Leave us alone!

It is probably not good form to resurrect this blog after 4 months' silence whilst in a towering rage. Me in a towering rage is not a pretty sight. It's a good way to get writing, though. And both men and women need to read about this.

I love London. It's my home. I hope to spend much of my life here. But there's one thing I hate, that I've never had to deal with so much of before, and that's the repeated street harrassment. Nearly every time I leave the house to go to the shops, or get on the bus or train, you can guarantee that some man is going to yell something across the street at me, or come right up close to me and behave as if I owe it to him to be intimate. It's a matter of celebration when I can leave the house and come back without this happening.

It's not just London, of course. Trains in Wales are particularly irksome. On my way back here, a couple of guys sitting near me started asking me perfectly friendly questions - about how long it was to various stations,  what book I was reading, what I thought about the Big Bang etc. - all of which was fine; great, in fact. Then one of them sprang up, sat next to me, snatched my book, and started reading it out in a twelve-year-old school bully sort of voice. It promptly descended to the pair of them chanting at me and generally behaving like schoolchildren who know they're going to get away with poking and hitting me all the way through Assembly, because I can't move and nobody's going to stop them. I ended up carrying all my stuff to a different seat and telling the conductor, who just said "they're getting off at the next stop" and went away. I felt so mortified and self-conscious - there was another big chatty group of people nearby, who I think knew what was going on and certainly stared at me when I moved and spoke to the conductor - but hadn't a word to say. I wanted so desperately to hide. It was me who got stared at, me who had to take the action, me on whom all the responsibility fell.

That wasn't the worst incident, though. On another journey a few years ago to see my then boyfriend, a huge crowd of drunken rugby fans got on, and one man sat next to me. He kept asking me where I was going, did I have a boyfriend etc. I told him yes I did and kept my answers monosyllabic, because his manner made me uncomfortable. My looking out of the window, reading a book, etc., did nothing to deter his questions and reinforced his demanding, hurt tone. Finally I pretended to go to sleep. When I opened my eyes a few minutes later I jumped out of my skin to find he had angled his body so his mouth was right in front of mine ready to kiss me. (My face was pointed downwards before you ask.) There was nothing I could do. My voice had gone. No conductor could get through the crowds. If I yelled, his rugby mates would be the first witnesses. I just sprang to my feet (and had to climb over him) and got off the train as soon as I could.

In London, what usually happens is that two guys walking in the street, or standing on a doorstep, will call "hello darling" or "come here, girlie" or "Oi! Blondie!" at me. This is annoying, but I can ignore them and hope they don't follow me. Sometimes it'll be someone alone. One frightening incident was where another large man ran up to me while I was walking up the street, fell into step with me, told me off for walking too fast for him, boasted to me for a while about how he earned £50,000 a year, and then asked me out for a drink with him. When I said thank you very much, but no thanks, he followed me into the train station (which I hadn't been planning to go to) and asked me why not in the most expectant manner. Panicking, I lied that I had a boyfriend, and dashed through the ticket barriers and went a couple of stops away. It wasn't his words that bothered me, but his taking for granted that I simply had to say yes. I thought he'd drag me along and do what he liked to me. The other day, I was walking home, carrying a couple of shopping bags, looking at the ground and having a bit of a happy giggle to myself about an earlier conversation that day (do you ever notice people doing that? I love it when someone in the street spontaneously smiles or giggles, and I know they're thinking about something nice). Suddenly someone's face appeared about three inches in front of mine and he hissed "HELLO SWEETHEART!". As with all the other incidents, I was just startled into complete silence. I had no answer ready. The happiness was knocked out of me. I went home angry and frightened, feeling like I was at school again where I had no right to be safe from the bullies, keeping my head low but wondering if anyone knew where I lived or was following me home.

Fair enough, none of these incidences led to me actually being assaulted. They're nothing compared to what some of my friends have gone through. I used to get worse in horrible school discos where being groped and boys getting angry not to be kissed was part of the package. But they're a crap way to live your life. They make me wary and angry. They make me feel that because I'm female, I'm collective property and automatically available. The way a lot of them look at me - as if I do them wrong - suggests that they hold me personally responsible for their feelings, and that I owe them something. I just never know what they might do. They seem to think they have the automatic right to say what they like to me - what else do they think they have the right to do?

It gave me a sudden memory of when my sister and I were very small, too young to understand about these things, and our mum explaining such an incident to us. All we saw was that she suddenly stopped to talk to someone in the street, as boring grown-ups do. When we walked on, she calmly told us: "He tried to cuddle up to me, so I made him tell me where [something, I forget what] was, and then I made him leave me alone." Her voice, echoing in my brain, sounded sad and resigned. She had had to talk to him, she had had to be touched by him with two toddlers in tow, and she was putting a brave face on it.

The worst part is that I can't think of anything to do to improve the situation. I could yell at them, but that takes more guts than I've got and would just draw more attention to me and doubtless get me blamed - I doubt any members of the public would leap to my rescue. I can keep my head down and run away, which is what I generally do, but that indicates to them that they can get away with it and will keep doing it. There's no teacher on playground duty in the adult world.

But that's the thing. I am female and as such I am, by many, held responsible. (Check this if you don't believe this happens.)It's supposedly up to me to find some way to deal with this stuff. Never mind that it's nothing to do with being in the wrong place at the wrong time - that all these incidents occurred in public in broad daylight, not down some dark alley where respectable girls don't go. Never mind that they all occurred when I was thoroughly covered in jeans and coat and scruffy flat shoes - one time in the pouring rain with my hood up covering my hair and most of my face. Never mind that I don't wear make-up, or that the one time I did walk through London in a short dress, I was terrified the whole time and wished I hadn't worn it, but apart from a random tourist striking up an annoyingly long chat, I was left alone. Never mind that it also happens to a lady I know who is over fifty and exceedingly modest - even while she's riding her bicycle. There are many perceptions that it's down to how a woman looks or dresses, that it must be her fault.

