Overheard in a dream

Overheard in a dream. These are creatures made entirely of spoons. We must chain onions to them, and make them sing.

Some Jokes

1. Beaten up in an Oxford library. Grievous Bodleian harm.
2. Why is pop so repetitive? Tell me why. I don't like Mondays. Tell me why. I just told you. Tell me why. Come on.
3. My horse tells dirty jokes. He's a ribald pony.
4. Just bumped into Octopus at the casino. He's an invertebrate gambler.
5. Always thinking about a tiny army marching around in my head. Keeps my mind occupied.
6. I was hoping to get a few Buddhist Monks to perform at my wedding. Chants'd be a fine thing.
7. Overheard passing Ann Summers. No, Mr Harris, we don't do them in children's sizes.

And in the Spiritual Sky...

And in the Spiritual Sky, entranced by the music of his golden flute, Radhe leans in devotion towards Krisna, raises her kohl-black eyes, purses her pink lips, and softly kisses a pearl which hangs from his beautiful blue neck. And inside the whiteness, grey marble cracks, and black, liquid eyes appear from dry crumbling white-face. And shoals of blue, green, yellow and red butterflies, with huge black fluttery eye-lids, tug across a raggedy rainbow screen, and gift a fitful flying colours infusion.

Down with Skool...



Ah, maybe it wasn't all bad...

 

 

There is a tiny knock on the staffroom door. At first I think there is no-one there. But, looking down, there is Ruth: shock of fair hair, almost obscuring her little face; big, uplifted manga eyes peep out. She has come to tell me that Roland, her brother, is poorly and won’t be in school today. In small, confidential tones, she goes on to give me the daily update: the life and times of Ruth and Roland’s mouse.

 

There is a wind blowing in from the hills, and we all stand by the main entrance, high above the town, as Harrington expertly unties the basket, and releases his star pigeon. With a second’s stall, she is off, describing an arc across a clear, blue sky.

 

‘He’s been gone a long time; he only went out for a wee.’ Perched on the teacher’s table, book in hand, wandering the moors with Cathy, Heathcliff, and some sleepy teenagers (for what seems like twenty years), I glance at my watch, and at the empty chair before me, which had been shunted backwards as he got up to leave. Suddenly the door bursts open, all heads turn, and Dave is in the room, knees bent, arms spread, ta – ra triumphant in full Superman costume.

 

 

 

Wise (hair) Styles: Ernie inspires a new generation...

Ernie Wise: a head of his time

 

Ernie's classic unfeasibly low comb across

Clearly Ernie inspired (longer) hair Styles

Ernie Styles trending...

 

 

 

Something like a poem to say something about the death of Mrs Thatcher...

'She destroyed our communities, she destroyed our villages, she has destroyed our pits and she tried to destroy our dignity...'

David Hopper, General Secretary of the Durham Miners' Association

'But you can't fall in love, make your homes, raise your children over filthy holes in the ground. You were born in history: you didn't make it, I know. Entrance into toil and filth is tragedy. It cannot be justified: never glorified. Accept this desperate birth, hold your head high, and walk away.'

Orphaned generations/Whose bellies were filled, whose backs were clothed by dreadful toil/In filth, in factories, furnaces, and pits...



Generations pour out of the factory gates...

Following a young man,
Diminished, shapeless,
Desultory on dirty streets,
I felt the ground shaking, and saw the graves opening,
And ten thousand bodies in blue overalls
Emerged, blinking, like moles into the sun.

I watched dazed, shell-shocked generations
Pour out from factory gates.

Big Bang.

Entropy.
End of days siren blasts.

And hordes push open broken gates, and escape
The ruins of the modern city.
Refugees stretch out in long lines to the horizon.

Monstrous Filthy Revolution spawned so many,
So many,
(I didn't know death had undone so many)
And neglected,
Starved, and broken,
Dying (or murdered by cold iron hands),
Abandoned millions.

Defiant, with automatic hand,
She pushes loose hair
From a tear-stained cheek,
One of orphaned generations
Whose bellies were filled,
Whose backs were clothed
By dreadful toil,
In filth, in factories, furnaces, and pits,
Called from labour
Which broke her body, and broke her heart.

