Socks’ Adventures: The Big Water

Socks:

Did you know there’s different types of water? I didn’t! I mean, water and me, we go way back. Like, I practically started drinking that stuff when I was a puppy. But the Fam showed me that you can even use it to get your paws wet? I’m still not the biggest fan of swimming. Usually we go to a small waterhole where the water is always cold and tastes really good. Mum and the Fam insist on throwing my toys in there when they could just throw them in the meadow, but I will admit that it does cool down. Also you can rub yourself dry in the dirt afterwards. Mum loves that.

Small black and white dog in the "Watt"

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Now, where was I? Right, water. There was a big water there. Like real big. But only sometimes. Sometimes there was a lot of mud. Mud is cool. The Fam took me there the first evening. There were puddles and mud and I quite liked that, but that water tasted really bad. I tried it and it was way too salty. And I tried again and it still hadn’t bettered its ways. Not even the third, fouth and whatever numbers come after that time. Stupid water.

Small dog swimming in the sea

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Socks’ Adventures: Holidays

In memory of the unforgotten “Jack’s Walks”

Holidays are a curious human invention. We pack up our lives to go and live them somewhere else for a while. Socks, with his glorious 13 months had no idea what they are.

Socks:

I knew that something was up. One day, they brought a big box home. A bit like a car (I don’t like riding cars), but not quite, so when the fam offered me treats, I was willing to enter. They praised me a lot, but really, I don’t know why. It smelled like the fam, but old. Whatever. Then they started putting a lot of boxes where they don’t belong. Really, mum, I know you’re not the best housekeeper, but clothes in the kitchen? As this went on, I got more and more nervous until finally, one day, you guessed it, they put me into the car. I don’t like riding cars! But there was a lot of treats (Leberwurst!) and actually there weren’ many stops or those wiggly things where your body moves without you doing anything, so I decided to take a nap.

A small black and brown dog napping in a doggy car seat

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A couple of naps later we arrived somewhere strange. It smelled very different, a bit like fish. I like fish! And the trees were gone. What did they do to the trees? But at least there was green grass and it wasn’t as hot as it was at home. There the grass is turning brown. I don’t like that. It doesn’t taste good, either. I was a bit confused as to what we were doing there, but hey, I thoght, now we live in the box on the green grass.

 

A small black an brown dog lying on the bed in the caravan

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To be continued….

 

 

 

 

The wee gardening of 2026

When we bought our house 10 years ago, we knew that the garage would need to be replaced. The house and garage are built against a hillside. What’s the groundfloor on the street side is the first floor on the garden side. The garage is 2 storeys, which is pretty handy as it gives you a room to store the garden stuff. The hill is rock, but at the lower end it’s just the ground. The pleople who built the garage were incompetent. One part is built on the solid rock, the other part was just 5cm of concrete on sand. Yeah. Of course the sand gave way, there were tears and gaps that got always bigger and last year the tension finally started to tear the roof apart. At that point we needed to act and had the old one torn down and a new one built. The people who tore down the old garage had it fall into the greenhouse. The people who built the garage had to trample a lot of our terracing.

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The now defunct greenhouse. After 9 months and several angry phone calls the dude finally called his insurance.

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The sad remains of the terraces.

There was absolutely no time to repair the damage this year. Maybe next year, if we get the fence put up this year. As a result, I didn’t even attempt to plant a lot. I grew some courgettes and Hokaido squash. The courgettes were interesting. They germinated quickly and grew into beautiful plants, so I repotted them when it was time. They all died. A few late seeds were still in the tray, so I let those grow and then planted them in the ground. They all but one died. The remaining one has grown past the size where the slugs will eat it and hopefully give more than enough courgettes.

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My courgette

The squash was more successful, I now have 4 nice plants.

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I dind’t grow my own tomatoes but just bought some young plants. They’re in pots so they can be moved should it be a rainy summer.

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Oh, and I planted some sunflowers. Let’s see how they grow.

Of Boomers and dogs

Before you “not all men” me: of course, not all boomers…

A small tricolour dog is trying to steal a colourful sheet from the couch

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Putting fresh sheets on the couch actually requires zero dogs….

