Extracts from: I am a teacher. Get me out of here

Francis Gilbert, Short Books 2004

The two students who speak below, Fotik and Abbas, are both teenagers from the Sylhet area of Bangladesh and both go to a State school in UK. Are they typical of immigrant students all over the world in having lived through experiences that few of their host country class mates have? Do such experiences make them into more mature human beings than many of their host country counterparts?

Fotik: I remember Grandpa picking snakes out of a bucket. He smelt of wet, muddy fields and always carried around a long gnarled stick, which he called his wand. He would poke and investigate the snakes with the stick, talking to them, soothing them, laughing with them. I would go with him to market to sell the snakes. The women always said he sold the freshest snakes in Sylhet. They would ask him to kill them before their very own eyes so that they could be sure the snake was fresh, then they would take them home and make snake curry with them. Snake makes a good fishy-tasting curry. I would recommend it. But you don't have it here in England; you will have to go to Bangladesh for that.

Abbas: There was burning. The smell of burning. I was screaming. I can remember feeling the scorching of the fire; it felt like it was eating up my arm like some hungry monster. The house was on fire. Some soldiers had decided that it might be fun to set our house alight. I watched them laughing as the dry wattle roof and floor of our bedroom burned. My mother didn't cry but seeing that I was hurting she picked me up and jumped out of the window. The soldiers carried on laughing but they didn't shoot at us with their rifles. My father had gone. I don't know what happened to him. After that we didn't go back to the house but kept moving, always moving on.

Commenting on the above texts and others he collected, Francis Gilbert writes

It took a lot of effort to get this information out of the students - they didn't volunteer it freely. They had no conception that what had happened to them might be of interest to a wider audience, but were clearly impressed when I typed up their stories and put them in their coursework folders. A year later, when the school was inspected, the inspectors commended these autobiographies. Well, maybe I had ghost written them - but I felt as if they were genuine pieces of work.

During that tem, Figgis invented a unit of work called " EastEnders: myth and reality". This involved showing his class a few episodes of EastEnders and getting them to analyse the plot-lines of the show, the characters and the themes. Figgis then asked the class to think of the characters living in their own neighbourhood and to write about them. The class then filled individual charts trying to match the characters in the TV show with their real-life counterparts. Finally, the class, after quite a bit of discussion, wrote an essay about whether EastEnders reflected the reality of their own lives.
The whole exercise brought home to me just what a miserable sham of a show EastEnders was. It had absolutely nothing to do with these kids' lives; it was about as much a reflection of their lives as Dallas was.
I was surprised about how resigned the kids were about this; there was a sadness in the way they would say to me that they couldn't expect anyone to write about their lives. Quite a few kids saw the work as just another piece of school work, but a couple didn't. one of these was Hakim. As the lessons progresses he seemed to become more and more involved in the work; he stopped jeering and sniggering at Figgis, stopped making silly jokes and got out his pen and wrote. I read his essay. It was clear that he was very angry.
"No one is interested in the Bengalis in England. EastEndersis a joke. It has no Bengali people in it. It has Indians in it but they are not the sort of Indians who live in the East End," he said to me. "It pretends to be about the East End but it is a lie. Why are we always ignored? All that happens is that we get grief; the police cuss us, the white people cuss us, they make us go to shit schools and live in shit flats"
I tried to calm him down by saying that it was up to him to change things, to get his qualifications and to write a new and better TV show that would tell the truth. But this seemed to depress him. He waved me away with his hand. "I'm not going to get anything here. You know that. Don't say this shit to me," he said bitterly.
These words scorched me and I left him alone to write his furious piece.