Qualified versus unqualified teachers

I don't usually use this blog for current events, politics or anything like that, but I watched a video yesterday that prompted me to write this piece. I don't claim to be an expert, but as someone who went through the state system of education, received a hand financially through university (because of my parents' low income, I was entitled to a grant that paid my tuition fees - I would not have been able to go to university without this help), and as a mother-to-be due in a few short days, I am concerned by the recent news about unqualified teachers, given that in a few short years I'll be back in the system with my own child.

Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, was ridiculed on Newsnight when Jeremy Paxman almost parodied of what he's best known for and repeatedly hounded Hunt with the question "would you send your children to a school with unqualified teachers?", which Hunt inelegantly dodged a total of five times. I think my problem with this entire debate is the concept of unqualified: it appears to have a double meaning, depending on who uses it. For the critics of Hunt, an unqualified teacher is someone who has spent years in the education system with an enormous subject knowledge, is well renowned and has been teaching since times of yore. These are the good guys who are being undermined by being made to sit a pointless teaching qualification in which they will learn nothing and waste money doing.

However, when I think of an "unqualified teacher", what springs to mind are the ones that have seemingly been appointed with only their subject knowledge intact and zero experience of teaching a real class of 20+ fourteen year olds. Subject knowledge is great, but a teaching qualification can teach a person to teach and handle an entire classroom of rowdy, confused teenagers and/or young children. To use myself as an example, before I went on maternity leave I worked part time as a substitute at a training provider, acting as both teaching assistant and as a Functional Skills teacher to kids of 16+. Despite having a basic teaching qualification and a degree-level subject knowledge of my chosen subject (not to mention being incredibly passionate about the English language), I really, really struggled with enthusing a group of fewer than ten kids of how I saw the joy of what you can do with a mere twenty six letters, the odd grammatical rule and several blobs of punctuation. A few months in this job made me realise how bloody hard it was to make young people as excited about something as much as I was; it gave me a real respect for teachers who do it every day of their careers with seemingly no trouble whatsoever.

So back to the main point: we have two sides of what classifies as a qualified teacher, I am very much in favour of the ones who have been in the education system for years and years and know their way around teaching their subject, but not in favour of those that can get a job teaching children with no experience in the classroom whatsoever. However, the rub is, they are both technically unqualified and therefore belong in the same tick box as "unqualified". Unfortunately, I don't really have a solution to this problem; all I can do here is rant about an seemingly unfair system and cannot provide a solution to it. All I can really contribute is that if your washing machine broke down, would you employ a plumber who has read all the books on washing machine repair but doesn't hold an appropriate qualification, or a plumber who has been fixing washing machines all their working life without that same qualification? The debate is the same for teaching, and it's the experience in the classroom that's more important than the subject knowledge.

I had many bad teachers and many good teachers through my education, and one that sticks out in particular (an English teacher of all subjects), was a teacher that knew her subject inside out, but unfortunately couldn't teach it for toffee; this led to the class resenting her, ridiculing her and eventually failing to turn up for lessons. It probably wasn't the right thing to do: especially not at 6th form level, but if a teacher fails to grab you with their enthusiasm and passion for their subject, it's very easy to stop listening to them because you don't really respect them.

It's overwhelmingly undermining for teachers that have worked to get that qualification that they're considered in the same league as those that can fall into the same profession with only subject matter and no real clue what it's like to stand in front of a room of twenty five people ready - and usually eager - to rip you to shreds if you make the slightest social faux-pas before them. Unfortunately, "unqualified" brings all those other good teachers under that umbrella who really can teach and have more experience of teaching a class than you can shake a stick at, but like I said earlier, if I knew how to rectify the situation, I probably would have already.

The Last Of Us: and why I hated the ending I saw.

Ellen...I mean uh, Ellie from The Last of Us

I'll be honest with everyone reading this: I enjoyed playing The Last Of Us, although I confess to not really liking the full ins and outs of the combat, stealth and so forth of it. This isn't the main problem I had though, It was the sloppy writing and the terrible decisions made by the developers, especially towards the end of the game. I don't know all that much about the inner workings of the video game industry, I know enough about writing and enjoying effective drama to feel really cheated and underwhelmed by the ending we were given.

To start with the very basics of good, effective writing of a story, every single story needs conflict, without conflict, you have nothing: boring people in limited situations that never change or grow and remain trapped in a stasis of arrested development. If characters don't face their inner and outer conflict, we have a story where nothing happens and you end up with a whole load of nothing. Conflict creates drama, and drama a good story makes.

Our main character, Joel, does experience plenty of conflict throughout his journey in TLOU: we see him lose his daughter and get separated from his brother, all in the middle of a zombie apocalypse - technically they're not actually zombies, they're inspired from a type of fungi that finds itself in insects, deranges them, makes them climb into a high place such as a tree and then, quite literally, grow out of the insect's corpse to release its spores and start the process over again. It's an interesting premise for an pandemic and apart from the somewhat repetitive gameplay, it seems to play well and has been praised by many critics as the game of the year.