Boomers largely grew up with dogs. They were something you just had, much the same way you had kids and they were treated much alike: they were supposed to be quiet, well behaved and functioning, and the means to achieve that was violence. Becoming adults, many of them stopped having dogs but not children, but the children were still raised much the same. Maybe the belt was replaced by the bare hand, but violence was still very much the preferred method of “teaching” kids. Gen X and Millenials mostly put a stop to this, making grandparents catch up with the 21st century or cutting them off and protecting their children.

While not every popular trend in current child rearing is actually good, today’s parents are much more consciously thinking about how they want to raise their children. Many read books or go to parenting classes. While they may not always achieve it, they do want to raise their children without violence and trauma. And actually, much the same is happening with dog training. We don’t just expect dogs to function. We see them as creatures with both needs and also somelevel of understanding. We actively learn how to interpret their body language correctly. A wagging tail does not mean a happy dog. A wagging tail means an excited dog, but not whether he’s positively excited or actually upset. (With Socks you can tell a genuinly happy wag by the fact that he’ll also wag his entire butt. Which is extremely cute.)

If the boomers didn’t choose to keep dogs, there was no such pressure on them to catch up with the time. Or as my dad said: “We didn’t have doggy school back then and we didn’t need it. You kids these days.” Enter my father in law, who is like the poster boy for a certain kind of old white man. Not the virulently capital letters Racist or Misogynist, just the ordinary type. A guy who got through life by simply ignoring things he didn’t like, who got his family to not contradict him or have fights with him by being loud. A guy who never had his beliefs challenged. Back to the topic: a guy who thinks he knows how to handle dogs, even though he hasn’t kept dogs in 60 years.

Socks is still learning many things and one of them is to tolerate people in “his” space. He’s a rescue who has finally found his safe place, a rescue who, like almost all rescues, has an issue with big loud men, and a kokoni, who was bred over two millenia to protect the home. This means that when people enter our home who have not been added to his expanding list of trustworthy humans, he is often insecure. That means barking and keeping his distance, but it also means giving warning signs. Growling, showing teeth, snapping at the air. Which my father in law all takes to mean “please keep getting closer, especially reaching over me with your big hands and try to touch me, preferrably on my head”. And no matter what you say, he’ll keep doing it. The father in law, not the dog. The dog is much more teachable. This is the way biting happens, but of course it’s the dog who gets blamed then.

Training Dogs: Gender Gap

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Every dog whenever the task at hand requires zero dogs.

Patriarchy doesn’t even leave our pets alone. Cats are clearly female coded: they’re domestic, clean, elegant, and also you can become a crazy old cat lady. Dogs, with the exception of certain small breeds, are male coded: outdoors, action, dirt! In children’s media a cat character is most likely to be female, a dog character is male. Even without gendered nouns (in German “cat” is female and “dog” is male), English speaking kids often think that “cats are girls and dogs are boys”. With this in mind, you should think that I’m the lone woman in a group of men at doggy school, right?

Nope. There’s occasionally a guy, but the main human partner for most dogs is a woman. Since I doubt that most dogs are a “I made puppy eyes at my husband until he thought it was easier living with a dog than with a wife who wants a dog” situation like ours, something doesn’t add up and I took it totally scientifically to Mastodon for a poll.

I know that the results are not in any way representative, but there was a tendency that I find interesting:

If the dog went to doggy school, the main person responsible was almost always a woman. If the couple was fine without doggy school, the dog duties were more equal. In no group did men do the majority of care and training.

What was also interesting were the conversations in the comments below. One guy remarked that most doggy schools are run by women and apparently men do have a huge problem with going to a woman and admit that they need her expertise. He furthermore counted that his wife is indeed a certified dog trainer, and he is not, but that when he’s around for some reason, the men will flock to him and ask him for his opinion, but argue with his wife.