I've written about blaming the victim before. It's a problem. It's a similar problem in cases of domestic violence, where it's very common to find bizarre ways to blame the woman or to somehow absolve the man (usually, though certainly not always, the perpetrator) of responsibility - "he just needs to feel better about himself", for example, when in fact his problem is that he does not see his partner as having the same rights as he does. (I strongly recommend my friend Natalie's posts about this issue. She's on Twitter as @God_Loves_Women. I'm not remotely religious but I really admire her and recommend you follow her!) It's all part of thinking that because someone's female, you can treat her how you like - and this gets woven into law, and her rights seen as incompatible with other people's, where such attitudes prevail.

All this is so sad for men as well as women. Most men I know are angry and upset to hear of me and other women being catcalled or otherwise harrassed. They worry about this happening to their female relatives and friends. They know it's not civilised and they would never do such a thing. (In fact, one man said he finds men who do such things intimidating, too.) Nobody's said so directly, but I suspect some men may worry about asking out a woman they like, for fear of being thought of one of the catcallers. They feel guilty on behalf of their own sex, which is awful. (Incidentally, both Rhys and Lee are currently fundraising for charities that work to improve things for women!) It's similar to the men who came along to the She is an Astronomer conference and are only too keen for more women to rise high in science. I hope nobody reading this thinks this blog is to criticise men!

I have a bad habit, by the way. I quite often explode on Twitter. Actually, Twitter's an excellent place to explode, because it moves so fast, the subject can move on when you've calmed down. And far more often than not people will check in and see if you're OK rather than put you down about it, and it's relatively anonymous. When I exploded recently about the man who hissed straight into my face, I got I think it must have been dozens of supportive messages. But when I came back home yesterday and tweeted "Something LOVELY happened today. I went into town and was not catcalled once!!! :-)" the point was, shall we say, not well understood.

One guy asked me: "What? Are you a supermodel?" and a couple more replied to the effect that this must mean I'm beautiful. I thanked them, I hope graciously and modestly, but assured them that I am not and that this was nothing to do with it. Being catcalled is nothing to do with appearance, and it is not a compliment. Unfortunately, I was not believed by all . . .

These are the nicer exchanges that took place. (Update: I had some screenshots here, with name, avatar and Twitter handle blanked out, but on reflection decided that was cruel. This person doesn't seem angry with me despite earning some furious replies from my followers. Please don't look for him. It took a long time to convince him that what was going on was not flattering or harmless, but it turned out to be genuine ignorance on his part. He deleted a lot of his tweets which were to the effect that it doesn't happen to ugly girls, so it should be seen as a "morale booster". These made me so angry - I am not Samantha Brick, I do not feel better if some random man thinks of me as better quality prey than another woman - that I unkindly retweeted him, and he got a LOT of stick. If you're reading this, Anon, I felt I should apologise for you getting all that stick, but I was stubborn and didn't want to go back on my point. And by the way, I'm sure you're not ugly.)

When asked if it was a good thing that I wasn't catcalled, and I said that it usually happens is bad and that it didn't happen today is good, his reaction was that "as an ugly bloke" he'd love to have such an obvious indicator that he was attractive, and that it was surely a good thing to happen to you. He felt that he couldn't relate to it since no women have pounced on him this way, and that not being a roadworker or builder, he wasn't a catcaller, and couldn't speak for them. (This was only a small part of the exchange.) The perception was that catcalling is something that a burly, practical, rather stupid class of males do, and that it constitutes shouting "you're beautiful" to beautiful girls, who prink and preen gleefully, and probably just continue on their way, feeling superior to other women and thus happy.

To give him his due, he admitted he had had no idea what it's really like and had learnt something new! And it definitely isn't like that. We get called intimate things by strangers, and are spoken to as if we are their property and should follow their orders. They violate our privacy and our space and our feeling of being able to leave the house safely. We look hysterical if we get upset, and everything we do makes it worse, and then it's our own fault for how we look or dress or just for being there among the world of men. We feel angry, helpless, humiliated, and alone.

Stellar, who was honked at six times within one minute when venturing into town last week (and has also had to put up with such things as men following her, and a bus driver saying "nice tits" when she was just a young teenager), joined the conversation, pointing out at the right time that it's not what a woman wears that causes the harrassment . . .

Then this person came along, who a) has had their account suspended, and b) whose anonymity I will make absolutely no effort to preserve:

 She replied calmly, as did NathanielBB. He wasn't having any . . .

I lost it.

I had actually tweeted this guy a few examples of very modestly dressed women who'd been harrassed, so as you can see, his attitude was "My mind's made up, don't confuse me with facts".

He may have just been a troll, but sadly what he says is hideously representative of what needs explaining. Again and again and again. Happily, it was cause for much celebration from several people when his account was suspended (it turned out it wasn't just me he was arguing with!).

I had the good fortune to be sent some excellent links by fellow Twitterers. "ihollaback", a site all about street harrassment in London, was tweeted to me by Becky (whose work I hope to write about in a later blogpost). Mike sent me this post he wrote about what "consent" means and is often taken to mean, which attracted some bizarre comments. Speaking of consent, this "Driver's Ed" on sexual consent, at Scarleteen, is excellent! Sent by Lee.) And Esther reminded me of @mencanstoprape, found at "Men Can Stop Rape", which is not the same thing I know (part of the same attitude, though, just a lot worse), which contains this delightful picture with which I shall leave you . . .

To fellow women this happens to, I support you. To fellow women free of it, it should always be this way. To men who disapprove and support us, and equally to men who did not know it was a problem but are open to finding out it is, thank you - you are not the problem but the solution, you shouldn't feel bad, and we need you all.

