Third day of being ill with what’s probably a winter vomiting bug, with one child home sick from school… and just having had to collect the other kid who started throwing up on his school trip… I finally got back to my bed and picked up the next book on my pile, Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Willd-Built.
The opening page reads: “For anybody who could use a break.”
Yes. Yes, please.
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Of all the discussions I’ve ever been involved with on the subject of religion, the one I’m proudest of was perhaps also one of the earliest.
Let me tell you about a time that, as an infant, I got sent out of my classroom because I wouldn’t stop questioning the theological ramifications of our school nativity play.
I’m aware that I’ve got readers from around the world, and Christmas traditions vary, so let’s start with a primer. Here in the UK, it’s common1 at the end of the school term before Christmas for primary schools to put on a “nativity play”. A group of infant pupils act out an interpretation of the biblical story of the birth of Jesus: a handful of 5/6-year-olds playing the key parts of, for example, Mary, Joseph, an innkeeper, some angels, maybe a donkey, some wise men, some shepherds, and what-have-you.
As with all theatre performed by young children, a nativity play straddles the line between adorable and unbearable. Somehow, the innkeeper – who only has one line – forgets to say “there is no room at the inn” and so it looks like Mary and Joseph just elect to stay in the barn, one of the angels wets herself in the middle of a chorus, and Mary, bored of sitting in the background having run out of things to do, idly swings the saviour of mankind round and around, holding him by his toe. It’s beautiful2.
I was definitely in a couple of different nativity plays as a young child, but one in particular stands out in my memory.
In order to put a different spin on the story of the first Christmas3, one year my school decided to tell a different, adjacent story. Here’s a summary of the key beats of the plot, as I remember it:
So far, totally on-brand for a primary school nativity play but with 50% more imagination than the average. Nice.
I was cast as Adviser #1, and that’s where things started to go wrong.
The part of God was played by my friend Daniel, but clearly our teacher figured that he wouldn’t be able to remember all of his lines4 and expanded his role into three: God, Adviser #1, and Adviser #2. After each natural phenomenon explained why it would be the best, Adviser #1 and Adviser #2 would each say a few words about the candidate’s pros and cons, providing God with the information He needed to make a decision.
To my young brain, this seemed theologically absurd. Why would God need an adviser?5
“If He’s supposed to be omniscient, why does God need an adviser, let alone two?” I asked my teacher6.
The answer was, of course, that while God might be capable of anything… if the kid playing Him managed to remember all of his lines then that’d really be a miracle. But I’d interrupted rehearsals for my question and my teacher Mrs. Doyle clearly didn’t want to explain that in front of the class.
But I wouldn’t let it go:
In the end I had to be thrown out of class. I spent the rest of that rehearsal standing in the corridor.
And it was totally worth it for this anecdote.
1 I looked around to see if the primary school nativity play was still common, or if the continuing practice at my kids’ school shows that I’m living in a bubble, but the only source I could find was a 2007 news story that claims that nativity plays are “under threat”… by The Telegraph, who I’d expect to write such a story after, I don’t know, the editor’s kids decided to put on a slightly-more-secular play one year. Let’s just continue to say that the school nativity play is common in the UK, because I can’t find any reliable evidence to the contrary.
2 I’ve worked onstage and backstage on a variety of productions, and I have nothing but respect for any teacher who, on top of their regular workload and despite being unjustifiably underpaid, volunteers to put on a nativity play. I genuinely believe that the kids get a huge amount out of it, but man it looks like a monumental amount of work.
3 And, presumably, spare the poor parents who by now had potentially seen children’s amateur dramatics interpretations of the same story several times already.
4 Our teacher was probably correct.
5 In hindsight, my objection to this scripting decision might actually have been masking an objection to the casting decision. I wanted to play God!
6 I might not have used the word “omniscient”, because I probably didn’t know the word yet. But I knew the concept, and I certainly knew that my teacher was on spiritually-shaky ground to claim both that God knew everything and God needed an advisor.
On the way to school this morning, the 10-year-old lagged behind to build a small snowman.
On the way back, the dog saw the snowman, which wasn’t there when she’d passed earlier. She wanted to make it clear that she Did. Not. Trust. it. She stood back and growled at it for a while, and then, eventually, was persuaded to come closer.
Leaning as far as her little legs could manage, she stretched to carefully sniff it while keeping her distance. She still wasn’t entirely happy and ran most of the way to the end of the path to get away from the mysterious cold heap.
(This same dog earlier this year spent quarter of an hour barking at our wheelbarrow when, unusually, it was left in the middle of the lawn, rather than beside the shed. She doesn’t like change!)
Kids’ ability to pick up new words from context is amazing.