There’s a saying that men want children like children want a dog. Apparently men also want dogs like children like dogs

Teacher’s Corner: Teaching kids and training dogs

Small tri colour dog lying on his back in a fluffy bed

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Socks has been living with us for two months now, and after he settled in, I took him to doggy school. While we were absolutely lucky in getting a dog with very few behavioural issues who’s keen to learn, he needs training. He was abandoned as a puppy and grew up in the shelter, so he never had any of the usual training. As a teacher, I don’t like badly raised kids and poorly trained dogs. I love my friends’ dogs, but seriously, they’re a nightmare trainig wise, only being manageable by either having a gentle nature (big dog) or being a prototypical small dog (no manners but easily controllable). I also would like Socks to become a school dog one day and therefore he needs a solid basis. So I’ve been taking him to doggy school for the last weeks, for general training and for recall. Right now it’s breeding season anyway, so dogs need to be on a lead, but hopefully once that’s over we’ll have a solid recall so he can have more freedom.

In recall training (and in general training), we mostly work with classic conditioning: Desired behaviour is rewarded. I’m very happy to live in a country where it’s illegal to torture your dog in the name of training with prong collars or worse electric collars. So for recall, our first job was to find out what our dogs love the most. Not only did we have to test what their favourite snacks are, but also what others things could motivate them to abandon whatever they’re doing elsewhere and to come back to us. So each team in the group came back with different answers, which got me thinking: Now, of course children are not dogs. I can’t explain to Socks why it’s important that he doesn’t just run into the street because there’s a blackbird on the other side. He’s got all the understanding of a toddler. Instead I teach him that sitting down and waiting for me the lead the way gets him a reward. But children are similar to dogs in that they’re all different and want and need different things. And unlike with my dog, I can’t sit down and analyse those things for 250 different kids. And I can’t implement them for 25 different kids in a classroom. The ressource “teacher” is spread a lot more thinly than the resource “dog owner”. But we thoght it would be fun to try and throw them a cheese cube every time they gave the correct answer…

Teacher’s Corner The integrative power of small towns

As you may remember, I now teach at a comprehensive close to home. This has many advantages, but it also means that my private life isn’t as private anymore. From running into parents while shopping over meeting students at the gym before it burned down (I do have a solid alibi for that one) to them playing trick and treat at my house at Halloween. Recently a kid asked me if I lived close to place where I actually live. She’d seen me walking the dog. She lives in a social housing estate on the other side of the street while I live in a street of nice semi detached private family homes.

This got me thinking how in small towns there is pretty little social segregation. Sure, our social backgrounds are different, we still live in the same nice area. The whole town has one primary school where all children of all backgrounds meet. Sure, you can then send your kid to the more exclusive secondary schools after that, but even then they will meet all the other kids at the sports club*. Not even horse riding is safe and we don’t have a golf club.

In big cities, the social housing estate or a poor part of town will have enough kids to fill their own primary school and so will the wealthier parts of the city. Here? No chance. And while there is prejudice against people living in street x, even the snobbiest parents have little chance to keep their kids from knowing “those kids”.

 

*Unlike in many other places, in Germany children don’t do extracurriculars at school but in public sports clubs where they live. If you play football, you don’t play with your schoolmates, but the kids from your town / village and might meet your schoolfriend at a match, playing against each other.

 

Please meet Socks

With all the horrors going on in the world, let’s have something positive. Please meet the newest member of the Giliell family: Socks

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I’ve always wanted a dog. I wanted a dog before I could write “dog”, but of course my parents said “no”. Later the circumstances weren’t right. First I was a poor college student, then I had two small kids in a small flat, then I had long commutes. Now the kids are mostly grown, we live in a house next to the woods and my commute is 10 – 20 minutes. The only other obstacle was my beloved not wanting a dog, but over the last 2 years the kids and I wore him down. Now the question was “What dog and when”? The “what was pretty easy. We wanted a small to medium mixed breed rescue and went with a rescue that brings in street dogs and dogs from kill shelters in Romania. Now, when you get your dog from a foreign rescue you have to be careful about some things, just like when you get your dog from a breeder, “breeder” or local shelter. We went with one that had a couple of decades of history, makes sure they visit prospective adopters and most importantly where the local contact / foster mum is a personal friend of our BFF’s mum.

Why not a local shelter? Two problems: First, someof them have unrealistic expectations like you mustn’t work outside the home and leave the dog alone. Second: German shelters are 80% populated by dogs that people shouldn’t have gotten in the first place: dogs listed as potentially dangerous like staffies, bullies, etc and their cross breeds and high need dogs like Malinois or Kangal. I can’t do a high need dog, which is what I also told the rescue lady, so we worked together. Our initial plan was to look for a dog that would then go on the March transport. She would foster until the start of the easter break and then we’d have 2 weeks to get used to each other.