So you want to start a Skeptics in the Pub?

Two years ago, when still living in Wales, I learned of the existence of Skeptics in the Pub. Crispian Jago made it possible for me to go along to one with the fabulous "Jourdemayne", and I was instantly hooked.

As soon as I got into the "skeptical circle", a common cry was: "Why isn't there a Skeptics in the Pub anywhere in Wales?" which promptly progressed to: "Why don't you start one?" Because I didn't have a clue how, that was why! . . .

. . . well, eighteen months after that I found myself co-founder of both Cardiff and Hackney Skeptics - with Dean Burnett and James Robson respectively, and obviously I could never in a million years have done either without them - and occasionally am one of the criers of "Set one up in Place X!" to other people. So it occurs to me that I really ought to write about how to go about it.

It's pretty simple. You need: a venue, a projector, a screen, a microphone, a collaborator, some speakers and an audience.

There is of course no right and wrong recipe for a Skeptics in the Pub; you can vary the ingredients, adjust the baking time and present as whatever dish you please. So this recipe comes with a strong pinch of NaCl and plenty of freedom to suit your tastes. Just be sure to grease the pan with enough C2H5OH for your audience's liking (that can in fact be none, if they are not drinkers).

(Incidentally, these measurements are in imperial, not metric. That is, groups and accounts listed are British, not worldwide. There are worldwide groups, however, and if you are not in the UK I recommend getting in touch with them.)

Whilst Still Thinking . . .

If you're not already a regular somewhere, get a feel for what Skeptics in the Pub actually does. Check out what events are taking place (scroll down Simon Perry's website and check the "Events" table on the bottom right), see when a bunch of interesting looking ones are occurring, and take a few days off work and travel around the country. Talk to the organisers and to visitors.

Before you start . . .

Get your prospective Skeptics its own e-mail address. You will end up needing it for the following as well as to keep it organised and separate from everything else in your life.

This sounds trite, but set up a Facebook group. Call it something like "Skeptics in the Pub in...." [your local area]. If possible, don't be too restrictive about what your local area is. I chose "Wales" as an umbrella term, since I didn't know where it was going to be. Let the skeptical community know and ask them to join - post on their walls. (Here are Cardiff's and Hackney's if that helps. Search around with "Skeptics" and "SITP" and so on in the Search box.) Like as not you will find various people who come along saying "Oh I've been longing for one of these round here!" I actually didn't "do" Facebook until I thought I might try it out for the very purpose of setting this up, and was actually pleasantly surprised by the effectiveness of groups, if not the intelligence of some conversations. Still, if you most absolutely do not do Facebook, you probably have a friend who does.

Start a Twitter account. This is pretty simple. Tweet to the generic SITP account and do a Skeptics search and follow a bunch of people.

Important: personally, there's no way I could set up a Skeptics in the Pub by myself, so if you're like me, let people know you are looking for collaborators. (You don't have to say "yes" to anybody!) Of course, if you can do it by yourself, no need!

And, especially, contact Simon Perry (@Simon_Perry on Twitter) who has the keys to the master website. This is where you will be able to put up events. Make sure that the "contact form" goes to your SITP e-mail address, not to your personal one, or you will end up flooded if it's successful! Keep a special folder handy on your computer for all the speakers' pictures and any documents and fliers you make.

If anybody discourages you at any point, please read this. Apparently it's been helpful.

Choosing a Venue

Your ideal venue possesses all of the following characteristics:

- A separate function room;

- Wherever guests sit, they need a good view of where the slides will be;

- Be calm and friendly;

- Be fairly quiet - not go in for loud music, at least not while you're talking;

- Sound and projector equipment for talks (you'd be surprised how many pubs have these);

- Be near a train station and car park;

- Serve a variety of drinks and do food until relatively late;

- Smell nice;

- Be licensed for under-18s;

- Have staff who are all in favour of a regular meeting taking place;

- Not want all their customers to get raging drunk;

- Be clean and well looked after;

- Have disabled access;

- Have an awful lot of spare chairs;

- Not charge you

I don't think I've yet found anywhere with all these characteristics! When it's a pub that isn't looking to hold drunken discos, but rather maintains a mature, civilised atmosphere and welcomes some guaranteed income on a weeknight, that's the main thing. One pub said they would charge us £100 for the evening unless they made £500 off our audience. I don't know if they did make that, but after our first night they never mentioned charging us again, so they must be pretty happy with us!

If the bar staff are unfriendly or uninterested, if the manager doesn't seem keen on the idea, don't go anywhere near the place. Also, if it's loud or dirty, steer clear. If it doesn't serve food, look up nearby outlets that do.

Strictly speaking, the venue doesn't actually have to be a pub. (I once received an objection that holding it in a pub excluded people whose religious faiths forbade them to enter pubs, which of course is a problem!) Hackney, for instance, is an attic rather than a pub!

I have to confess, this isn't my strong point because Dean and James found the venues in our cases. When I arrived on the scene at Hackney, James had already found our attic. Dean however took me round Cardiff for a day of surveying eight different places. Both of us wore science T-shirts, making it the nerdiest pub crawl that had ever taken place in Cardiff. I cannot more strongly recommend a day of such a pub crawl, or a read of his blogpost about it.

What Day?

Most Skeptics in the Pubs run on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday night. And most run regularly, such as the second Thursday of the month, or what have you. (Cardiff is the third Monday of each month, and Hackney the last Monday.)

Make a list of the nearest Skeptics in the Pubs to yours - or even all of them, if you have time - and write down when they are. Put them into a table and pick a day when you don't clash. (Sadly this is difficult in London!)

Monday is a very popular night, since it's an especially quiet night for pubs. I could not recommend a weekend night less. Pubs will be having other, noisier things to do then. So, probably, will your guests and speakers.