Leave your homes and families,
Leave your lives and loves,
Your stories, songs, your clans, and ancient feuds,
And seek another way.

Our whole world undermined,
There is nowhere else to go,
Nothing to do,
But fall into the Abyss.

Lost boys and girls
Roam the streets,
Limp on blackened feet,
Looking for their lives.

But freed from man-forged manacles,

Some will run in the sun
And sing a new song,
The soft, bright Eloi;

The inheritors.
.

How to Survive the Factory: for teachers in public sector organizations...

 

How to Survive the Factory...

 

 

Colleagues,

Whilst our Trade Unions engage in negotiations over pay and conditions on our behalf, I wonder if we might consider some short term personal and collective strategies to make our working conditions a little better for ourselves.

To that end, I offer you ‘How to Survive the Factory’: a brief collection of simple techniques, designed to preserve your energy and well-being during the transition from collegiate, professional pedagogy to Fordist mass-production (the exam factory).
Please send me your own labour-saving, person friendly, factory system techniques, so that, between us, we can improve our working conditions.

Mutual aid. Self-help. A set of companion strategies to formal representative Trade Union/Labour Movement consultation, negotiation, and, in the last instance, collective industrial action.

Pete Keogh April 2013

 

 

 How to Survive the Factory

 

Work in accordance with the principle of mutual aid. We are not individual, professional pedagogues. We are factory workers, who need to organise to act collectively, not only in dispute, but as a matter of day to day survival.

 

Work in accordance with the principle of recycling; economy, no waste of energy, efficient use of resources – especially our own bodies and minds. Treasure these human resources. Look after them. Make the ones you have last as long as you can – we can’t tolerate a throw away and cheaply replace policy where our own bodies, minds, and human relationships are concerned.

 

It isn’t a matter of doing more things. It is a matter of doing things differently!

 

Do everything you can to get yourself from the centre to the periphery of every classroom activity.

1. Reorganize the timing, pacing, and selection of teaching and learning activities inside and outside the classroom

• We need a new way of working for a new way of organizing the teaching and learning day.
• It is clearly not possible to work in your usual way when the organization of teaching and learning has been so radically transformed.
• It is clearly not possible to work in your usual way – as an individual professional teacher – under new, more formally directed work patterns.
• There are serious implications here for what we often represent as goodwill, or professional responsibility.
• If more of your time is directed, you must find ways of doing less when you are not directed.
• Think seriously about how much work you take home. Factory workers do not take any of their work home. If you must prepare or mark in the evenings or at weekends, try to do less, try to be more selective, prioritise what you judge will help students to improve a particular skill. Don’t mark as thoroughly as you usually do. Don’t mark as personally. You probably have larger classes now, as well as more contact hours. You must reconsider what is humanly possible in the time you have outside work. You must reconsider what is reasonable in terms of a healthy work/life balance. Surely our health and happiness, our homes, our families and friends must always come first? However much we might experience work as self-fulfilment, as public service, as career, in the last instance, it is a way of earning a living. This must surely be an opportunity for all of us to reconsider the meaning and value of our work, to reconsider what we can reasonably be expected to do to maintain ourselves and our families, without causing undue suffering to ourselves and others.
• I’m sure we can work more effectively and more efficiently. I’m sure we can improve the grades for our students. I’m sure we can do all of this simply by re-examining and reorganizing how we engage in our teaching and learning.

It isn’t a matter of doing more things. It is a matter of doing things differently.

 

2. Use all available Electronic and Paper Resources rather than your own physical and mental energy and your own precious family and leisure time

• Use yourself – your own teaching performance – sparingly. It’s a finite human resource, which cannot be exploited for more than a few minutes at a time without causing permanent physical and mental damage.