That doesn't, however, let it off from having a really poor ending.

Back to Joel. He meets with Ellie (who bears a remarkable resemblance to Ellen Page, even more so in pre-release screenshots but yet fail to have anything to do with the actress and even though Ellen Page has since spoken publicly about it and forgiven NaughtyDog for this discretion, it's still painfully embarrassing as I'm sure most of us were hoodwinked into believing Ellen Page had something to do with Ellie's design, motion capture and voice), a young girl who has been infected but has failed to mutate. She has been hailed by those that know as a walking cure for the pandemic and Joel is reluctantly enlisted as her guardian to get her to safety to a group known as the Fireflies. A whole game later, Joel and Ellie find themselves at the Fireflies headquarters and against Joel's wishes, Ellie has been taken away from him to be prepped for surgery in order to remove the mutation in her to create a vaccine, killing her in the process. Joel, having become more than a little attached to Ellie, busts her out of there and drives away, lying to Ellie when she awakes that there were dozens of others like her and it turns out the Fireflies didn't need her anyway. Right at the end it seems Ellie doesn't quite believe him when he swears his story is the truth, and then...

...it just ends.

Woah, woah, woah, let's back up a little here. At the beginning of this article I accuse the game of leaving the characters in arrested development and not letting them grow through the various inner conflicts they experience, and indeed Joel was at first reluctant to take care of Ellie, he does indeed grow to love and need her and eventually risks his life for her ultimately; but let's look at this objectively for a moment. Ellie is never given a choice about whether she wants to sacrifice herself by the Fireflies, but by rescuing her, Joel automatically takes that choice away from her, and does the worst possible thing by lying to her about it, despite her concerns and doubts that his story is the truth. Joel acting in this way makes him an incredibly selfish character. Perhaps she would have seen the Fireflies reasoning and been totally ok with it. We'll never know of course, but the ending seems to suggest it might have been something Ellie would have wanted. She regards Joel with a sort of "I'm not sure I believe you" look when he swears his story is the truth, and looks very uncomfortable. I got the impression by her expression she would find out eventually and/or their relationship would fall apart anyway soon after.

"But he's grown!" People protest. "He's changed to love and open his heart to Ellie, who has become like a surrogate daughter to him!". It's true she cared for him in the harsh winter after a slight impaling put him out of action for a while and would have certainly killed him if not for Ellie, that still doesn't make me empathise with his decision to take her choice away to engineer a vaccine that would potentially save the entire human race. Whoever coined the phrase "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" (verbatim, it's Mr. Spock, but there are countless others in history that have expressed the same philosophy) is played with at the ending of TLOU, and then totally crapped on as Joel within 5 minutes of getting her to the Fireflies, decides because they pushed him around, that it isn't right and must save Ellie from the clutches of the evil Fireflies!

Let me remind you that the whole game, Joel has been aiming to get her to the Fireflies. It's literally the entire motivation that keeps him going. Sure Joel and Ellie bond over the year or so they're together, but if he cared about her so much, why did he keep travelling towards the Fireflies' headquarters? He's depicted as a wise-beyond-his-years, tired guy that trusts no one, so why did he not think the Fireflies would not do a thing like kill Ellie to create a cure?! Surely it must have been in his mind that to create a vaccine for the pandemic, Ellie wouldn't have got off easy: Throughout the game I had theories she would either become a baby factory or cut open for scientific reasons or to try and create a vaccine. Joel being this stupid about what would happen to Ellie angered me greatly, and again goes against his established character trait of trusting no one.

Something else about this whole surrogate daughter/interdependent relationship Joel and Ellie establish throughout the game: even after about twenty freaking years to grieve for his daughter, Joel can't talk about her and everytime she's brought up he gets all mad and bitter. Having suffered loss and grief myself, as most of us have, twenty years is more than enough time to accept one's past, and so it simply doesn't make sense to me on an emotional level that he's still so bitter and twisted about something that has happened to most people in his world, especially considering how quickly he gets over other people dying around him that he becomes close to. Joel seems to have transplanted his daughter onto Ellie, which may explain why he does what he does because "Oh I can't lose her again" kind of thinking, but it yet again hails back to his arrested development, and even after twenty years, he hasn't changed at all.

Which brings me onto my final point that bugged me about TLOU, it's a general point really, but it's worth noting. Joel is one of the most forgettable characters in media I've ever come across. He seems to tick all the boxes to make him as generic as possible: he's a white middle-aged American dude who's gruff and world-weary with a sorry past and a plaid shirt. Do we really need to play as this white American dude again? The script written for him is direly cliché when I played through there were several occasions where I managed to correctly guess exactly what Joel would say to a given situation. It's just sloppy, bad writing and given the money that was pumped into it, could - and should - have been better.