Then she got a foster dog on the January transport and told me: “Come look at this one, I thinks that’s the onbe for you”, so we went for a first visit. The dog we met was still very shy and had to be carried across the doorstep because he was afraid, but we instantly fell in love. The little guy even matched the name my daughter had already picked back when we first decided to get a dog: Socks.

Small tri colour dog being carried, looking very shy

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Look at how shy he was back then!

Within days we agreed on a “test” day and then a few days later went to pick him up. He very quickly lost all that shyness once he realised that finally had a family.

The doggie lying on his back with his mouth open next to a leg. You can see a hand giving belly rubs. He looks cheeky.

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Did I mention that we’d wanted a mixed breed? Joke’s on me.

The rescue guessed that he was an Australian Shepherd mix, which, if you look at pics of tri colour Aussies does make some sense.

Tri colour Aussie in a field of flowers

By Wikimedia Commons

But some things didn’t quite add up:

  • He’s looking very much like an Aussie, except for his build. He’s relatively short legged and pretty small. If one of his parents was an Aussie for those Aussie looks, what was the other parent?
  • No characteristic double coat.
  • None of the herding behaviour I remember from our friends’ Aussie mix
  • Digging. He loves digging so much

Last weekend somebody said: “He looks like a Kokoni” and I was “he looks like a what?” Please meet the Kokoni, one of the world’s most ancient dog breeds. They’re thankfully not a recognised breed by any kennel club, but they have been around in Greece for probably 3.000 years, while being rarely known outside of Greece (but it’s not too far away from Romania where he was found). I looked the breed up and sure there was my dog. Not only were there pictures that looked exactly like him, the breed description also describes his character to a T. Thankfully since nobody has ever come up with any breed standards, they have no known breed specific health issues. They’re friendly, active, loyal and smart and they’re also used to keep mice and rats away. That explains the digging.

So how’s life with a dog? Of course it’s work. My day now starts at 5:30 so I can walk the dog before I go to work. But you know what? It’s doing me good. Getting up has always been my nemesis, and I’ve been known to hit the snooze way too often. Guess what? The dog doesn’t have a snooze button, so I get up at 5:30 and then we get ready and I arrive at work without being in a hurry. Also the first week or so I was totally exhausted because I wasn’t used to walk 5-7 km each day, but I’ve built up the stamina and also my jeans fit much better. But the best of all ist coming home and being greeted like I’d gone to Antarktca in a Tshirt and still came back.

The conservative inability to consider others as people

A sign that says: "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people"My favourite aunt in law married a card carrying conservative guy. He is, like many of them, a wonderfully nice person when you’re a member of the in group and I actually do like him as a person.But his politics… Now, I have decided that I will not discuss politics with him until he’s back in the workforce. You see, the current conservative motto here is that people unjustifiably have a life and don’t work enough. There are plans to abolish the 8 hour work day for more “flexibility”, i.e. 12 hour shifts. They keep telling us that not only do we need to retire later, we also need to keep working once we are retired.

My conservative uncle? After he worked very hard to inherit money from his aunt, he decided at 63 that he has now worked enough and can live off his savings, especially since he’ll accomplish another great achievement by inheriting more money from his dad. So in short, he’s the perfect example of preaching water and drinking wine. There’s no use trying to argue with him, so I tried to steer clear of political topics at my cousin in law’s wedding last weekend, until…

Well, it wasn’t even a discussion, it was the perfect example of an old white man being completely unable to even consider that other people’s lives might be different from his. Somebody mentioned that food has gotten terribly expensive, as every statistic you care to look at will show, and while all other people in the group sighed and agreed, he told us that THEY hadn’t increased their food budget in three years. As a couple each of them contributes a fixed amount to their food budget, and while this isn’t how want to run a family budget, that’s none of my business. Anyway, he then explained that they achieve this by combing through the special offers, making a shopping list with the things they need and the places where they’re cheapest and then just go from one place to the other. I said: “Yeah, that’s good and well, but the two of you are both retired, you do have the time, us, we both work full time”, something that everybody should easily agree with, right? Oh no, I was informed that this had nothing to do with retirement. This was just a matter of planning and priorities! You see, looking for the offers just takes 10-20 minutes! A lie, if I ever saw one. It takes about 20 minutes for us to make a normal shopping list and that’s with us having a whiteboard on the cupboard where we write down what we need already. Comparing different supermarket brochures to find the best offers and combinations would surely take at least twice as long, if not longer. And of course it’s then just 2 to 3, maximum 4 different shops! All across town, of course…