Kids’ confidence even when they’ve misunderstood how a word is used is hilarious. 😊
This evening, our 7-year-old was boasting about how well-behaved his class was while their regular teacher had to attend an all-day meeting, vs how much it impressed the temporary teacher they had.
His words: “Today we had a supply teacher and we totally DOMINATED her!”
To:****@fulwoodacademy.co.ukFrom:“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>Subject:Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997Date:Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:18:07 +0100To Whom It May Concern,
Please supply the personal data you hold about me, per data protection law. Specifically, I’m looking for: a list of all offences for which I was assigned detention at school.
Please find attached a variety of documentation which I feel proves my identity and the legitimacy of this request. If there’s anything else you need or you have further questions, please feel free to email me.
Thanks in advance;
Dan Q
To:“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>From:“Jodie Clayton” <*.*******@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>Subject:Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997Date:Fri, 26 Jul 2024 10:48:33 +0100Dear Dan Q,
We do not retain records of detentions of former pupils, and we certainly have no academic records of pupils going back thirty years ago.
Jodie Clayton | Office Manager with Cover and Admissions
Black Bull Lane, Fulwood, Preston, PR2 9YR
+44 (0) 1772 719060
To:“Jodie Clayton” <*********@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>From:“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>Subject:Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997Date:Fri, 26 Jul 2024 17:00:49 +0100But, but… I was always told that this would go on my permanent record. Are you telling me that teachers lied to me? What else is fake!?
Maybe I will always have a calculator with me and I won’t actually need to know how to derive a square root using a pen and paper. Maybe nobody will ever care what my GCSE results are for every job I apply for. Maybe my tongue isn’t divided into different taste areas capable of picking out sweet, salty, bitter etc. flavours. Maybe practicing my handwriting won’t be an essential skill I use every day.
And maybe I will amount to something despite never turning in any History homework, Mr. Needham!
Dan Q
The UK’s Conservative government, having realised that their mandate is worthless, seems to be in a panicked rush to try to get the voters to ignore any of the real issues. Instead, they say, we should be focussed on things like ludicrously-expensive and ineffective ways to handle asylum seekers and making life as hard as possible for their second-favourite scapegoat: trans and queer people.
The latest move in that second category seems likely to be a plan to, among other things, discourage teachers from talking about gender identity in schools, with children of any age. From the article I linked:
The BBC has not seen the new guidelines but a government source said they included plans to ban any children being taught about gender identity.
If asked, teachers will have to be clear gender ideology is contested.
Needless to say, such guidance is not likely to be well-received by teachers:
Pepe Di’Iasio, headteacher at a school in Rotherham, told Today that he believes pupils are being used “as a political football”.
Teachers “want well informed and evidence-based decisions”, he said, and not “politicised” guidance.
This shit isn’t harmless. Regardless of how strongly these kinds of regulations are enforced, they can have a devastating chilling effect in schools.
I speak from experience.
Most of my school years were under the shadow of Section 28. Like I predict for the new Conservative proposals, Section 28 superficially didn’t appear to have a major impact: nobody was ever successfully prosecuted under it, for example. But examining its effects in that way completely overlooks the effect it had on how teachers felt they had to work.
For example…
In around 1994, I witnessed a teacher turn a blind eye to homophobic bullying of a pupil by their peer, during a sex education class. Simultaneously, the teacher coolly dismissed the slurs of the bully, saying that we weren’t “talking about that in this class” and that the boy should “save his chatter for the playground”. I didn’t know about the regulations at the time: only in hindsight could I see that this might have been a result of Section 28. All I got to see at the time was a child who felt that his homophobic harassment of his classmate had the tacit endorsement of the teachers, so long as it didn’t take place in the classroom.
A gay friend, who will have been present but not involved in the above event, struggled with self-identity and relationships throughout his teenage years, only “coming out” as an adult. I’m confident that he could have found a happier, healthier life had he felt supported – or at the very least not-unwelcome – at school. I firmly believe that the long-running third-degree side-effects of Section 28 effectively robbed him of a decade of self-actualisation about his identity.
The long tail of those 1980s rules were felt long-after they were repealed. And for a while, it felt like things were getting better. But increasingly it feels like we’re moving backwards.
With general elections coming up later this year, it’ll soon be time to start quizzing your candidates on the issues that matter to you. Even (perhaps especially) if your favourite isn’t the one who wins, it can be easiest to get a politicians’ ear when they and their teams are canvassing for your vote; so be sure to ask pointed questions about the things you care about.
I hope that you’ll agree that not telling teachers to conceal from teenagers the diversity of human identity and experience is something worth caring about.
Update: Only a couple of hours after I posted this, the awesome folks (whom I’ve mentioned before) at the Vagina Museum tooted a thread about the long tail of Section 28. It’s well-worth a read.
This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:
What colleges have you attended?
