I hold, in my hands, an exam paper. My exam paper. OK, so it isn’t really in my hands because I need my hands to type, and OK so it’s my coursework exam paper which I don’t actually hand until under after Christmas, but still! Unlike A-Levels they’ve actually taken the candidate number business seriously and used it instead of a name, rather than Britain’s exam boards awarding bodies who still get you to sign scripts. There are eleven questions and seven themes for me to make up my own question from, out of which I need to select one before my first and last supervision and thus teaching for this exam. Super. But it’s a false choice – a bit like school choice – because it just raises the anxiety level. What if I pick the wrong question? What if I spent the rest of the year staring at the blindingly obvious question I should have chosen instead? Oh, stress! But not really stress, because real stress is an actual exam in an actual exam hall which first year historians are magically exempt from.
Today (well, yesterday) was a rather productive day, with another essay completed and supervised. On race and immigration, which invites questions like ‘are people just hysterically anti-immigrant, or are they also really racist too?’ – although I must stress that this wasn’t actually my question. But it would be if I was setting it. But even more – more! – productive than doing this was making the amazing discovery of the difference between homogeneous and homogenous. Go on – without looking it up – I bet you don’t know? But I’ll remember this for the rest of my life now!
Tomorrow (well, today) is Natasha’s 16th birthday 
which, as ever, follows hot on the heals of mum’s birthday – double woos, yays and houplas! The experience has made me realise that birthday cards take on a whole new meaning if you’re actually sending them from somewhere other than the same house, and you can cram in letters and news and requests for money and stuff. Although I must stress that requesting money wasn’t actually what I did. But it would be if I was desperate.
And finally: it took him a little under a month, but Boris Johnson has finally put a great clunking foot wrong by scrapping half-price bus travel for those on income support. Well done, Boris, you’ve managed to double the fares of the very poor in a single stroke. I’m seriously starting to regret voting for him… although I must stress that, of course, I most certainly did not.
When New Labour came to power in 1997, they had a handy slogan for their educational policies: ‘standards, not structures’. It was more important, they argued, to focus on raising standards inside schools rather than muck about with the overall structure of the education system itself: convenient, too, because it avoided having to make any troublesome decisions over grammar schools. As policies go it had the unusual honour of being publically disavowed rather than quietly dropped, and the government soon set about upon a noble quest to make the already rather contorted structure of the nation’s schools that little bit more unfathomable by the year. The rest, as they say, is history.
Well, I thought I’d attempt to rescue the phrase from oblivion, because it occurred to me that whilst it was a wretched failure for education it does happen to perfectly describe how we should look at another contemporary debate surrounding the upbringing of children: the role of the family.
What makes a good parent? There’s clearly no perfect answer, and the truth is that a good parent is one who manages to improvise with both luck and skill. But I’m fairly confident that most people would agree that a good parent is one who loves, who disciplines, who teaches, guides and provides support when things go wrong. A good parent strikes the right balance between taking care of a child and letting them go, establishes trust, respect and – one would hope – a lifelong bond.
All pretty uncontroversial stuff. What still appears to be more controversial with some people is the fact that the precise structure of the family in which this happens matters about as much as the layout of the family’s garden shed. Sure, a heterosexual mother and father might be the most commonly occurring pattern, but does that make a single parent, gay couple or foster family any worse for being rarer? Of course not. The standard of parenting is the one and only important thing, and – humans being as they are – that’s something which will always vary across all types of families.
This is why it was such good news that MPs successfully defeated an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill this week which would have retained the discriminatory ‘need for a father’ wording used to restrict the use of IVF by single women and lesbian couples. It’s another legal step – as with civil partnerships – which quite clearly manoeuvres the law firmly out of arbitrating which family structures are preferred over others: an arena in which it quite simply does not belong.
There were, unexpectedly, some pretty odd arguments against the move. Some claimed that it was aimed at eliminating the role of fathers altogether, which is about as silly as saying that the government should legislate against only children to preserve the role of siblings. If there is a father, than that father will have a role; if there is no father in anything other than a strictly biological sense – as is the case with a lesbian couple – then there is no role for a father. It’s as simple as that. Others insisted that the clause simply ensured that a lesbian couple would consider the need to have some sort of male role model. Whilst I would agree that male role models are generally a good thing to have, it is frankly bizarre to expect such a thing to be enshrined in legislation: why not legislate that any single mother has to provide male role models, too? Who would enforce this, the Office for Male Role Models? Let’s just go the whole hog and have an Office for Good Parenting complete with twice-yearly inspections and the ability to levy fines against any parent found ignorant of the procedures of the naughty step. It is genuinely insulting to potential lesbian parents to single them out for legal lessons on how to bring up their children, as if this is something which wouldn’t be considered before embarking on the not exactly trivial procedure of IVF.
But a few voices distinguished themselves in the desperation of searching for a respectable concern. Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith was insistent that fathers filled the valuable role of showing their daughters that it was possible to have a loving relationship with men which didn’t involve sex. Presumably having two lesbian mothers wasn’t considered a similar indication that sex with men wasn’t an insurmountable fact of life. This was nothing, mind you, compared to Iris Robinson of the DUP, who opined on the horror of a child “going into the parents’ bedroom and finding two women making love or two men making love”.
It takes a pretty blinkered form of homophobia to forget that the standard of ‘not having sex in front of your child’ is one which really should be common to all parents, regardless of family structure.
You can comment on this article here.
(…and what the silver linings are.)
1. My essay was poorly written which never really got to grips with the question, and I ran out of time on it.
But at least this gives me lots of left-over material for supervision tomorrow!