I kindly informed him that I’m so busy, if he tells me that I have to spend just one more hour on shopping a week, I will cry. That was met with baffled silence. Again, he’s not a bad guy. If you told him “I need you here” he’d drop everything and come running. But he is completely unable to even recognise his own privilege. If he can do it, so can everybody else! I’m pretty sure that he’d pout if I even mentioned the word “privilege”, and I think he’s the poster boy of the kind of old white men who will be literally literally the death of us.

Teacher’s Corner: Keep your paws off the holidays and buy those damn pencils

A drawing of a yellow school bus in front of a blue sky with the words "Back to School"

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ahhh, August. Summer, ice cream, ripe fruit … wasps and parents on social media.

There are two discussions on social media right now that I find highly problematic. One is as sure as the fruit fly invasion, the other one is relatively new, so let’s start with that one.

I saw complaints, on social media, in traditional media, usually from parents, that the school holidays are too long. This cry seems to be independent from the actual length of the summer holidays. Germany is towards the low end with 6 weeks, while Spain gets a whole three months. The complaint is that parents don’t have that many days off and that those long summer holidays are from a time when mothers stayed home.

Now, I fully understand that childcare is a problem for working parents. But really, forcing kids as young as 5 to conform to capitalism’s desire to control our lives? Is that the answer? Not to mention that the very same parents would then have two other problems:

First of all, not everybody can get days off from work at the same time. Not even in Europe. Already people have to coordinate with co workers. For years my husband and his colleague had to decide who’d get the first, and who’d get the last three weeks. No matter how long the holidays are, they’d only ever get half of them off, which means that either you and your spouse never get a holiday together, or you’d still be stuck with a childcare problem.

Second, family holidays are already expensive as fuck. Families are a captive audience, so to speak. Shorten the holidays, shorten the main season, see prices soar.

Which all leads me to the suspicion that they don’t actually want more education, they want childcare where they’re free to take the kids out of class for a holiday. And since they are all working under the false assumption that teachers have all those school breaks as paid time off, they want to punish us and make us “work like normal people”. But here’s a heads up: If we work like normal people, I will not call you, read or answer your emails or schedule an appointment after 4 pm or at the weekend. I will absolutely not grade at the weekend. Trips? Forget about it. A 4 days class trip is 60 unpaid hours. Oh, and I will take my days off when I want.

Also, how much do you actually hate your own kids? They made it through the year, they are exhausted, there’s a heat wave and you want them to sit in class and do homework? What parents should be asking for is cheap or free summer daycare*, but then poor kids might profit as well and I guess we can’t be having that. Instead parents demand that their kids be turned into good little workers.

*My kids had that in primary school and it was amazing. I could never have organised all those activities myself.

Imagine some clever way in which I linked the two topics here

Which leads me to the second part, the inevitable whining about school  supplies. Let me get my point clear before I continue: I’m the first person to demand that we finally properly finance education and also school supplies. Schools should get both the money and time to organise and buy the things needed, including exercise books, folders and pencils. But I guess until that moment, we’re stuck with the Karens on Instagram. (If we did, they’d probably complain about not liking the colour of the pencils).

What really annoys me about this discussion is that it takes away attention from actual issues with school supplies: They can be a huge burden for poor families, especially when a kid starts school. Every year I have to collect (as a teacher) and pay (as a parent) “photocopy money”, to pay for each and any copy  we make. On top of the usual supplies, this can be quite difficult, especially if you have more kids. I always inform my students to discreetly tell me if they need more time. I’ll then put my broad back between them and administration and take the blame for not handing the money in.