I feel like this question might be a little US-centric? Or at least, not UK-friendly! The question doesn’t translate well because of transatlantic differences in our higher education systems (even after I skimmed a guide to higher education across the pond).
Let’s try instead enumerating the education establishments I’ve attended post-school. There’ve been a few!
Nowadays young adults are required to be enrolled in education or training until the age of 18, but that wasn’t the case when I finished secondary school at 16. Because my school didn’t yet offer a “sixth form” (education for 16-18 year olds), I registered with Preston College to study A-Levels in Computing, Maths, Psychology, and General Studies.
The first of these choices reflected my intention to go on to study Computer Science at University1. Psychology was chosen out of personal interest, and General Studies was a filler to round-out my programme.
Then known as the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, this became my next academic destination as I pursued an undergraduate degree in Computer Science with Software Engineering.
Since then, I’ve used my Software Engineering degree for… almost nothing. I started working at SmartData before I’d even completed it; the Bodleian required that I had one but didn’t care what the subject was, and I’m not certain that Automattic even asked. But I still appreciate some of the theoretical grounding it gave me, which helps me when I learn new concepts to this day4.
Almost a decade later, the academic bug bit me again and I decided to study towards a foundation degree in Counselling & Psychotherapy! I figured that it I were going to have one degree that I never use, I might as well have two of them, right?
The academic parts5 of the work could be done remotely, but I needed to zip back and forth to Aylesbury on Monday evenings for several years for the practical parts.
Almost another decade passed then I decided it was time to break into academia a further time. This time, I decided to build on my existing knowledge from my first degree plus the subsequent experience and qualifications I’d gained in ethical hacking and penetration testing, and decided to go for a masters degree in Information Security and Forensics! I even managed to do some original research for my dissertation, although it’s terribly uninteresting because all it possibly managed to prove was the null hypothesis.
Something I’d discovered having been a student in my teens, in my 20s, in my 30s, and in my 40s… is that it gets harder! Whereas in my 20s I could put in an overnight cram session and ace an exam, in my 40s I absolutely needed to spend the time studying and revising over many weeks before information would become concrete in my mind!6 It almost feels like it’s a physical effort to shunt things into my brain, where once it was near-effortlessly easy.
People have occasionally suggested that I might push my field(s) even further and do a doctorate someday. I don’t think that’s for me. A masters in a subdiscipline was plenty narrow-enough a field for my interests: I’d far rather study something new.
Maybe there’s another degree in my sometime, someday, but it’s probably a bachelors!
1 I figured that an A-Level in Maths would be essential for admission to a Computer Science degree, but it very definitely wasn’t, though it helped out in other ways.
2 The ubiquity of digital photography nowadays makes it easy to forget that snapping a picture to share with friends used to be really hard work.
3 Little did I know that 20 years later Three Rings would still be going strong, now supporting ~60,000 volunteers in half a dozen countries!
4 While I love and am defensive of self-taught programmers, and feel that bootcamp-plus-experience is absolutely sufficient for many individuals to excel in my industry, there are certain topics – like compiler theory, data structures and algorithms, growth rates of function complexity, etc. – that are just better to learn in an academic setting, and which in turn can help bootstrap you every time you need to learn a new programming language or paradigm. Not to mention the benefit of “learning how to learn”, for which university can be great. It’s a bloody expensive way to get those skills, especially nowadays, though!
5 I was surprised to find that the academic bits of my course in counselling and psychotherapy were more-interesting than the practical bits. See for example my blog post about enjoying a deep dive into the background of The Gloria Films. I learned a lot from the practical bits too, mind.
6 I probably didn’t do myself any favours by beginning Automattic’s intensive and challenging recruitment process while wrapping up my masters degree though.
Gorgeous freezing fog over the fields on the school run this morning.
At school, our 9-year-old is currently studying the hsitory of human civilization from the late stone age through to the bronze age. The other week, the class was split into three groups, each of which was tasked with researching a different piece of megalithic architecture:
And so it was that one of our eldest’s classmates was searching on the Web for information about The Devil’s Quoits when they found… my vlog on the subject! One of them recognised me and said, “Hey, isn’t that your Uncle Dan?”1
On the school run later in the day, the teacher grabbed me and asked if I’d be willing to join their school trip to the henge, seeing as I was a “local expert”. Naturally, I said yes, went along, and told a bunch of kids what I knew!
I was slightly intimidated because the class teacher, Miss Hutchins, is really good! Coupled with the fact that I don’t feel like a “local expert”2, this became a kick-off topic for my most-recent coaching session (I’ve mentioned how awesome my coach is before).