Check what is a good day for the pub, too. If they always hold a bingo night or a Happy Hour on Wednesdays, or invite bands along on Tuesdays, avoid this day.

I must apologise here to James, who had to change our day from Tuesday to Monday (and thus risk clashing with Westminster and London) because I have lectures on Tuesday nights. Well, he was crazy enough to take me on board as a co-founder . . .

Finding Speakers

You need to pick a few speakers well before you launch. In fact, I'd personally say always leave a few months between launching in cyberspace and launching in real life!

Pick a variety of different subjects - do not confine it all to one of, say, politics/the supernatural/alternative medicine/science. Don't shout out too loud that you are looking for speakers if you aren't prepared to cope with some possible slightly odd offers. If one of the talks you've seen seems to hit the perfect note, as Simon Perry's did for me for Cardiff's launch, then contact that speaker.

Handy resources: the 21st Floor's List of Speakers and Hayley Stevens's She Talks. (Sadly the vast majority of Skeptics in the Pub speakers are male. You can decide for yourself whether or not you want to make a special effort to encourage women, or more young people or more ethnic minorities or what have you along.)

It's good to kick off with somebody fairly well-known - but these people may be very busy, and may also charge you a lot (not all of them, but some do!). Don't start off with a string of people coming from far away, as the travel expenses and staying over will come to a lot. If you're lucky enough to have a "local hero", make sure you snag them!

Advertising

So, you have your venue and plans - your Skeptics in the Pub is cooking! Now you want as many guests as possible!

I read a document - which I have since been unable to find - that your launch night sets the tone, and if only 8 people turn up to it, you're unlikely to have arranged much of a kick-off. I commented earlier that you should wait a few months between launching on the Internet and in real life. Pick a good time to launch: if it's just before Christmas or during the summer, everybody's going to be too busy. We timed Cardiff to kick off alongside the academic year to pull the students in. (In some places, students make up a large proportion of your attendees. In other places, there are virtually no students. It depends.) You may wish to include some fun gimmick for your launch such as a raffle or a competition to see who can come up with the most ridiculous idea for something or other.

When you've got your day, set it up as a Facebook event. Invite all your friends you think won't be offended. (Sadly, some will!) Tweet both the website event and the Facebook event like crazy. Mention it every day or two, at different times. Ask famous skeptics for a retweet. Don't hassle or spam anyone, but don't be embarrassed to say something you've already said this week.

Promote yourself through a variety of sources. Approach local newspapers. In fact, if you google "local newspaper [whatever area you live in]", you may come up with several more local rags than you even knew existed! Look for their contact forms and their events pages. List yours as an event. Write them a short note with some exciting or weird information - which the events are likely to contain! Put in very clearly what Skeptics in the Pub is. I personally like to explain that it's not about yelling "I don't believe you!" but that it is from the Greek word "Skepticos" meaning "to enquire or find out" - this was inspired by a beautiful interview with D J Groethe, which Tannice from Guildford Skeptics sent me.

You may well also find the council lists local events - add this. Approach the local radio (if you have any mates or mates of mates in radio or media, all the better). Print off some fliers - they can be hilarious or they can be very simple - and distribute them round shops, pubs, museums, libraries. Personally I feel very foolish and rude doing this. I have learned to have a look round, and then go up to whoever's behind the counter, smile very nicely, and ask if you can add your flier to their collection. If the person is remotely nice, invite them along!

Even supermarkets often have a "community noticeboard". I felt a particular satisfaction in placing an advert for Hackney Skeptics in my local Sainsbury's alongside an advert for psychic sessions. (By the way, do talk to the staff before you do this.) If you are a student, or know of any, see if you/they can get something into their student newspaper or find some other way to list it as a worthwhile event.

If you end up in an unfamiliar area - and quite a few organisers do - then make friends with local people to show you round and tell you where will accept fliers. I hope to meet a lovely lady named Sandra soon to distribute more Hackney fliers (which look amazing, by the way - not my artistry, sadly!).

Money

Usually Skeptics in the Pubs charge £2 or £3 for expenses. Many are exceedingly apologetic about charging anything - "Our events are free; we just ask for X to cover the speaker's expenses". I'm less apologetic, personally, probably because I travelled for 3 hours there and back to Cardiff Skeptics and never claimed expenses for my tickets or petrol. If you've done a load of work for this - which you should have! - and the speaker has come all this way, people can afford what usually amounts to less than the price of a drink! Besides, it irks me to be asked for money when I've been told that something is free.

Money might be collected before the talk, or during the interval, or after - perhaps in a pint glass or similar. This involves having to go round all the audience members, and try to avoid missing anyone out, which personally I don't enjoy doing. At Cardiff, we neatly combined ensuring that everyone paid with welcoming everyone, by having a table at the top of the stairs people climbed, with me and often another person - often Dean's wife Vinny - sitting behind it.

I liked this system because it ensured not only that everybody paid, but that we met and greeted all our members old and new. When they paid, we stamped their hand and had a laugh offering them a choice of stamps - a Bah Humbug, a gingerbread man, a star or a squiggly thing. (Except on the first night when I printed out a load of mini-tickets!) Have a float of pound coins ready as lots of people will give you a fiver or tenner. Have a greeting line ready for everybody - "Hi! How are you?" "Hi, thanks for coming, £3 please!" "Thank you very much indeed! Would you like a hand stamp so I don't ask you again?" At Hackney, the Picturehouse staff take care of that, which saves us a job but also removes some of the friendly personable aspect of it. (That also means that they take a fee from us, but in return they give us great service, a glitzy venue, free drinks for us and free food and drink for the speaker, so I'm not complaining!)

Have a nice big money jar, and for goodness sake don't do what I did every Cardiff Skeptics night without fail and leave it lying around. I once left it in the pub overnight. Thankfully, Dean got over there the next day and it was on the windowsill untouched!

