Every year, in August, we take our car for an MOT – this isn’t an idiosyncratic thing, it’s a legal requirement so that the government, originally the ministry of transport which is where the letters come from, can check that all the cars that are being driven on the roads are safe. Sometimes you pass first time, the car’s fine, no worries. My cars have been second hand and often fairly old which has meant that this is an extremely rare occurrence. Normally they need things done, so the garage calls me up and says that they need to attach the brake cables to the cam shaft, or rejig the carburettor so that it’s in sync with the fan belt, or do something unspeakable to the head gasket and he tells me what it will cost to fix it and I tell him to do that and then I pick the car up at the end of the day in better shape than I drove it in.
This kind of check is normal in lots of areas of life – companies have auditors, schools have Ofsted, politicians have elections and you have vacations. These are not holidays, time off – that’s Year 11 thinking – but it is time where you decide what’s important, what you want from life. You have one of these coming up and so you need to do a bit of self-auditing, check your scholarship over and, probably, do some work over half term so that when we catch up again in November you’re in better academic shape than you are now.
We say that it’s a big step from being a Year 11 to being an adult and that sixth form is that step, so you need to be about a 12th of the way through that process – not finished by any means, but definitely off the starting blocks – we should see some changes from how you were when you arrived at school.
The biggest change I think you should see is this one – we call it Response – and it’s a willingness to think about how things are going and to take personal responsibility for making them better rather than expecting someone else to do it for you. Ten out of ten response is working at an independence level expected of a University undergraduate, taking complete responsibility for improving your work and working closely with your teachers to ensure you improve. That’s the goal – that’s where we want you to be by the time you leave here, that’s being ready to be an adult. It’s not where I expect you to be at this point.
More realistically, six out of ten is engaging well with all your classes, completing and submitting all homework on time having done them as well as you can, correcting your homework when you get it back, organising your work into folders, coming to teachers for support and spending time on doing things that are hard rather than giving up after five minutes because it’s difficult. That’s where you should be now – there’s nothing there that’s beyond you if you make the commitment to your studies. So, over half term, have a look at your homework tasks – are they all your best work? Were they all submitted on time? Have you corrected them all? Have you had a go at the things you find hard and gone for help to get the bits you can’t work out explained again? For most of you the honest answer will be no – the vacation MOT is a chance for you to fix some of that, to do, redo or correct homework that isn’t up to scratch, to come back for the second half of Courage term ready to do it better next time.
The next thing I think you need to have done is to start reading. I know that some of you arrived here saying you don’t read, don’t like reading – but none of you came here saying that you can’t read and every single one of your teachers has told you how important it is to do. It’s been six weeks – have you read a book a week, six books? Have you read a book a fortnight, three books? Actually if you’ve just got through one book that’s a start – I’m worried that some of you haven’t really started one, haven’t got a book that you’re really making an effort to read – wherever you are on this scale, the half-term MOT is an opportunity to make some progress: with sixteen days off school you can read a book or two or even three or four.
The book I’ve been reading recently is this one, Natives by Akala. It was written five years ago so you may be ahead of me – if you’re not then I recommend it, partly because it is brilliantly written – Akala is a man who uses words with precision and beauty – and partly because it’s a fascinating examination of race and class in modern Britain written by someone younger than me but older than you who grew up in London. He says this “It’s easy for people just slightly younger than myself, and born into a relative degree of multiculturalism, to forget just how recently basic public decency towards black folks was won in this country. I was not born with an opinion of the world but it certainly seemed that the world had an opinion of people like me. I did not know what race and class supposedly were but the world taught me very quickly, and the irrational manifestations of its prejudices forced me to search for answers."