I eventually talked to the class mostly about the human geography aspects of the site’s story. The area around the Devil’s Quoits has changed so much over the millenia, and it’s a fascinating storied history in which it’s been:
It turns out that to be a good enough to pass as a “local expert”, you merely have to know enough. Enough to be able to uplift and inspire others, and the humility to know when to say “I don’t know”.4
That’s a lesson I should take to heart. I (too) often step back from the opportunity to help others learn something new because I don’t feel like I’m that experienced at whatever the subject is myself. But even if you’re still learning something, you can share what you’ve learned so far and help those behind you to follow the same path. I’m forever learning new things, and I should try to be more-open to sharing “as I learn”. And to admit where I’ve still got a long way to go.
1 Of course, I only made the vlog because I was doing a videography course at the time and needed subject matter, and I’d recently been reading a lot about the Quoits because I was planning on “hiding” a virtual geocache at the site, and then I got carried away. Self-nerdsniped again!
2 What is a local expert? I don’t know, but what I feel like is just a guy who read a couple of books because he got distracted while hiding a geocache!
3 I’ve no idea what future archeologists will make of this place when they finda reconstructed stone circle and then, when they dig nearby, an enormous quantity of non-biodegradable waste. What was this strange stone circle for, they’ll ask themselves? Was it a shrine to their potato-based gods, to whom they left crisp packets as a sacrifice?
4 When we’re talking about people from the neolithic, saying “I don’t know” is pretty easy, because what we don’t know is quite a lot, it turns out!
For “School at Home” this lockdown, this 7 y/o’s PE teacher challenged her to “build an obstacle course”.
In these challenging times, and especially because my work and social circles have me communicate regularly with people in many different countries and with many different backgrounds, I’m especially grateful for the following:
Whenever you find the current crisis getting you down, stop and think about the things that aren’t-so-bad or are even good. Stopping and expressing your gratitude for them in whatever form works for you is good for your happiness and mental health.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Our eldest, 4, started school this year and this week saw her first parents’ evening. This provided an opportunity for we, her parents, to “come out” to her teacher about our slightly-unconventional relationship structure. And everything was fine, which is nice.
I’m sure the first few months of every child’s school life are a time that’s interesting and full of change, but it’s been particularly fascinating to see the ways in which our young academic’s language has adapted to fit in with and be understood by her peers.
I first became aware of these changes, I think, when I overheard her describing me to one of her school friends as her “dad”: previously she’d always referred to me as her “Uncle Dan”. I asked her about it afterwards and she explained that I was like a dad, and that her friend didn’t have an “Uncle Dan” so she used words that her friend would know. I’m not sure whether I was prouder about the fact that she’d independently come to think of me as being like a bonus father figure, or the fact that she demonstrated such astute audience management.
I don’t object to being assigned this (on-again, off-again, since then) nickname. My moniker of Uncle Dan came about as a combination of an effort to limit ambiguity (“wait… which dad?”) and an attempt not to tread on the toes of actual-father JTA: the kids themselves are welcome to call me pretty-much whatever they’re comfortable with. Indeed, they’d be carrying on a family tradition if they chose-for-themselves what to call me: Ruth and her brothers Robin and Owen address their father not by a paternal noun but by his first name, Tom, and this kids have followed suit by adopting “Grand-Tom” as their identifier for him.
Knowing that we were unusual, though, we’d taken the time to do some groundwork before our eldest started school. For example we shared a book about and spent a while talking about how families differ from one another: we figure that an understanding that families come in all kinds of shapes and sizes is a useful concept in general from a perspective of diversity and and acceptance. In fact, you can hear how this teaching pays-off in the language she uses to describe other aspects of the differences she sees in her friends and their families, too.
Still, it was a little bit of a surprise to find myself referred to as a “dad” after four years of “Uncle Dan”.
Nonetheless: in light of the fact that she’d clearly been talking about her family at school and might have caused her teacher some confusion, when all three of us “parents” turned up to parents’ evening we opted to introduce ourselves and our relationship. Which was all fine (as you’d hope: as I mentioned the other day, our unusual relationship structure is pretty boring, really), and the only awkwardness was in having to find an additional chair than the teacher had been expecting to use with which to sit at the table.
There’s sometimes a shortage of happy “we did a thing, and it went basically the same as it would for a family with monogamous parents” poly-family stories online, so I thought this one was worth sharing.
And better yet: apparently she’s doing admirably at school. So we all celebrated with an after-school trip to one of our favourite local soft play centres.
This declaration was posted to one of my first websites, on 22 April 1997; I’m not certain why. From the sounds of things I was using a school computer at the time. It was
republished here on 22 March 2021.
I am using an RM PC-433S Accelerator on a 486 Nimbus Network, operating a Brother M-1824L dot matrix and a Brother HL-8e laser jet. I am using a mouse and a 102-key keyboard. The monitor is capable of displaying up to 256 colours in VGA, at a resolution of 640×480.
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