Joe Baron: "F**k off, you c**t!" "Your mum sucks c**k!" A morning in the life of a teacher

The author is a teacher. Joe Baron is a pseudonym.

11am

‘F**k off!’ he shouts. John is typical of many of our kids: stunted, undernourished and utterly feral.

‘Come here, please,’ I reply, consciously controlling the tone of my voice. Tone is so important. I want it to exude authority, but not anger, even though I am feeling pretty annoyed. I look back sensing another, menacing presence. Ben, a short, portly year 7 pupil with crooked teeth approaches. He walks with purpose. He is clearly disheveled, upset and, dare I say it,seething with anger.

John runs towards the main building, away from me and his larger pursuer, deploying his full arsenal of expletives as he goes. ‘F**k off, you c**t! Your mum sucks c**k! You fat f****r!’ Is he talking to me or Ben? It is difficult to discern; Ben and I are both on the large side.

For the time being, I postpone my indignation and concentrate on Ben. He appears to be the more immediate threat. ‘Stop there, Ben!’ I exclaim. ‘I’m gonna f****n’ kill ‘im,’ he shouts, red-faced and panting.

‘No you aren't, Ben,’ I reply, desperate to maintain a semblance of control. He continues to steam towards his nemesis. I have no choice but to restrain him. As I do, he turns his ire on me. ‘F**k off, you c**t!’ he shouts. ‘Let go, you t****r!’

Joe Baron: We must support Gove's reforms and allow me – at last! – to be a 'real' teacher

Joe Baron is a teacher.

As academics and union leaders berate the government over its proposed changes to the National Curriculum – which place much greater emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge and the mastery of spelling, punctuation and grammar – I cannot help but conclude that I, and the rest of the teaching profession, have been guilty of charlatanism and by extension a gross dereliction of duty for many years.

"What do you mean by charlatanism?" I hear you say. "You're a teacher, aren't you?"

Well, you could say that, at least in the titular sense. But 'teachers', at least in the state sector, have been discouraged from 'teaching' for twenty-odd years. Left-wing politicians have conspired with Marxist educationalists and union barons to repudiate the impartation-of-knowledge-by-expert-practitioners model, a model tried and successfully tested for centuries, in favour of a revolutionary new paradigm that impels teachers to act as dispassionate 'facilitators', strictly prohibited from lecturing, and fanatical exponents of an educational theory that encourages the development of thinking skills rather than the acquisition of knowledge (and here you may begin to get confused, especially if you consider, quite rightly, knowledge and thinking to be inextricably linked).

It doesn't take the deductive ability of Sherlock Holmes to realize that, as a consequence, teachers are no longer expected to be purveyors of knowledge; after all, according to the left – the real power brokers in today's education system – knowledge is intrinsically discriminatory and thus dangerous. Who gets to decide what the 'right' knowledge is? Hitherto, they would argue, it's been an egregiously one-sided, occidental approach that neglects the wider world and, among other things, inaccurately depicts Britain as a beacon of reason and justice. In this new milieu, knowledge is frowned upon; it has no place in education. In fact, for all intents and purposes, it runs counter to the expressed objectives of the powers that be. Children must be taught how to think, rather than what to think.