I’m currently reading Natives by @akalamusic it is quite frankly magnificent. However, I’ve just finished the chapter on secondary education and the hideous, obvious racist and what happened (or rather didn’t) when she was a hideous, obvious racist. 1)

Now, in my first year of teaching I taught A Level Language and Literature coursework. I gave one particular boy a low mark for his first draft. His work wasn’t very good, didn’t really meet the brief despite support and was too short. His response? 2)

‘This is because you hate Asians, Miss.’ Before I could gasp in middle-class horror the rest of the (quite diverse really) class pointed out for me that no, it was because he was lazy and had done it all the night before. What did I do? 3)

It wasn’t a formal accusation, he sheepishly took it back so I said no more about it (rightly or wrongly). BUT I did make sure that when his final draft came in his was one that was moderated. I was well aware that I whilst not racist I was at risk of subconsciously 4)

Pigeon-holing him as a ‘lazy student’ and put a ceiling on his achievement that way. How does this relate to Akala’s point? Well, when we first started discussing that teachers would be rank ordering the GCSE and A Level groups an unintentional ‘controversy’ arose 5)

@Positivteacha mentioned that we needed to be aware of subconscious bias against certain groups when doing this. And this is true. Repeated studies have proven it (as mentioned in @akalamusic ‘s book). But a large number of teachers were outraged. How dare anyone suggest 6)

That they were racist/classist/sexist? Well, you’re not (hopefully) consciously but we do all have unconscious biases for a variety of reasons against a variety of groups and we did need to be reminded of this before doing the grades because this is important. 7)

This matters. Yes the board are going to do stuff and yes I’m hugely devastated at the fact that hard work of various departments and schools is probably not going to be seen now. And yes I know of individual students this will possibly affect. BUT 8)

There are very sound reasons that we don’t just accept teacher marks in normal circumstances. There is a reason that our names weren’t visible to the markers when we did our final exams at my university. There’s a reason I think it’s great we mark individual scanned in 9)

Questions not names whole papers at GCSE anymore. Nobody was saying any individual teacher was a bad person. Merely this was something you had to consider and discuss in the process. Reading Natives you can see why. I hope I’m not a lazy liberal. 10)

I try not to be. But I’m sure I’ve missed many an injustice in my time. As well as point out the specks in the eyes of others we need to be realise we may be ignoring a plank in our own. End of rant. 11)