Some places are incredibly conscientious and publish their financial records so people can see where their donations are going. I haven't been treasurer at either place, but I can say I've never once had anyone be the slightest bit suspicious of our finances or remotely resentful of paying.

Equipment

At least, you'll need a projector and cable - that preferably works with both PCs and Macs! - and a screen. You may be able to borrow these regularly, or may get donated old ones. (If you know of a good place to get them please let me know.) Before you launch, test them! You may end up needing the speaker's computer and the projector on a table in the middle of the front row of the audience. (There's nothing wrong with this. It gives the audience a place to put their drinks too.) Test it out, walk to the back of the pub and see how it looks from there. If, as in Cardiff, the speaker has the windows to the back of them, invest in a black sheet you can pin up!

Usually the speaker brings their own laptop - check this in advance - but it's good to have one of yours as well just in case theirs and your equipment refuse to speak to each other.

Also test the mike as these are notorious for failing. Another nice bit of equipment to have, if you've got/can afford one, is one of those clicky things the speaker can hold which moves between slides. (What's it called?) Of course, if it's a well equipped pub, they will have a mike and sound system of their own - the staff may or may not be willing to help you with it when it turns into a recalcitrant mystery!

Looking after the speaker

I give these tips more from the point of view of my own experiences as a speaker - which have on the whole been terrific; thank you to my many lovely hosts - than as an organiser. (If I fail on any, or I should add anything, let me know!)

Well in advance, ask them how they'd like to get there - by train or car or whatever. Lots will be very generous and book, or ask you to book, the cheapest train tickets available. Send them a map of exactly where the place is, so they can plan what time to leave. They'll probably want to arrive early to set up and get something to eat (or, if they're a new speaker, they may want to eat after the talk when they're less nervous!). Make sure you, or someone you trust, can arrive early too to meet them. Give them your phone number in case of emergencies (in fact, if you have a Skeptics talk of your own, don't give it at your own venue but keep it up your sleeve just in case the speaker drops out at the last minute!).

If they have travelled, they may need to stay over. If you or another organiser has a spare room, that's terrific. Some speakers, myself included, are happy to crash on a sofa - but not all. Look for fairly cheap hotels about the place - also feel free to post any good links to finding cheap rooms in the comments, please!

A travelling speaker will really appreciate having a map and directions from the station to the venue and the place they're staying in. Send these before the day they set off so they have time to print it out!

Ask in advance if and when they'd like to eat. If it's difficult to get from the station to the pub, and you have a car, it's really lovely to get picked up, though obviously only if this is feasible! If you're likely to arrive later than them, let them know. Upon arrival, ask them where they'd like to stand, so you can set up the microphone there, and check they're OK with the lights - it's awful if those are blinding or ruin the slides.

Before the talk - and I will love you forever if you do this for me - get a nice big glass of water they can reach when their throat dries up!

Be on hand for them. If the venue has several different rooms, don't scurry off with your mates into one whose existence they don't even know of so they spend the hour after their talk looking for you.

The Big Night!

Wow! It's actually happening! You're probably running around like a headless chicken - someone has to go and pick up the speaker from the station (their train has been delayed); you're either terrified that the seats aren't filling up (turns out twenty-odd of your audience are at the bar!) or delightedly bewildered that all your seats are full and there are still people coming in, and random pub visitors are asking "What's this?". Some clevercloggs turns up and responds to "Hi! Thanks for coming! Three pounds please!" with "I DON'T BELIEVE YOU!" or wants to discuss some minor objection or irrelevant philosophical point with you at extreme length. Everyone wants to know where the toilets are or where they can get food at once, interspersed with horrible moments of complete quiet where you feel you're standing there like a lemon supposed to do something and heaven knows what.

Don't start on the dot of 7:30 or whatever time you advertise - let people get last-minute drinks. It is a good idea to pop up to the microphone around that point and say hello everyone, thank you all so much for coming, we'll be starting in ten minutes, you can get drinks there and food there, toilets are that way, etc. Do go round and say "Hello, thanks for coming!" to as many people as possible. If they just smile vaguely and look blank, that's OK. If they look lost, it's OK to ask them "Hi, are you here for X Skeptics?" Don't talk to any one person all evening. It makes you look unapproachable.

When it's time to begin . . . Just get on and do it. I have started various introductions by hitting my teeth on the microphone and, once, when I was being introduced as a speaker, by walking into a projector and knocking my glasses to the floor. (A friend told me he once started a lecture by knocking over the lectern!) I have also tripped over the microphone wire, crashed to the floor, and had the microphone fall over and hit me. If someone as clumsy as me can do it, you can. It's your show.

Spend a couple of minutes introducing yourself and the idea of Skeptics in the Pub, how it began, how you came to launch this. Introduce anyone working with you. If you happen to know of other people also looking to start a Skeptics, ask them to raise their hands so they can meet each other in the break. Tell a funny Skeptic joke or story. Make any announcements that need making. Don't spend ages, but this is your moment set out your expectations for the evening and future evenings - you can establish, indirectly, whether you want this to be a shouty sort of group or a super-civilised one, for example. Tell the guests what's going to happen this evening - the usual format is introduction, speaker gives talk, 20 minute break for drinks, and then questions and answers; but of course there may be alterations or extras! It is also a good idea for the speaker's first slide to already be up by this time - either that or your own slide with a welcoming message and/or your website.

Then introduce the speaker, shut up, and let them get on with it!

There may be a bit of quiet hustle and bustle you have to deal with - people arriving late, or people jabbering at the back and preventing others from listening to the talk. Sadly you cannot focus your whole attention on the talk - keep an eye on your audience! If things go horribly wrong and they seem to be getting bored (unlikely!), have something up your sleeve for after the talk to make them laugh. This may also be your only chance to eat during the evening, and you will definitely need it.

