‘Little bitch’: the shocking reality of teaching teenage boys

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‘What am I meant to do, go and say sorry like a little bitch?” said the 15-year-old boy sitting beside me in a quiet room halfway through the school day. He had refused to apologise to his classroom teacher for his disruption of her lesson. It had been insidious, low-level nuisance stuff: he’d been swinging on his chair, answering back and wouldn’t stop talking.
I’m a senior pastoral leader within a comprehensive school in southwest England, so students are often sent my way when there’s a stalemate. What was depressingly clear was that this child’s refusal to apologise was connected to the fact that his teacher was a woman, and saying sorry would mean that he, a male, would lose face.
I can’t overstate the influence of social media influencers in school. TikTok is the worst offender. The nuance of what they’re watching is repeated in the classroom. Phrases and memes “trend”: it’s cries of alpha (dominant), beta (weak), sigma (cool); it’s shouting “pussy” in the corridor.
What may surprise you is that the school I work in is highly regarded and serves an affluent community. These are the children of doctors and professionals. Yet there is a huge disconnect between what the parents believe their kids are watching and their actual online lives.
We’re meant to be a phone-free school, which should mean that students do not access their phones during the day; phones are in bags and they’re not allowed to get them out. But the reality is that they go to the toilets to be on their phones or are quietly messaging under the table while more oblivious teachers are otherwise engaged.
We’ve got staff who have been at the school for decades and they are shocked by this new defiance, which they’re ill-equipped to deal with. We have record numbers of teachers leaving, fatigued by the levels of disruption to their lessons from repeat offenders. I started teaching 20 years ago and I’ve never seen this level of boisterous uninterest in what female staff have to say.
• The school that locks phones away
Recently, I reminded one boy in a larger group of boys to put his tie on at the beginning of the school day. He went to do this immediately, but as he did so, his friend called him “beta” for listening to me, a member of staff with not insignificant authority but a woman nonetheless. When I challenged the second boy on this attitude, his response was one of arrogance, chest puffed and eyes darting about as I spoke to him as he tried to gauge the impact his defiance was having on his peers.
I felt that perhaps, when taken away and spoken to in a quieter moment, he could see reason and half-engaged with my explanation of why this was wrong. But what a difficult line to walk, when I know that he spends up to six hours a day watching shorts of angry men explaining why we shouldn’t listen to women, and I am the woman who is reinforcing everything they say by telling the pupil he is wrong.
This is not just typical teen behaviour: boys playing football will step in line quickly when reminded not to tackle hard, the boys in the dining hall will apologise when they are reminded not to raise their voices to unreasonable levels. Instead, this is a sub-group across each of our year groups, performing behaviours that are all the more alarming because of the ways they mirror each other. Video footage of the recent riots across the UK — in which boys as young as 12 were involved — were all the more depressing because they looked so familiar to me: groups of boys egging each other on in damaging ways.
I had a lesson recently where Andrew Tate was mentioned by a boy who remarked on all the cars and money he seemed to have as a reason that he was someone to emulate. One of the girls tried to cut in and say, “But you do understand that he’s a bad person?” And the boy said, “Well, you can’t say that; he’s doing pretty well for himself.” At this point I added, “He’s also someone awaiting trial for sexual offences. And I think we’re going to shut this conversation down.” Wealth equals good in class, with little regard for how it is achieved.
• How did Andrew Tate, king of toxic masculinity, make so much money?
In discussions with these specific boys I ask them about their aspirations. Many of them articulate that they want to be “rich and have nice cars” by being entrepreneurs. When I dig into this, they seem to believe that an MLM scheme (multi-level marketing, otherwise known as pyramid selling), drop-shipping or gaming will make this a reality for them. I have quite a few students who say they’re trading already. Cryptocurrency, I believe. They simply say they’re trading and are as young as 14. The value and necessary endeavour of hard work seems to be lost on these boys. And as for the counterpart girls to this set of boys, their aspiration is simply to have wealthy husbands.
It’s not all bad. As kids mature through their GCSE years, many start to engage with a wider range of voices, as students always do. And some do come out the other side as balanced individuals. Most will go to university and are expected to get good grades on A-level results day tomorrow. Inevitably, though, there are students we lose, students whose views cannot be changed.
For most schools, mine included, the problem year group at the moment are the students who are going to be in Year 11 next month. They’re the students who never transitioned properly, having started secondary school in bubbles during strict post-lockdown conditions, so never had that sense of pecking order going into a whole new school environment. They weren’t socialised in their communities, nor were they policed by adults other than their parents, which young people need. They spent the most time online at a point when it probably had the most impact on them as developing young people.
• I’m a digital native — can I survive without my smartphone?
Now the problem is that most of us adults are two steps behind and not equipped to understand the speed at which TikTok videos trend. By the time we’ve gleaned what one phrase means, it has been deemed no longer “cool” by Year 8 and we’re locked out of the conversation.
“Miss, do you think I am a sigma?” one child asked me recently, to much sniggering from his peers. Sigma, as I didn’t know at the time, meant popular but also silently rebellious. In those lags of understanding between students and staff, ideas become deeply rooted, rabbit holes are explored and significant damage is done, for we cannot establish informed discussion.
What I can tell you, from the coalface, is that for young men to succeed through school and beyond they need to believe they can do well, feel a deep sense of belonging within their classrooms and, most crucially, feel respected by the staff in front of them. Too many male students I’ve spoken to have articulated that the thing that most bothers them about learning is the sense that their teacher does not like them.The writer has chosen to remain anonymous