Another issue is that there are colleagues who do use this as a personal self fulfillment trip with seriously ridiculous demands. I once had a colleague who insisted on fountain pens in year 8. Like, WTF?

But all that justified criticism gets drowned out by the Karens and Sabines*, usually financially safe white women, crying about having to spend two hours shopping for supplies and another two hours with labelling them, if they care to do so. Why don’t the teachers do it???, they want to know. Well, maybe because you’re not paying me. Just a guess. Why would I spend even more unpaid hours and pay with my own money, hoping that in a couple of months you will deign to pay me back? I already spend more on supplies for other people’s kids than I spend on my own kids. And again, what message are you sending to your kid? That school and education are not your priority. That you don’t really care. Lady, that’s not a good look.

*Of course it’s not the Todds and Martins who do this because they don’t even know what year their kid is in.

To finish my rant, parents and their ever growing sense of entitlement are really the worst part of the job. So if you’re friends with a teacher, remember to keep them from social media in August and maybe give them some pencils.

Giliell goes electric part 2: I want to ride my bicycle

Bikes are great, there’s no doubt about it. They allow you to move relatively quickly with ease and are great exercise. Whenever you have a discussion about changing the way we go from A to B (because cars ARE a really inefficient way to do so), at least in Germany you’ll hear about the Netherlands and their cycling infrastructure. Which is great. And yes, better cycling infrastructure gets more people to cycle. But it’s also an undeniable truth that the Netherlands are mostly flat, while right here the only street names that don’t end in “hill” or “mountain” are those that end in “valley” or “vale”. If you think I’m kidding, I grew up in the “Eagle mountain street” and I now live in the “Oakwood vale”. Which means that cycling around here is great for exercise, but bad for transportation. My daily commute is 8km one way, uphill and downhill. Can I cycle 8km uphill and downhill? Absolutely! Am I presentable and able to work a full work day afterwards? Nope, no way. In comes the ebike and a program that makes leasing one a no brainer.

The ebike is a game changer in individual transportation. It allows people who are not super fit to use a bike as a means of transportation, riding comfortably without over exerting yourself and it allows fit people to expand their range. Also, there’s a program that’s called “job bike”: you choose an ebike and you lease it from a company. But your monthly payment is deducted from your gross salary, thereby reducing your taxes, so in the end you pay a lot less than the actual nominal fee. Now that I finally have a stable contract I qualify for the program and went on hunting for a bike.

There are two small independent sellers that participate in the program and one big sports chain. I went to all three of them, and in the end bought at the big chain. Not because of the price (though that also played a role), but because the people there who are salaried employees were the only ones who acted like they wanted to sell me a bike, while the owners at one of the small ones acted like I was wasting their time  while the other just couldn’t offer what I wanted.

Anyway, so here’s my new bike. I’ve done a test run to school and back. It takes 20minutes instead of 12 and is a comfortable ride, mostly on bike lanes. I just need to get out of “gym mode”, remembering that I actually don’t want to do a sweaty cardio workout. Now I need to convince the bosses that we need a decent teachers only bike rack.

Oh, and I’ve also run into my first “no good enougher” on the internet when talking about the bike. What’s a not good enougher? That’s somebody, usually a single male urban somebody, who will dismiss any and all small efforts you make to use less energy or produce less carbon dioxide as “not good enough”. You changed your combustion car for an EV? Why do you need a car anyway? The healthy single man living in an urban area an working from home doesn’t, so neither do you? You made a nice vegan meal using vegan minced meat? Why do you use “ultra processed food”? You got an ebike? No healthy person needs electric support! You know the type, right? Amazingly, they’re rarely working mums, unless their job is social media. They move goalposts so fast you’d think that the speed of light was getting envious.

But they won’t spoil my fun. Financially this won’t save me a dime, but it will hopefully be fun and still provide some additional exercise. We do what we can and recognise that not all things are for everybody.

Adolescence, mini series, a review (Spoilers, of course)

Image of a young boy in the froeground. In the background you have a middle aged white man on the left and a similarly aged black man on the right. All look straight towards the viewer

Copyright: Netflix

After hearing all about it, I watched the Netflix mini series. It was hyped to be about how the internet turns young boys into misogynists, about Incels and the manosphere. I was hoping for some actual content about these matters for so far uneducated people, and boy was I disappointed. In the end, I watched it so you can do something better with your time.