• Rely as much as you can on text book and internet derived exercises.
• Search the net for teacher resources.
• Get the students doing activities individually (in silence, for calm and rest for you), in pairs, and in groups, while you have a rest, and/or while you do casual, lo-energy, lo-impact ‘learning walks’ around the classroom, checking progress.
• Share resources with colleagues, using Moodle, or e-mail stuff to each other.
• Maintain and develop an open door policy; pop in and out of each other’s classrooms, offering resources, advice and support wherever possible, so that no-one feels isolated and vulnerable to senior management monitoring.
• Maybe, even, cross-faculty pop-ins for sharing of resources, advice, and support. We can develop a friendly, supportive culture of collective, personal and professional relationships and collective, mutual action as a challenge to the culture of fear associated with official learning walks and observations.
• While the students are busy with their activities (pleasant whirring of machines), we can pop in and out for a chat, to relieve the pressure and maintain our human relationships. Formal observations focus on ‘learning’, what’s in student files, what they actually do to learn – not on individual teacher performances – even though we (are encouraged/compelled to) experience the lesson grade as our personal teacher grade! As a union, we need to address the relationship between performance management and lesson observation to get this clarified. It’s the lesson, as an out-there, objective phenomenon, which is being monitored during an observation, not the individual teacher. This needs to be formally embedded in our working practices and procedures.
• Don’t operate as an individual pedagogue, jealously guarding your horde of teaching resources. Work in accordance with the principle of mutual aid. We are factory workers, who need to organise to act collectively, not only in dispute, but as a matter of day to day survival.

3. Use all available Electronic Technologies (when they are working)

• Search Youtube for relevant clips. A five minute clip from Youtube saves research and preparation. And students respond well to visuals.
• Don’t repeat the same introduction to a lesson 4 or 5 times. Say it once into a webcam and play it back for repeated lessons. It’s fun, and catches the students' attention!
• Exploit any opportunity for dvds, audio, tv,  internet resources (exam board web-pages, individual online teacher resources, British Library, BBC)
• Anything to get yourself from the centre to the periphery of the classroom activity

 

4. Use whole institution data collection as the only formal test of progress

• The rest of the time, set short exercises and tests which can be self-assessed, peer assessed, or marked in class by means of teacher ‘learning walks’ (tick in mark book for work done satisfactorily).
• Try alternative ways of marking (mass-production methods), which give students a quick snapshot indication of progress and how to improve. I’m trying out a traffic light system – underline good points in green, need to improve points in orange, and ‘very poor stuff’ in red! Then put a coloured blob at the top of the first sheet. No personalized comments in writing. Comments can be oral, face to face comments during teacher ‘learning walks’, while students do 10 minute tasks. Maybe supplement with a list of typical improvements on power-point saved from previous years. I did one last year called ‘How to improve your text analysis’, and it will do for this year and years to come.
• Principle of recycling; economical, no waste of energy, efficient use of resources – including my own body and mind!

5. Never stand and talk at the front of class for more than 10 minutes.

 

• Standing up and talking at the front (from the dais) is exhausting when you have to do it time and time again.
• Use a stopwatch or timer to set 10 minute (maximum) tasks.
• Use a text book or internet resource rather than make up the tasks yourself.
• Set little 10 minute exercises which you can sit down and discuss/mark with the class on completion (when the alarm goes off).
• These are work routines which the students get used to and come to expect. They seem secure with the routine.
• These are mass production work routines which save your energy and throw the responsibility for production onto the students.
• This kind of time and activity organization and quick, varied, routine pacing has been commended during the observation process.

Please send me your own thoughts and ideas. Please send me your critical comments. Let’s maintain a reasonable dialogue and find a reasonable way forward to our mutual benefit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not much, I know. It's something I wrote when I was under a lot of pressure myself, and could see my colleagues being routinely crushed under the wheels of the Machine.

 

Pete Keogh April 2013

 

 

 

 

I am a hat...

I am a hat

In the Beginning
There was Flesh.

And Flesh was made Word.

Word is Dead.

And Flesh sits in the Chestnut Tree Café,
Happy with a Latte.

Flesh remembers,
'Those are pearls that were his eyes',

Smiles, and hears the Inheritors,
Shrill Eloi voices in the rose-garden.




I am a hat...

Don't follow leaders...