Skeptics in the Pub is for dialogue and everybody is welcome to speak. But don't feel you have to let anyone abuse this. In the unlikely event that there's a troublesome person in the audience, don't leave it to the speaker to sort them out - you're in charge and have the right to run this how you like; tell them to either be polite or leave. The bar staff should be able to help you. (I once had an audience member who shouted annoying know-it-all comments throughout a talk I gave, but that's not nearly as bad as some scenes I've witnessed, such as an audience member giving a female speaker a lengthy flood of sweary abuse over the microphone.) Questions and answers is a particularly vulnerable time for this - establish with the speaker whether they want to pick the questions or whether you should. We once had a chap in the front row who kept asking questions without raising his hand, unaware that there were people behind him with their hands up and being made to wait for him again and again, and the speaker was too polite to ignore him. The speaker was conducting Q&A while I sat in the audience, so I opted to quietly go up up to him and tell him about the people behind him, and request that he wait. He looked annoyed, but didn't argue. Some people will frame an exceptionally long statement or complaint as a question - if this happens you may stop them and ask "What's your question?" If Questions and Answers drags on a long time - it once dragged on so long for me that I got a backache! - ask the speaker when they'd like to stop, and feel free to make some remark such as "Last question, please" or "Time for two more questions, and let's have them from people who haven't asked any yet."

If lots of people have come, celebrate this. If it's a few, make it cosy - for example, have everyone bunch up and speaker come and sit with them for questions and answers, and make each individual feel noticed and special. Tell the audience when the next talk will be and who it will be with (have this information on a slide). Encourage them to follow you on Twitter, join the Facebook group, and contact you if they can help with anything or have any suggestions. Have a notebook ready for e-mail addresses. Also have a not-too-tatty bit of paper and a pen ready for if anyone wants to be added to your e-mail list.

Thank the speaker and your audience for coming and bringing your dream into reality. You have collectively achieved something wonderful - especially you, the organiser - and you should be extremely proud.

And don't give up!

On a time and place for pain

Many years ago I awoke very early, surrounded by sleeping people. I was on a week-long retreat with the creative writing society at university; I had just finished my degree. Curled up silently, feet away, was the guy I was mildly interested in at the time, in the arms of a girl whose arms were always covered with angry red slashes. I'd found out too late that she didn't like talking about it, which put me in a terrible bind: I ached to listen, to try and help her, and it seemed unforgiveable to ignore them, yet that boundary was one she had asked me to respect.

It was a wonderful week, but one in an unhappy time, for various reasons such as my then poor health and generally being young, with romances that weren't meant to work out, not working out. That sort of thing.

I couldn't bear to stay in that room. I crept downstairs. It was summer, so already light. There were more people downstairs; there were 13 of us in a house for about 5. The kitchen was empty, though. On the windowsill there were huge boxes of books. One was called "Cutting". I picked it up. I've never forgotten it.

I don't know how good, really, the book is. I know nothing about psychology and I have the feeling the author, a psychiatrist named Steven Levenkron, was writing about his own theories and I don't know whether or not they were tested. I could go and do a bunch of research now, but this is the wrong place to go into that or the issue of self-harm, which other poeple have written about far better than I could. Because that's not the point right now. I wanted to write about an atypical case in the book.

A 12-year-old girl was very good at gym, and seemed to be constantly training, always pushing herself harder. Sometimes she had an accident on the equipment, which hurt, but she would recover and go on. Her gym teacher grew concerned and called her parents, however, when injuries began to appear on her body that could not be accounted for by any accident he'd seen.

It turned out that the girl was used to the fact that after hard exercise, her body ached, and she had heard that that was a sign she was really pushing herself and on the way to success. Feeling desperate for more success - due to ambition or due to feeling undervalued out of the gym or feeling honour bound to please, whatever it was - she had started inflicting pain on herself, confusing that kind of pain with the by-product of hard training.

Now before we start shaking our heads and sighing pitifully and thinking how dreadfully obvious it is that two forms of pain should not be confused, let's remind ourselves how similar they often seem - and how much we need to reassure ourselves that the productive kind is worth going through. Isn't "no pain, no gain" a common saying? I once had an immensely illuminating discussion with a particle physicist at Sussex University. For some reason he and I and a few other students were talking about mathematics and how far removed it is from society. (I could not more recommend this wonderful essay by Paul Lockhart on that.) This physicist's remark was: "With so much television these days, and things like that, people think they should understand something instantly, and they must be stupid if they don't, so they should do something else. But mathematics is like a language, or a musical instrument. You need to practice."

Although the first bit sounds a bit Susan Greenfield ish, his words resonated with both my own education, and the curriculum I was supposed to feed to the children I later taught. In short: here is the learning objective for today, all of you must get it by the end of the lesson, and we will move on. No allowance for children who might whizz through five or six of such "objectives". Nor any allowance for topics, for skills, for complexities that needed a long story, that required several lessons - and often bits from apparently unrelated subjects - until it all hung together.

He had a point. If you don't get maths immediately, you're encouraged to stick to arts subjects. That's the attitude that, if many of us want to get anywhere, we must fight. The fighting can be painful. So can the practicing and practicing. Those of us who come to university to do a science degree, having done the kind of maths lessons that address something for one lesson, prepare you for the exam, and then leave you to forget. You have to make up for all that. It can hurt.

It leads to a schism of two cultures. The people who feel let down by the get-things-instantly approach foster their own reactive culture of work-yourself-like-mad-to-make-up-for-it. And a reactive, they-did-this-to-me-and-it-was-really-damaging approach to things can go a bit into overdrive.

