I sometimes find myself thinking what I might have become had I not spotted that job at the University of Bath back in 1977. \u00a0I was teaching at the time and so becoming a headteacher might have been a possibility at some point. \u00a0I'm not sure how well that would have worked out.<\/p>\n
Were I in post today, \u00a0I do wonder how I might have dealt with a year 8 student in East Sussex who recently announced that it (sic) was identifying as a cat. \u00a0This incident became a social media sensation largely because of the teacher's reaction which was recorded on video, and the DfE is reported to have sent in commissars, with Ofsted sharpening its pencils as I write.<\/p>\n
We are of course enjoined to take young people's feelings at face value and to confirm what they say about their innermost selves, and so I suppose I might have played along and thereby risked even more upset for those other year 8 students who'd already made up their minds and called it out. \u00a0They were pellucidly clear about what was going on.<\/p>\n
However, I think that I'd have been more likely to be skeptical, thinking that it was either piss-taking or more usefully, a satirising of the current fad for identity politics. \u00a0It was, we should remember, a cat at a vulnerable age caught between primary school and GCSE with hormones churning and clattering; between comics and the News of the World, as used to be said, before that newspaper's demise.<\/p>\n
Anyway, perhaps, rather than a direct challenge, a good approach would have been to call in its parents and say that a school is for young people, not cats. \u00a0Either than or call in a vet.<\/p>\n
That this line wasn't taken in the school in question is quite understandable, of course, given the witch-finders around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I sometimes find myself thinking what I might have become had I not spotted that job at the University of Bath back in 1977. \u00a0I was teaching at the time and so becoming a headteacher might have been a possibility...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}