2. The Government abandoned the mooted handover of bits of the Southern rail franchise to TfL.
But it gives me more ammunition to hate Boris Johnson?
3. A guy from Newcastle thinks that the working classes are just naturally stupid and university admissions aren’t an issue.
But he’s wrong.
4. The Themes and Sources examination paper reminds me that I’ve got coursework over the summer.
But the questions don’t look too bad…
5. My cheese feast pizza disappeared from the fridge at precisely the moment that I was starving with hunger.
There is no bright side to this.
Bad Things Update – I totally forgot about finding out about how The Apprentice ends before I had a chance to see it! And ends badly. And now I can add forgetting to put this on the list on the list, too 
Saturday night! I’ve been meaning to blog about this, for I think it demonstrates an original formula for the classic night in: two nights in one, sliding down the formality scale from wine to ice-cream as you do it. Perfect 
So, I shared a few glasses with the well-attired Andrew (making his exciting first visual appearance on this blog) Matt and Caroline from Themes and Sources, before Oliver, Abi and I rewarded ourselves for our pleasing mock exam results with Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough. The plan was to watch Doctor Who – an excellent episode, by the way – but this was scuppered by the iPlayer so we went with Child Of Our Time instead. Still, twas lovely!
Recipe for success: wine…
…and then ice-cream
Talking of Who – the news that Steven Moffat will succeed Russell T Davies as executive producer made my little fanboy heart jump for joy. Steven Moffat! He wrote, like, all the best episodes! And I’ll always be eternally grateful to RTD for bringing the series back to television and doing it as such a wholesome triumph to boot. 
I shall shortly return to much-needed work, which this week is on education which is rather brilliant, and doubly so for giving me quotes such as “there are decreasing returns to selectivity for the able and large returns to mixing for the least able. Society at large benefits from mixed-school communities and teaching.” Told you so, society Can we have our comprehensive future now, please?
And finally: at a time when it’s very difficult to find good news about the state of the government, I am genuinely proud of what is being achieved tonight with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. By the time I had dinner tonight the moves to block hybrid embryos had already been defeated, but there was still some question over whether IVF would continue to discriminate against lesbian and single mothers in its ‘need for a father’ and – of course – over abortion, which was worrying us. At time of writing, thankfully, the IVF amendment has also been defeated and it’s only abortion which remains an open question: I very much hope we get a clean sweep tonight and reject attempts to lower the 24 week limit. Not because I think 24 weeks is a magic number, naturally, but the medical evidence doesn’t seem to suggest any advance from the previous reduction from 28 weeks, and so any further cut could be a dangerous step in the power of those who ultimately seek to curtail the right to abortion drastically. We’ll see.
Right, this needs to be blogged: Sainsbury’s have a serious attitude problem when it comes to alcohol and ID. (Gosh, I feel like Nic writing this!) They’re going way beyond what the law requires, and it’s ridiculous. Here’s the sob story…
After dinner, a group of us headed to a branch of the popular supermarket chain to do a quick bit of emergency shopping. I was after some orange juice, biscuits, milk… that kind of thing. Maybe even a pizza for lunch. It wasn’t exciting. At the checkout, I stand ready to pack my reusable bag (saving the planet, see) with these mundane items when the checkout lady spots a few bottles of beer and asks if I have any ID. ID? What? No? 
“Oh, that’s mine!” says Oliver cheerily as he takes out his proof of age. Great, let’s get going… except no. “I still need to see your ID” the woman says to me insistently. By this point she has resumed scanning, so a pile of goods is building up by the bag which I would be packing if I wasn’t standing there in a confused state. “But I’m not buying any alcohol!” “It doesn’t matter, he is.” “But he’s not with me! He’s doing his own shopping! We’re paying separately!” It won’t wash.
Trying the ‘just ignore her’ approach, I resume trying to pack but am very behind by this point. “Need any help?” asks Owen, who’s waiting for us having sped through a separate checkout, and starts helping me back. “I need ID from you too!” she shouts, accusingly. What? What?!
It turns out that Owen is now part of our ‘group’, and every single person in the group must now produce ID in order for Oliver to buy his own beer with his own ID. Abi and Joe are quickly recruited too, by dint of standing too close or conversing. Trying to negotiate, we offer our Cambridge student cards. Bearing our date of birth and photo, it’s pretty clear we’re all old enough to hypothetically buy the alcohol which we weren’t even trying to buy. But no, that’s not good enough. No, Oliver’s beer must be left behind.
How on earth did they come up with that? Does that mean that a mother or father can’t buy alcohol if their children happen to be with them? Why are we arbitrarily deemed to be a ‘group’ when we’re clearly all making separate purchases and just happen to be together? If we had just gone to separate checkouts, surely we would have defeated this system? What purpose does it serve anyway? Why doesn’t Sainsbury’s understand the most basic concepts of legal liability? How warped an attitude to alcohol are we going to have in this country? Why was I allowed to buy alcohol in the Willesden branch of Sainsbury’s without even being checked for ID myself?
Grrr.
Anyway, so that’s that. In-between being checked for ID for the right to talk to my friends in a supermarket queue, I actually spent my day being rather productive, writing my essay on twentieth century crime rates and watching The Apprentice alongside Abi. (You need to watch that in a group, really. It’s a programme designed for bitchy comments.)
Oh, and for next week’s Themes and Sources class the ‘surprise assignment’ turned out to be the fairly obvious one. Design your own utopia. In a group. Which is really silly, because utopias – indeed any social engineering from scratch project – is entirely pointless, but utopian planning by committee is taking it to another level. If only I was a Communist, this would be a hell of a lot easier…
One thing, however, is for sure. There will be no Sainsbury’s in my utopia.
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