I’m struck by that phrase, the irrational manifestations of the world’s prejudices. The world judges quickly, and often based on appearance – although things aren’t as bad as the 1980s when Akala was growing up it would be a fool who claimed there is no longer racism or classism in this world and neither Akala nor I are fools. The manifestations of this prejudice are the ways in which actions follow – they are overt or tacit discrimination. Akala talks about the men in his life being beaten up by white supremacists, of footballers who had bananas thrown to them on the field or who received bullets in the post – those things happen less now, but my experience walking the streets of London as a fifty year old white man is not the same as that of a young black man, nor that of Akala who is somewhere in between on both accounts, having a white-Scottish mother and a British-Caribbean father. And the discrimination is irrational – it’s not the result of careful analysis but an ingrained, thoughtless reaction to those who look different to us. I said something like that in class a couple of weeks ago and one of you asked “different to whom?” which is a good question because the point is that you and I don’t look alike – in fact, for each of us there are more people in this room who fall into a noticeably different group from us than don’t if we divide by skin colour, religion, home language and sex. The irrational manifestations of the world’s prejudices forced me to search for answers. Akala is a rapper, and in one of his songs he says that the most rebellious thing you can do is to get educated. He’s rebelled, searched for answers, learned to use words to challenge those irrational manifestations of prejudice and I’m enjoying being made to think by his book. What are you reading that challenges you, that educates you, that makes you think. The library is full of such books – don’t leave school on Friday without having taken one to read over the vacation.
And the last thing I hope you’ll think about in your review of the half term is whether you’ve started taking opportunities. Are you looking out for chances to put your hand up and do more, get more involved? What you get out of school is proportional to what you put in and if you’re still doing the minimum you can get away with then you’re losing out. On Sunday I saw a video about deaf children in Namibia and a school that has been set up to take them in and teach them. The students spoke about how before they got a place at the school they had been shepherds, they couldn’t go to normal school so wouldn’t have got an education. They spoke about how vulnerable they were, how people would attack them when they slept because they couldn’t hear them coming. When it comes to the irrational manifestations of prejudice, these kids were at the bottom of a very big heap, but now they were at school, learning, getting educated and you could see their joy. You get to go to school for free, almost in some cases reluctantly and I’m often struck by how privileged you’d have to be to take that for granted, to reject what was offered to you because you’d rather do nothing. When you’re doing your audit, and thinking about your response this half term I’d like you to think about what you’ve done that has gone beyond the work set by your teachers. We’ve had seven weeks of school, that’s about 30 golden hours – how many of those have you used for something other than crashing on the sofa? How many of those have you used for something more interesting than doing homework so you can crash on the sofa later? I hope that by the time you’re in year 13 you’ll be doing at least three interesting things a week – that’ll make you ready for the opportunities of university, ready to be successful in adult life. Right now I’d settle for one. Have you got one golden hour a week that you use to do something interesting? If not, what will you do when November comes round – and either way, what are you going to do that’s interesting during your vacation. Will you write a story, find out about Namibia, or deafness, compose a song, go to a museum, or an art gallery. All of those are free, all of those are opportunities you could take.
There’s a lot to do in your two years at Harris Clapham Sixth Form. You’re one half term in – you don’t need to have done it all, but you do need to have made a start. So take time this Saturday to give yourself an MOT and then time over the two weeks to fix some of the things that need fixing – and particularly in these three areas: show you understand response by doing it now and taking some action in your subjects – and come back in November sharper and ready to learn the next thing; show you recognise the importance of reading by getting through a book that makes you think – and come back in November and tell me about it, ask me about Natives; and show you recognise the privilege of opportunity by doing something interesting – and come back in November and share your interests with each other. The most rebellious thing you can do is to get educated, says Akala, to which I would add that the most important decisions you make in education are how you spend your vacations. Enjoy your two weeks when they come and make wise decisions.
Footnotes
1. More advice on how to spend a vacation (in this case, specifically a summer vacation) can be found in The Thing Itself.
2. More of Akala can be found in Get Educated (which focuses particularly on that song).
3. The Namibian school I found out about was a beneficiary of the same charity that is discussed in Liberian Soap.