Watching a Trade Union Leader



Frances O'Grady TUC embodying a larger purpose

 

Witnessing the Larger Purpose

 

...There are others, however, and I would proudly count myself amongst them, who would say that the leader is passionately committed to a cause which is larger than herself, a greater purpose, a historical project, a general, social unfolding which transcends the particular social action whilst including the particular social action (her own subjective, personal, human action), and is passionately committed to generalising her passionate commitment to the cause of social equality towards full human flourishing.

 

Consider Bertrand Russell’s prescription in times of war (first published 1916), which contains the privileging of the ideal relation of the unfolding dialectical historical practice:

 

If life is to be fully human, it must serve some end, which seems, in some sense outside of human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty.

 

And Russell continues, like the leader, to inspire those who must work to change

 

themselves and to change the world, with the courage to carry on against all the odds:

 

Those who are to begin the regeneration of the world must face loneliness, opposition, poverty, obloquy. They must be able to live by truth and love, with a rational, unconquerable hope; they must be honest and wise, fearless and guided by a consistent purpose.

 

And the leader finds herself engaged in the ‘regeneration’ project in accordance with the modern rational conditions which provide reasons for her actions. She works in a particular way in accordance with a general historical practice which legitimates the particular work in accordance with a particular articulation of British Labour Movement action. The social order makes her and she engages with the social order to make it different and better; her work chooses her and she chooses her work.

 

As Marx argues in The German Ideology: ‘circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances’. Each finds herself in particular spatio-temporally located conditions in accordance with which she must engage in the work of regeneration. Russell concurs, albeit from a more liberal, mystical perspective:

 

What we have to do practically is different for each one of us, according to our capacities and opportunities. But if we have the life of the spirit within us, what we must do and what we must avoid will become apparent to us.

 

 

                                                                

                                          Bertrand Russell and the Larger Purpose

But.....

 

I don't believe in leaders


I don’t believe in causes


I don't believe in truth


I don't believe in Russell

I don’t believe in Christmas

I don’t believe in holidays

I don’t believe in X-Factor

I don’t believe in Strictly

I don’t believe in Dad

I don’t believe in theory

I don’t believe in Sport

I don’t believe in Jesus

I don’t believe in Krishna

I don’t believe in Marx

I don’t believe in Gandhi

I don’t believe in fitness

I don’t believe in children

I don’t believe in sex

I don’t believe in banks

I don’t believe in America

I don’t believe in China

I don’t believe in Royals

I don’t believe in war

I don’t believe in love

I don’t believe in family

I don’t believe in animals

I don’t believe in medicine

I don’t believe in parties

I don’t believe in struggle

I don’t believe in teachers

I don’t believe in machines

I don’t believe in nature

 I just believe in...

And for a moment,
The boy who is nothing
Sits on the white square
Of a re-folded universe,
And with a pop
He is gone.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From each according to their ability (to pay), to each according to their need...

from a blog I forgot I had (2)...

 

Sunday, March 21, 2010

 

Justifying Narratives

Yesterday I alluded to the arguments and narratives that justify the marketization of the public services. Today I offer a couple of instances of anecdotal evidence that a particular narrative is circulating in the education 'networks of practice' (Fairclough and Chouliaraki 1999).

On one occasion, I was present as a trade union representative in a meeting with state education managers, on another, the very next day, I was chatting informally over a coffee with a friend who is a manager in a UK High School.

In a rather heated 'consultation' on 'proposed' changes to part-time contracts of employment, the changes - as relations of other changes in full time working conditions which had already been put into operation as part of a college wide restructuring - were justified by a narrative which took the form of: 'up until now, everything has been about the teacher...now everything must be about the student...'. Not the exact words - but a representation from memory of the basic sequence of events which compose the narrative. It is of course already familiar to me - It can be found in both written and spoken modes - in documents, procedures, in staff meetings, in conversations between individuals - anywhere, at any level within educational organizations (and presumably anywhere in the public services).

Then the next day, my friend explained that she had a difficult decision to make regarding a member of her staff - a decision which might well result in a serious change in conditions of work and personal circumstances for the teacher in question -and it was justified by the narrative of transition from a teacher-centred to a student-centred practice! 'Up until now, I've always tried to be kind to her, and let her carry on as she is, but she's always been hopeless, and now she's taking the piss, and we've got to think of the kids...they only have one chance...'. Different in its particulars, but 'structurally' more or less the same narrative.