Episode 1: The crime (not actual titles)

The series starts with the police storming the house of the Miller family early in the morning, arresting their 13 years old son, who promptly pees himself. Why that arrest needed to be made in this frankly brutal and disturbing way is beyond me, except to frame the boy as a kid, scared, in his PJs, in his nice little single family home. You know, somebody you should feel sorry for. Afterwards everybody is really decent towards him, calming him down, treating him kindly. If you don’t know the premise yet, you’re wondering what is actually the matter here. The episode deals mostly with the legal shenanigans, who is going to be his “responsible adult” (his dad), getting a lawyer, collecting evidence, etc, until we come to the questioning. The boy is questioned on the murder of a girl from his class, where he had been the night before, etc. His dad asks him when they’re alone if he has done anything and he steadfastly denies any wrongdoing. Then the DI shows the CCTV where you can clearly see him stab the girl to death. At this point, it still could have become a decent series, and I will say that both acting and directing the story that they chose to tell is superb, especially by Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie, the young murderer.  The episode ends with the shocked father laying down flowers at the place where the murder happened and the viewer is now left with the question of “why”.

 

Episode 2: The investigation

This is where the show turns sour to my taste. In this episode the DI (male, the guy in the picture on the right) and the DS (female, of course) visit Jamie’s school to find out why this happened, to talk to his friends and classmates. The two adults stumble cluelessly through the comprehensive school from hell, where kids are just on their phones all the time and the teachers just leave them alone don’t even bother teaching anymore (while for some reason the building is nice and clean). I know, teaching and schools are in a crisis, in the UK as much as elsewhere, but come on. But it sets a pretty contrast to the orderly loving home. Obviously, if anything went wrong it must be here, rather than at home. We get to know the victims best friend, the angry black girl, we get to know Jamie’s friends, but in the end the DI’s estranged son who coincidentally goes to the same school tells his dad about the online codes in the exchanges between Jamie and his victim, only that here the idea is that she bullied him online, calling him an incel. This should have been the point where the series dove deep into the toxic masculinity of the online world, into a world where Andrew Tate poisons the minds of young boys and men. But instead we’re left wondering how Katie, the victim, was nasty to poor Jamie. This another one of the big shortcomings: The victim remains mostly faceless. She is a prop for the storytelling. We get a glimpse at her through her best friend, but that’s it. After this episode, she is hardly mentioned again, nor is the impact that her death has on her friends and family. We get to know more about the DI and his relationship (if you can call it that) to his son, his thoughts and feelings, than about the victim. The DS is clearly just there to give the man somebody to talk to (not so much with). Her character remains flat as a piece of paper. The episode ends with the DI taking his son out for lunch, apparently in an attempt to make up for his previous neglect. We never see any of these people again.

Episode 3: The psychologist

This episode is the one where we’re somewhat dealing with toxic masculinity. Jamie is in a holding centre for youths, awaiting his trial. A psychologist visits him, to write a report for the trial. This is not the first visit, nor is she the first psychologist. Of course this psychologist is female. She brings him hot chocolate with marshmallows and tries to talk to him about the men in his life and about masculinity. When pushed on the issue Jamie, who still denies having committed the crime despite being on video, becomes violent, throws items, and frankly enjoys scaring the psychologist. This is the one where we actually see who he is: an angry young man who enjoys hurting women, who has zero remorse or accountability. He accidentally confesses his crime, only to walk it back again. We learn that his victim was also a victim of revenge porn and that he had approached her, saying that since she was damaged goods already, she might as well hook up with him, but her rejection was what made him finally kill her.  I consider this the best episode. It dealt well with how he is, but again, it leaves the question of how he became like that completely unanswered.

