I saw this on the morning news and it gave me a few unpleasant flashbacks – to work, not school!
Ofsted has reported that persistent low-level classroom disruption is damaging pupils’ learning and long-term prospects. Ofsted says that leadership and authority is lacking, so the problem isn’t being addressed. As you’d probably expect, the namby pamby head teachers don’t agree. The BBC article lists the following as examples of disruptive behaviour:
- Disturbing other children (38%)
- Calling out (35%)
- Not getting on with work (31%)
- Fidgeting or fiddling with equipment (23%)
- Not having the correct equipment (19%)
- Purposely making noise to gain attention (19%)
- Answering back or questioning instructions (14%)
- Using mobile devices (11%)
- Swinging on chairs (11%)
The morning news showed several dramatized examples, one of which really triggered the unpleasant flashbacks for me. You see, you don’t need to be a teenager to be distracted by people with issues.
In the final years of my employment in the rat race, I was plagued by people who were socially deficient. We had been forced to adopt an open-plan office arrangement – successively losing a dedicated office, then 5 foot cubicle walls, and finally ending up with secretarial walls that barely extended above desk level. At the time I left, they hadn’t quite got to the stage of mandatory sharing of underwear and bodily fluids, but that’s the direction it seemed to be heading.
On my island of four desks, I had my boss to my left. He had this habit of licking out his coffee mug (inside and out) complete with slurping every time he had a drink. To my right was this guy who made sandwiches at his desk, and he would get butter all over his keyboard, mouse (which I was responsible for maintaining), and workstation area. One time there was fish roe – the cheap caviar kind – all over it as well.
He was not computer literate and was a one-finger typist. The combination of sticking keys and his inept typing literally shook the desk group every time he hit a key, and God help you when he decided to delete a block of text… backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace… It was like an earthquake.
He used to eat vegetables from his father’s allotment – one whole lettuce, one whole bell pepper, one whole parsnip, etc. at a time – as though they were fruits. He would bite ravenously into oranges, apples, and pomegranates. The juice was everywhere. One time he apparently climbed into his car pooler’s car one morning with an opened tin of pilchards for putting on sandwiches later that day.
Then, directly opposite me, was a hummer. It took me months to figure out where the annoying background noise was coming from, but I eventually nailed it. It turned out that when he was at his workstation he just hummed all the time. An annoying, low-pitched, almost constant hum.
On a neighbouring desk island another colleague was clumsy and heavy-handed. She was only happy when she wasn’t getting her hands dirty, and therefore spent a lot of time in and out of stationery cupboards and drawers. It was slam-bang-slam-bang whenever was around. She knew it annoyed me and would simper “sorry, Fergus” every time she did it or heard me tut.
About the same distance away, but in a totally separate department (it was open-plan, remember) on another desk group, there was a buyer who conducted every single phone call on full-volume speakerphone. She listened to all her voicemails using it, and if she called someone (which buyers do a lot) she would similarly use the speakerphone while she rummaged loudly in cupboards waiting for someone to answer. When they didn’t (which people who buyers call tend to also do a lot) she would just let it ring and ring until it cut off, and then redial. She’d do this almost constantly when she was at her desk. When she had to go out for a meeting, she doused herself in that cheap Impulse deodorant, which floated around the office via the air-handling system for an hour or more.
So I can fully understand how bad behaviour in the classroom can have a detrimental effect on the education of children. It’s just a shame that no one can take the problem seriously in the workplace. None of my ineffectual and incompetent managers would.