At the time, I said nothing about the connection between this narrative and the narrative of the previous day - but I was somewhat taken aback by the clear correlation between two particular instances of the same generic mode of justification for a change in personal and institutional thinking, actions, and relations at different levels: change in management strategy and material and linguistic management action is a relation of change in the attitudes and values of particular managers. Two separate particulars at the level of event - one generic justification at the level of practice (Fairclough and Chouliaraki 1999, Fairclough 2003).

This is a particular recognition of work going on between the level of event and the level of practice, work which is done by the genres of governance (Fairclough and Chouliaraki 1999, Fairclough 2003), which relay the arguments and narratives of justification throughout the networks of practice.

I will continue to be vigilant and report any further instances which bear witness to a justifying genre of governance.
 

It's a difficult one though, isn't it? We all want the best for our kids - at school, at home, when they're sick - but we have to achieve this, not at the cost of reducing public service workers to hollowed out husks through the crippling workload increases caused by the 'need' for efficiency savings in accordance with the logic of the competitive market. Classic market logic - benefits for one group are only available to the detriment of another; Hobbes' struggle each with each over finite resources.

We all need to pay - whatever it takes - for an equal and fair distribution of social benefits - benefits for all groups involved in the public services - benefits for those who provide and for those who receive those services. From each according to their ability (to pay), to each according to their need.

What kind of world do we want for our children?

from a blog I forgot I had (1)...

Saturday, March 20, 2010

What kind of world do we want for our children?

What kind of people are we? What kind of people are we becoming? What kind of people do we want to be? What kind of world do we want for our children? Fundamental questions of identity, relationships, and social conditions I recall (as accurately as I can from this distance) from Gee, Hull, and Lankshear's (1996) New work order: behind the language of new capitalism.

 I am wearied.

 

I am wearied by the arguments and narratives which circulate as the genres of justification for market-driven public service governance. I am wearied by the practical and technical rationality which underpins and is maintained and reproduced by those genres. I am wearied by the smug, self-interested certainties (the raised eyebrows, the patronizing tones, and incredulous sighs) of the public service managers, and their steely refusal to recognize the lie of the totally practical response to market demands, whatever the human cost. I am wearied by the management discourses which not only reduce public need to a purely logistical problem with a practical and technical solution, which not only reduce public servants to unitized, commodified resources for cost effective distribution, which not only reduce socially connected human beings to hollowed out, atomic means to ends, but also seek to engage those human beings as the fully responsible agents of their own dehumanization.

I am wearied and I am angry.

I am angry that so many of us who work in the public services as teachers, nurses, social workers, and many, many more, suffer the effects of these management practices (routinized language uses and the actions they produce) - the ways our personal and professional identities, relationships, and activities are hollowed out and reduced to things, the ways the management arguments and narratives produce and distribute versions of our working world which we don't recognize and we don't value, and the bewildering mixture of formal and informal styles adopted by managers, who hoodwink us into engaging in our daily work with the people we care for, in accordance with rules, procedures, and schemes which are the products and producers of marketized, consumerist attitudes and values we don't share.

I am angry that 6 social workers have been sacked by the senior management of Birmingham Children's Services. I am angry that a Staffordshire hospital management was more concerned to meet its targets than care for sick people. I am angry that governments have been consciously developing the neo-liberal discourses and strategic management practices necessary for the justification of the development of marketized public services, designed to achieve value for public money rather than meet public need.

I am angry that even those who are suffering - and causing others to suffer as an effect of the necessity to work in these conditions - refuse to recognize the lie of the strategically managed, competitive, entrepreneurial society, which encourages the narrow pursuit of individual, private wealth over the public requirement to meet the real, concrete physical and social needs of our fellow human beings.

 

We need to challenge the lies.
 

We need to challenge the linguistic, material, and economic logics which underpin our society. We need to talk a different talk, walk a different walk, and be prepared to pay for a realistic alternative. We can't have a low tax economy and a properly funded, genuinely 'public' public services. We need to make ourselves personally poorer to have a richer experience of own and others humanity.

