Teaching the leader of the opposition a lesson

Is Kemi Badenoch actually right about something? Sort of

The leader of the opposition and surprise supporter of my career handbrake turn

Kemi Badenoch was cheerleading me last week. Unexpected.

She did not mention me by name. In fact, she was talking about school teachers in England rather than teaching assistants at Scottish universities, but the point stands.

The bold leader of the opposition told the Commons that Labour’s schools bill implies "doctors are not sufficiently qualified to teach biology, that Olympic medallists can not teach PE".

And, by extension, that journalists can’t teach journalism.

Ok, this might be a bit of a stretch but, momentarily, I felt the warm glow of Kemi’s appreciation for my efforts.

Somewhere deep in her Starmer-kicking rhetoric was a round of applause for newsroom veterans who have aged out of the digital-first world and are now instructing the next generation in the whys and wherefores, plus the who, what and when, of the news pyramid.

I am into my second semester of teaching undergraduates how to be journalists. It’s a ride.

Marking assignments recently, I came across this: Accuarcy is important.

Several students need reminding that a sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop.

Despite signing up for a journalism course, news and current events are a mystery to them. Who is John Swinney? Tumbleweed. Rachel Reeves’ job title? Pass.

Luckily years of dealing with idiot news editors, egomaniac columnists and other useless degenerates, as well as bringing up two weans, has given me the patience and others set required to stand up in front a room full of politically illiterate 18-year-olds and explain everything from the Leveson Inquiry to why the Daily Star remodelled Liz Truss as a lettuce.

Liz as a lettuce Everything that’s great about British journalism in one salad. Photo: Daily Star

Look away, Kemi, as I reveal some of my technical secrets.

I attempt to terrify them into respecting the apostrophe by telling them that, when I was an editor, if I got a pitch or a CV with one out of place I would simply press delete. This is true. No one has time for that.

While the text books talk of the structural difficulties of covering big events - inaccessible locations, obstructive officials, trauma and panic everywhere - I lower the tone? What will happen when their phone dies? And where will they go to the toilet?

This is my cue to tell them about covering 9/11 when a strip club near the cordon around Ground Zero opened to allow reporters to use their facilities.

One of my proudest achievements so far, in the class on how to use statistics, is drilling into them that the first question they should ask of any number is: is this possible? Or is it bollocks?

It seems to be working and I had several small moments of pride when different students mentioned these specific points in their end of term exam.

Something that no one has pointed out to Kemi is that it’s only within schools that teaching without a specific qualification is an issue. Hello, have you looked at universities recently? No one there has actually learned how to teach. Faculty are expected to get up in front of the students and know how to explain complex stuff via vibes.

Perhaps there was an early folk belief that the ability to deliver a lecture, preside over a tutorial and mark an essay was transmitted via terrible coffee and baffling room numbering systems. Just by hanging around university campuses, people who knew a lot about astrophysics or ancient Arabic would magically be able to share this knowledge with wriggly teenagers.

Since performing this career handbrake turn I have taken up the national sport of academics - moaning.

Material is plentiful.

Lectures, tutorials and marking are strawberries and cream compared to navigating the campus, remembering which lifts are out of order, using the online teaching platform and filling in the paperwork required to actually get any money.

I have wasted much of my already poorly paid prep and marking time sitting in front of a screen, pressing random links in the hope that I will somehow remember how I uploaded the grades last time.

Okay, we are using a different system for this assignment. Of course we are.

So far, I have taught in five different rooms. Each one has a slightly different tech set up. The older buildings have drop-down projectors that are linked to one of the computers in the room.

One of the 25 or 30 computers in the room. These may have a piece of paper or small label guiding innocents like myself to the correct one. Or they may not.

It might also be possible to connect to the projector via a laptop. But if that’s an Apple laptop, the display screen will be instantly scrunched into a weird A4 format which the system thinks is compatible with the projector.

It is not compatible with the projector.

This may then prompt a student who has not met me before to attempt to mansplain why this is happening.

He will be, naturally, wrong.

Thankfully the university has a whole department dedicated to helping people like me to plug in their laptops. Or not, depending on the room. They are superstars. One phone call and they bound out of the lift wearing an embroidered polo shirt, carrying a bag of magical leads and an unerring ability to find a workaround.

They also have an entry pass to all the best lifts and know the quickest routes between all the buildings. And look impressed when I use words like HDML.

Am I paid magnificently for imparting decades of wisdom, making jokes about my ex husbands and learning how to access a saved PowerPoint presentation from Onedrive?

Hahahahahahaha no. I’m a teaching assistant, the zero hours contract worker of academia. I’m paid, just, for teaching, prep and marking. Answering emails from students, meeting students who disagree with their marks, filling in forms, walking round the campus trying to remember the quick route between two buildings the guy from IT showed me is all done in my own time.

And that is surely what Kemi would have wanted.