Brief encounter

I was traveling up to Cambridge last Wednesday and as I got on the train I noticed the woman on the seat in front of mine crying, not in terrible distress or fear, but crying nevertheless. As we were all traveling through the Downs I couldn't help overhearing her conversation with her companion, who was clearly a colleague as well as a friend. It turned out she was a primary teacher (on strike that day) and had been given the year six class this year. In the UK system this makes you very visible to the headteacher, the governors and the parents as in that year (age 10/11) all children take a national test and schools are ranked by the results. So this was a cause of some considerable stress to her. What was actually making her cry with frustration though were her unsuccessful efforts to get her children to get a grip on the denotative and connotative aspects of words. She described her efforts to get the children to give her examples of words that made them go "wow" and how incredibly difficult she found it when instead they gave her words that meant "wow", (flabbergasted and gobsmacked were the two she her most often).

Two things struck me about this brief encounter. The care and energy this public sector teacher was putting into her profession, and the children for which she was responsible, was really inspiring. To spend your strike day talking about the more recondite elements of your teaching technique, with a companion who was just as focused, though less engaged, than her, speaks to real commitment.  On the other hand the punitive system that she works in is clearly unsurvivable. The terrible ratchets created by the techniques of the new public management rely on the commitment of people like her, but crush it out of them. Our social systems are running in the red and that cannot be sustained. Underneath the crisis of the financial system is a hidden crisis of social capital.