What kind of people have we become? A people who have grown desperate to hang on to what is ours at any cost to our fellows. A people prepared to accept the lie that we can have personal wealth and a secure, fair, and compassionate society.

Let's challenge the lie whenever we hear it repeated in any of its many and different forms. Let's start living again, free from the fear of losing what is ours, by giving what is ours privately, and enjoying what is ours publicly.

Intellectual light feet...

Learning to think: our schools no longer have any idea what this means...

Thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned...

For dancing in any form cannot be divorced from a noble education, being able to dance with the feet, with concepts, with words: do I still have to say that one has to be able to dance with the pen - that writing has to be learned...


Twilight of the Idols (1889)

Genius.

                                       There's not much between
                                       Your hip and your arse,
                                       Genius.

There's not much between
Your ears.

 

Give this man a hug, somebody,

Quick...



My Vestigial Tale, Compassion

My vestigial tale, Compassion,
Didn't do me any good.

Far from being an atavistic flourish,
It was neither use nor ornament:

It just got in the way.





There are problems in these times
But, ooh, none of them are mine
Oh, baby, I’m beginning to see the light

                                        Beginning to see the light The Velvet Underground



 



                                                      I will go and join the Eloi, and curl up nice and warm.

 

 

Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.

Exit

I had not thought death had undone so many...

Ann Clwyd and the dehumanising tendency in neo-liberal NHS/UK Public Service Management

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/12/05/ann-clwyd-battery-hen-nhs-hospital-wales-_n_2242345.html?view=print

White towers slo-mo to ground zero. Mouthfuls of grey dust. Eyes blink: becoming accustomed to the dark.

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

‘But its kinda fun here’, say the Eloi. ‘We are light; pure energy: we are Stardust. Don’t disturb our day, we’re miles away. And after all, we’re only sleeping.’

But old men die in hospitals, unnoticed, and the Eloi walk the wards. Dainty children huddle behind their monitors. ‘Careful. Ooh, my nails’. Pink and perfect. Safe behind their hi-tec, wrapped up nice and warm in scene of crime, forensic onesies.

Black and huge. Yahoo bands make noise and beds at night, while the soft white Eloi sleep.

'How the sick and old clutter our office with their tubes, phlegm, and crumpled pyjamas.'

There is nothing . Only art...

The boy who is nothing sees Lennon’s white plimsolls walk beside the blue sea.

In Subway, alone, he looks down at a rainbow sandwich and brown tea. At the table by the window sits George Clooney. Or is it Cary Grant?  He turns and grins. Oh, brother - it’s George. The boy who is nobody turns away.

Greybeard at the next table looks over: a warm smile, soft, wet lips. White glass beads run down grizzled Ginsberg locks: the Maharishi sips his tea from a paper cup. Beside him, a Devotee sits hunched: middle-aged, silver specs, balding, tiny plait - all there is between inner light and banking; offers a glimpse of Guantanamo orange beneath his sodden parka; lays down his head; fingers beads inside an orange bag. Silent prayers. 

‘Ask me any question you like’.

‘Do you know God?’

There is a black cowled figure behind you.  Ferry across a jet black river. Orange eye of the jaguar behind big green leaves. Rustling, and there is a glistening brown thigh.

‘What lies on the other side?'

‘There is nothing. This is art.'

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Bows his head. Hunches. Rubs his eyes. There is nothing. Only art. And drum and bass on my radio. And do I dare, do I dare: dye my hair ruby red; and click my heels, and think of Ma?

Notes for Reviews

Music Reviews

Hasp: 1970s gentle folk/prog-rock combo celebrate 40 years in the business with the new digital release of the seminal 1974 concept album, 'Fairy warblers in high waist trousers'. 

If you enjoy Hasp, you may also enjoy Cusp, Lisp, and Wasp.

Also watch out for 'Clues for Trousers: New Romantic Survivors' on My Imaginary Records.


Light Entertainment

Behind the Curtains with Humphrey Burton

BBC4's Behind the Curtains with Humphrey Burton returns with more celebrity revelations from the world of shadows, wierdness, and self-effacement. 

'More occult tales in comfortable slacks...'