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About sweating the small stuff & why some people react so strongly to it: if you managed me in a STSS way, I’d be fired in a week. I don’t see clutter, I don’t see chaos, I don’t see mess & I don’t see disorder. I’m not being poetic: I genuinely don’t pick up on it. Visual noise
I don’t register when kids are writing on the wrong side of the A4, when they’re using the wrong colour ink, when they’ve left the wrong things on their desks, when they’re spinning pens, or when they’re slouching. Again: not poetry. It just doesn’t read in my field of vision
I am so bad at ensuring students maintain correct notes & organised folders that it would make you ill. I may be the only English teacher alive completely indifferent to stationary. I do not own stationary. I own one a chewed biro that’s lost it’s lid at a time. Then lose it.
As a teenager, I am told that I turned up to school daily with a single biro in a carrier bag. Sometimes there was no carrier bag. I rarely did homework and I didn’t keep notes. I sprawled and slouched and stared at the ceiling and scrawled notes to my friends and argued. A lot.
But I was always engaged. Ferociously so. And all my teachers knew that. They encouraged me to apply to Oxford, where I got in and where I continued to sprawl and slouch and not make notes and lose everything and generate chaos and never go to lectures and argue. Ferociously
My first Head of Department spent two years absolutely despairing at me. It came to a head when she came in to do a Y11 folder check one day, and found battered, empty folder after battered empty folder covered in pictures of penises and mum jokes
She took an entire week to come back to me about it. So, she told me, she could calm down and think about it. This is what she said: ‘I finally realised that you don’t need folders yourself. Or notes. Or order. Or organisation. But some of these kids do. Most of them.’
And so she and the deputy created a series of boxes in my room labelled with class names so that I could sort things automatically. I started nominating organised students to be the ones to collect in folders, but abandoned that and started using exercise books instead
I would never apply to a Harris academy, or Bedford Free school, or any other place that needed me to sweat the small stuff, because my head just doesn’t work that way. I’m not wildly against it: I can’t do it. And that’s one very personal, individual way of being neurodivergent
Not every behaviourally messy teacher or kid is neurodivergent. Not every neurodivergent teacher or kid is disorganised. But those of us who are cannot operate in those environments. We kick off. I kick off: a series of escalating resentments where people talk past each other
When I was an NQT, the assistant head observed me in a lesson and said ‘we have room for all kinds of teachers at this school.’ Hard stare at me. ‘Including the rebels, and we are a better school for it.’ I am very good at what I do. So are the super organised teachers with pens
So - and it was a long walk to get here, I know - I flip out when I see STSS schools. Because part of me always assumes that everyone else’s head is like mine, and I know how I would react. But not everyone is like me. I’m a freak with aphantasia & no inner monologue. I hate pens
All I would ask is that some of you try to empathise with those of us - staff & students - who would crash out of such environments. And that you please keep that in mind when you see people reacting to high control systems with what looks to you like utterly irrational hyperbole
People like me are often very smug about the way our brains work. As if we are uniquely cool and anti-authoritarian and creative. The rest of you are equally cool. We’re just different