Similarly, something being "hard to understand" can often be labelled as "and therefore, correct", along with "if you don't understand it, you just need your brain to work harder". Alternative medicine proponents use very warped logic to seem deep. Indeed, they use what they think is the language of scientists, and borrow the catchphrases of brave fighters, to look like lone, persecuted proponents of truth.

The fact that their logic is "hard to understand" does not make it correct. Something being hard to understand may mean that it is hard to understand, but important and worthwhile - quantum mechanics, for example. It may also mean there isn't anything there to understand.

Similarly, someone I used to know got very angry when I responded to his constant nagging that I became a devout Christian with a few choice quotes from the Bible, inspired by a few handy hints like this. When he told me that God was all about peace, and anyone who engaged in war was directly disobeying God, I reminded him of Numbers 31 7-18. "Where are you getting all this from?" he demanded. "You're obviously not looking this up as you go along." (For the record, I do not usually go around upsetting people by pointing all this stuff out until I've been severely provoked.)

The crux of the matter - excuse the pun - was that he would end up by acknowledging, "Yes, some of these things are hard to understand. But God is Love." Apparently, I was supposed to twist my brain around to equate war crimes and genocide with love. It was difficult, but a mature, thoughtful person could manage it.

Sorry, I don't think I'm being immature or thoughtless to refuse to equate war crimes and genocide with love. I don't label that as "hard to understand". I label it as "barbarity that is an integral part of an important and sometimes beautiful historic document, whose barbarity should not be overlooked or embraced".

But many people do feel that the "hard to understand" actually is maturity and depth. They have worked hard to find peace with it, and they feel that I should, too.

Maybe it's not the same thing as the pain. But maybe it is. Maybe feeling that you've made a difficult, complex leap, in whatever form, feels like an achievement - when it might simply be that you've made a difficult, complex leap into a much worse place than you were before you made it.

The reason I'm writing all this is to make a request to many teachers, employers, and other leaders out there. Not anyone I'm currently working for or with, all of whom (and I am very lucky to be able to say this) are wonderful.

Take a man whose company I worked in when I was 18. He believed himself to be naturally of infallible honesty, but irrevocably corrupted by a cruel world. He had had to adapt. He had had to learn to exploit and deceive. He had faced the pain of watching his real self die. He had to, he felt, charge a client £600 for his trainee (me) to update a few words and dates in a document to send them, a process which took 2 hours and for which I would be paid £7, minus tax. It was not respectable to tell your clients the truth about anything. "At the end of the day", as was a favourite phrase of his other two employees, that was how business operated.

Well, if that was what he wanted to think, that was his problem, I thought, and got on with my work. But no, he had to make it my problem as well. He couldn't stand the idea of me thinking, even privately, that one might be able to run a business without deceiving everybody, one might buy locally produced food, one might have a romance that worked, one might smile and do someone a favour without feeling afterwards as if you had personally handed them a spoon to dig into your flesh. I knew not to contradict him. I knew to look polite and listen. But my opinion must have been written on my face. I had to have daily lectures about how unacceptable my attitude was, how he had faced the pain of betraying his principles, and my not facing similar pain was equivalent to my being a bad worker (no matter how good my work was), and I had wasted company time by having him lecture me, too. I owed it to him to get as badly hurt as he had, to feel as if I too was filled with poison.

Why this was so important to him I have no idea. I'm glad I've never met anyone quite like that since. What was so strange was that I was, as he constantly reminded me, the bottom of the heap - why was it so important to him how my brain worked? He seemed to think he was doing me a favour by making me miserable. I'm sure I need hardly say he wasn't. It wasn't as if I learnt anything, other than that he wanted me to be miserable. Maybe he thought I was learning, maturing somehow.

It was the teachers on the science teaching course I nearly completed four years ago who were even more blatant. (I've written elsewhere about some of their methods.) Let me put it this way. Two of them, a man and a woman, complained to my mentor in my hearing that I had failed to cry when they expected me to.

Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, my commitment, effort, and indications of success were measured by my ability to weep when they criticised my teaching.

Indeed, I recall now, all the girls in that school who I worked with had broken down in tears in public at some point or another - except me. I don't cry often or easily. It's not my thing - that's just the way I am. When someone humiliates me in public, I crawl into a shell. Surely to cry would be to let them win? I guess that was what they wanted. I guess they also didn't apply that standard to the male trainee teachers.

If they had some point to make about my teaching, then I presumed this was to instruct rather than upset and therefore I listened as hard as I could. It wasn't as if there was any point taking it personally. Of course my teaching wasn't perfect. I was a trainee for goodness sake. I was full of human faults like everyone else. I didn't know the kids or the curriculum as well as them. I didn't have their authority. I hadn't gained the children's respect. (Well, of course I wasn't going to gain that if they shouted at me or made sneering remarks in front of the children, as some of them did!)

And it's the same in a lot of jobs, if not to quite such a degree. Apparently "I'm stressed" and "I'm broke" is an acceptable form of boasting. To be willing to be stressed out, to be willing to be utterly humiliated, to give up your principles, to give up your dignity and important things in your life, means you are committed to the job.

It doesn't. It means you are committed to the ego management of your boss. It means they have power. It doesn't mean you're good at your work, but I guess the former is a lot more satisfactory to them (and indeed to be too good would be an insubordination).

Bosses? Teachers? Leaders? People with a public influence? Please think twice before being dissatisfied if those below you seem happy. It doesn't mean they're not learning, concentrating or respectful. Most of them will learn far better without extra pain. If you really need to see someone getting hurt, please bear in mind that in their lives they will all have plenty of that to deal with all on their own.

Thanks.

Doctor Proctor and the Irregular Galaxies

Before I write this post, an apology. Formspring, the question and answer site - on which you're all welcome to contact me with an astronomy question (no guarantee I can answer it, but I'll do my best) - turned one of my entries into a blog post here without any form of notification. I always make sure I have the "blogger" tickbox un-ticked, so it shouldn't have been able to do that. Annoyed and caught off guard, I deleted the unwanted blog post - and forgot to save a comment someone had left! Sorry to that person. Please do leave it again.

