got bored and kicked a bucket congealed with tar off the roof. God knows where it went. We wagged for a solid month until they introduced electronic registers for every lesson.

Nevertheless, the games continued, and part of the reason I held off from entering teaching was because of the behaviours I had 15collaborated with as an adolescent. My science teacher was a Mr Campbell-Bannerman, and during one of his lessons someone bit a candy necklace and fired it. The next thing I remember would have defied even William Golding’s imagination, since we were all up on the tables in the library, hooting like savages as we pelted this poor teacher with projectile candies. Nevertheless, I always enjoyed science, and exhaustively tested the hypothesis of shatterproof rulers. And, hey, at least nobody called him Piggy.

DANNY DYER’S DEADLIEST MANDEM (KEY STAGE 4)

Fifteen years later, I’m working at Willenhall School. I’ve just been on to SIMS and printed off my report from Year 11. Here it is:

Subject	MAG	TAG	AUT1	AUT2	SPR1	Expected
Business	E	D	3	3	N/A	U
English	B	A	3	3	2	B
History	C	B	3	3	3	U
IT – digital applications	C	B	2	3	2	C
Maths	D	C	3	3	3	C
PE	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	U
PSHE	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	U
Product design	A	A	N/A	1	2	N/A 16
Additional science	D	C	2	3	3	D
Systems and control	A	A	3	3	3	G

Let’s crunch the numbers, shall we? Firstly, target grades, or TAG for short. A couple of As there. Some Bs and Cs too. The boy has potential. Next up, flight path. These are the numbers specifying whether I’m reaching my target grade (1) or failing to achieve my minimum acceptable grade (MAG) (3). The number 2 means that I’m reaching my MAG but falling short of my TAG. So, is Samuel Elliott making good progress?

Well, despite what my science teacher says about needing to improve on ‘skills such as displaying and analysing data’, we need to understand that data analysis is not a skill.1 Understanding these numbers requires an understanding of what a 15-year-old ‘badman’ is up to. No number of spreadsheets will tell you this, so I will.

Around the time of the report, I wandered into school. It was 11am. I wore my tracksuit because it was a Friday, and I always wore non-uniform on Fridays. No one ever challenged me about this. And y’know what, why would they? My trainers are sick – Mr Major wants me to wear my Hush Puppies, but he can bugger off. Anyway, my GCSEs are too crucial for me to go home and change. ‘You want me to fail, sir? No, exactly. Now check this new jacket; it’s got a Gore-Tex outer shell, Scafell Pike Storm Protection, and Dual-Altitude Wind-Blast Technology. Hiking? Nah, just looks sick, my brudda.’

17During breaktime, my friend Connor ran up to me. ‘Saw you on television,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You were on TV last night.’

‘What the fuck? Don’t lie.’

‘I’m not. Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men. Check it out.’

That evening, I browsed the TV for Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men. Sounds awesome, I thought. About time I got some recognition. BBC One? No. ITV? Nah, keep going. I continued channel hopping until my thumb ached. Then, somewhere in the Nevada-like stretches of hinterland between Sky Movies and adult pay-per-view, I found it. According to the programme information, Danny Dyer was interviewing Barrington ‘Baz’ Patterson, a cage-fighter, bouncer, and former Birmingham football hooligan. To call the show ‘low brow’ would be an insult to Neanderthals everywhere. We need a new term – ‘prognathous’, perhaps, or ‘Australopithecus’.

‘I’m Danny Dyer,’ said...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Empowered Young Learner
• Chapter 2: Wasteman Teacher
• Chapter 3: The Principles of Behaviour Management
• Chapter 4: Behaviour Management in Action
• Chapter 5: The Nuts and Bolts of Lesson Structure and Feedback
• Chapter 6: Spreadsheet Numerology and the Seating Plan Zodiac
• Chapter 7: Creating Resources
• Chapter 8: Narratives in the Classroom
• Chapter 9: Extenuating Circumstances: The Naughtiest Classes and Covers
• Conclusion: Are You on Team Teacher?
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Copyright
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