Where Did I Go Right?: How the Left Lost Me by Geoff Norcott

Author:Geoff Norcott
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Octopus
Published: 2021-05-12T23:00:00+00:00

7

MR NORCOTT

I take a dramatic pause. Like an English teacher in a film, I’m about to blow these kids’ minds. I’m going to read out the words of a well-known rap song like it’s poetry. I know, pretty out there, right? The song is ‘Lose Yourself’ by Eminem. I start with the familiar opening bars, speaking of a single shot and opportunity. They lend themselves to my idea that I too am taking a risk. I’m speaking with a much more pronounced RP English accent than usual, just to throw them fully off the scent that it’s a rap song.

I seem to have the class’s attention but I’m not sure for how long. It suddenly strikes me that reading out the lyrics of a rap track is one of the most awfully clichéd things a teacher could do. It’s up there with going, ‘Hey, kids, did you ever think like how Shakespeare was also kind of a rapper?’ The kids aren’t giving much away. They’re staring at me with a post-lunch blankness that could be inspiration or a post-prandial dip caused by eating two chicken burgers.

I continue with Eminem’s iconic song despite my reservations.

Thankfully this is a top set. Even if they did think this was shit, most of them would be too scared to let me know. So far, I’ve even held the attention of the naughtiest kid, who’d briefly stopped twanging his ruler. But I can see his finger starting to twitch, so I speed up. For some reason, my accent is starting to go full Brian Blessed. It’s weird. Ruler lad is on the verge of a full and disruptive comedy twang so I drop the RSC intonations and switch to a committed impression of Eminem. It’s decent. The kids laugh.

Yes, I’ve deployed a fairly cheap gimmick, but teaching is like comedy. You do what you can to get an idea over the line. You can make a point about the connections between poetry and rap until you’re blue in the face, but what people really enjoy is misdirection and a silly voice.

I particularly enjoyed teaching during my training year. I started off at St-Martin-in-the-Fields, a girl’s school in Brixton. There’s something about teaching in a deprived inner-city area that makes it feel like the job in its purest form, missionaries in corduroy.

Just like the kids on Pitt Crescent, the pupils at St-Martin-in-the-Fields had finely tuned bullshit radars. If I’d tried to rap here there would’ve been less applause and more eye rolling. Whenever I mention that I taught in Brixton, people instinctively presume the school was rough. It wasn’t. A lot of the kids had African and West Indian heritage so God was a bigger part of their lives than for many of their white contemporaries in south London. As a teacher, it’s always useful to have a higher power to refer to; God is way more useful than an exhausted-looking head of year.

My next placement in Watford didn’t carry with it the same sense of urban urgency.

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