Episode 4: The dad

Infuriating in missing the mark. The episode deals with the Miller family and how they’re dealing with the situation. Did I say the Miller family? I meant the Miller dad. This episode shows how the producers actually avoided any and all critical thinking on masculinity. While they want to celebrate the father’s 50’s birthday, they discover that somebody sprayed “nonce” on the father’s van. From this moment on, the whole family has to deal with his rage and mother and daughter are busy handling his mood and emotions. They appease him at every single turn. And while his rage might make the viewer uncomfortable, it is also shown in a sympathetic way. The poor man is under such a lot of stress, the poor man is breaking. What about his wife? What about his daughter? How do they deal with being known as the murderer’s family? Especially the teenage daughter? We don’t find out because those two are so damn busy doing the emotional labour of handling the father’s emotions. At one point the parents actually talk about what has happened and how they had thought that their son was safe when he was in his room with his computer. The mother mentions that unlike her husband, she sometimes still can’t believe it, because unlike him, she hasn’t seen that video, and the father has the damn audacity that it should have been her in that room. That one time when his son actually asked for his support, when he needed to be present, he wishes that he could have dumped that burden on his wife as well. The series ends there. During the episode we get to know that Jamie is finally pleading “guilty”, but we don’t know what brought on this change, whether it was him finally taking responsibility, or him hoping for a lesser sentence.

In the end, it’s a series by men, about men, for men. That promotional image I posted at the top pretty much says it all. There’s 4 episodes, each one centred around one character, and the one woman is missing. It never critically investigates online culture and communities. It completely fails to understand the link between the dad’s casual violence and entitlement to female emotional labour, and the son’s brutal misogyny. It frames this discourses as something that happens to boys, instead of something that is perpetrated by boys. It touches on revenge porn, but then tosses the topic aside quickly, not caring about the mostly female victims. It fails to investigate communities and family structures. My friend has a son, and she liked it and was so worried about her son becoming like that, without her being able to do anything about it, as if it was a sentence handed down by god that your son has to end up in the manosphere with the parents being unable to do anything about it. It hits different when you are a mother of two teenage girls who would be blamed for her on deaths because they were not nice enough to some creepy boy.

Teacher’s Corner: It’s Ramadan

I am a life-long atheist. I didn’t have to deconvert  and I’d go as far as saying that I’m anti theist, because I do think that religion is a net evil in the world. But here and now I share the planet mostly with religious people and for the majority of my teaching career I’ve been teaching at schools with large Muslim populations, so I’m well used to the month of Ramadan, where Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. Thankfully, it’s moving backwards in the year, now being in early spring and no longer in the middle of summer. Those years were pretty hard. I won’t say I’m a fan of children not eating and especially not drinking, but I also understand that it’s important for the kids. Where religion takes a backseat for most of Germany’s Christians, it’s still at the centre of most Muslim children’s identity, especially of those who arrived from Syria in recent years. It’s not just religion, it’s a piece of home.

With that in mind, it’s important to me to support my students, all my students, in growing into the best version of themselves and they can only do that when they’re feeling safe, accepted and respected. We’re talking a lot about teaching kids respect and tolerance, but many colleagues simply don’t do that themselves.

I took over a year 5 ethics class* four measly weeks ago, and this week the Muslim kids practically ambushed me during break because of one of my colleagues. During class, one of the Muslim kids had not felt well and was tired. The teacher asked him what was up, he said he was fasting, and she turned around and audibly murmured about “victim religion”, which greatly upset the kids. How, I mean how on earth can you do that to kids? Does she think that any learning was happening after that remark? And most of all, does she think those kids will trust her when she tries to teach them about humanist values? In my experience, if you turn it into an “either your religion or being part of our community” situation, their religion wins. From that point on, any new idea will be seen as an attack on their faith. Also, they’re children. They’re still closely linked to their families of origin. If you bring them into conflict with their families, you put them in a position they shouldn’t be in.

Also, in my experience, if you treat them with respect, you can set some ground rules that will be accepted. My rule is that we don’t comment on how another person practises their faith. If or when to fast, or wear a hijab, varies greatly between groups and populations, and I especially don’t need any competition about who’s the best Muslim. I tell them that if Allah is almighty, he doesn’t need 5th graders to do his work. This works well for me. They understand that this rule protects them as much as it binds them. They know that their way is accepted and tolerated, and in return they tolerate others. That’s how you actually teach those values, and not by insulting 10 year olds who can’t argue back.

 

  • In Germany school must provide religious education for Catholics and Lutheran protestants. If you don’t belong to those groups, you get ethics class. I teach them quite a lot and like them pretty well.