Back in 2008, when the first of Galaxy Zoo's many projects on merging galaxies got underway, the zookeepers posted a list of galaxies they wanted us to identify as mergers or not. We had a zooite called Waveney, which, incidentally, is also the name of the hall of residence that I was in at university - and which he had been in many years earlier! Waveney, whose real name is Richard Proctor, wrote a program allowing us to go through the list much faster, Galaxy Zoo style - and made quite a difference, by allowing mini-projects to run quickly and enjoyably on the forum.

One area which hasn't been looked at much in astronomy, including in Galaxy Zoo, is irregular galaxies. We've been focussing - especially in the early days - on galaxies with a defined shape we can study, such as spiral or elliptical:

(From the Galaxy Zoo 1 tutorial. Click to expand.)

An irregular looks like neither of these. In fact, I can't really describe an irregular's shape. It might be a cloud, it might be a set of clouds or starforming clumps, it might be a crazy-shaped mass after a merger . . . There's a good sample here and the forum's whole collection here if you'd like to browse. Here's one for illustration, but it's hardly a representative of all of them.

(From SDSS.)

Now, on the one hand, irregular galaxies got more interesting since the launch of Hubble Zoo because it seems to me that nearly every galaxy we get on that is irregular! Hubble Zoo is mostly looking at galaxies much, much further away than those we looked at with the SDSS telescope. That means we see them as younger than our own - and younger than they would be now if light travelled instantaneously. Most of them are, frankly, a mess. It's fascinating to think that these wispy, often unclassifiable things are a prelude to the gorgeous creatures nearby. As an aside, to me, that's a hefty piece of evidence in favour of the Big Bang. I've classified well over 100,000 galaxies by now, and seen how different they look according to age. (Granted, this is not a scientific study.)

And on the other hand, irregular galaxies are interesting because Waveney is going to do a PhD on them.

His irregulars project has been running for a while, and as I write this, the "click count" is 88,488! The largest sample of galaxies looked at by a professional astronomer that he can find is 161; Waveney's project has many thousands. These were mostly collected by extracting all the ones from the Irregulars thread on the forum, and a brilliant, dedicated lady in Puerto Rico named Aida Berges going through the rest of the forum and the SDSS databases to find others. (Have a go at navigating around; it's terrific fun!)

To take part in the irregulars project, I recommend a quick look around Galaxy Zoo or the forum for a few tips, so you know what you're doing. But I don't mean masses of intense study. Galaxy Zoo itself does not require you to be an astronomer; it requires you to be better than computers at looking at shapes, and as (presumably) a human, you therefore qualify. There is an "irregular checking examples" thread where people can ask for advice.

You'll be asked: how clear the irregular is (i.e. how reliable anything is you say about it - some are very faint or fuzzy); whether it's a compact galaxy or whether it's all over the place; whether it has various features that larger galaxies have - a core, a bar, any spiral features; and whether it's alone or among a lot of others, for which there are zoom buttons you can use to help (even so this can be a bit thorny, as galaxies that appear to be nearby can often be millions of light years further away, just in the same line of sight). There are also buttons to indicate whether it happens to be the same as the previous irregular - for the SDSS camera often focussed on more than one point in a galaxy - and whether it's not an irregular at all.

Waveney's initial results show some definite differences between irregulars and other galaxies - their blueness, for example, which is an indicator of heat and star formation. You can also look at their metallicity to see how old they are. For example, are irregulars basically very young galaxies who might eventually evolve into the spirals and ellipticals we know? Or are they simply the cosmic plankton, unobserved amidst the sharks and whales yet a bedrock of the ecosystem - because, perhaps, not enough gas happened to be a round where they formed? (Spiral galaxies, for instance, need to be a certain mass to become the complex rotating disk we're familiar with.)

The method Galaxy Zoo uses to gain a really accurate database is for lots of people to classify each galaxy. For example, 90% of people might think that something's a smooth elliptical; but the other 10% may claim that they can see signs that it's rotating, or disturbed. It's easily possible that neither sample of people was wrong. Although I can seldom resist talking about irregulars as if they're the animals we don't notice because they're small and unglamorous, galaxies do not have particularly fine lines drawn between definite types. There's a lot of argument on the forum over whether or not one type of galaxy turns into another, or whether it's just that some sit on a blurred line!

Waveney uses the same method: get as many people as possible to look at each irregular. You could say that 25% of people think this has some spiral structure, and therefore, in a sense, this is 75% an ordinary irregular and 25% a sort of proto-spiral. That may sound unscientific, but it's less so than trying to force it into a human-defined category when it genuinely doesn't belong to one.

He got the idea of turning this into a PhD thesis from a remark Chris made along the lines of "you've done half a PhD here". " I recognise this means I have done 10%," he writes cheerfully, "but it got me thinking – why not do it properly. I don’t want to do this full time, I have a very full time job – but could I do it part time. Does the Open University do part time PhDs – a quick web search yes it does…" There's nothing like simply looking at what you could do and what options are available!

As I said, he's looking at colour and metallicity, also the irregulars' masses and starforming rates. He's comparing these with equivalent samples of spirals, ellipticals and also the peas, the intensely starforming compact galaxies we amateurs found and studied in 2007 and 2008. None of the irregulars contains an active galactic nucleus, which suggests that they are all of low mass. (An active galactic nucleus is the activity surrounding a supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy - where stars and other matter whose speeds around the disk are insufficient to keep them in orbit forever, and which therefore pile up in the middle. When a huge amount of matter arrives in a small place this way, before it enters the black holes, it becomes unbelievably hot, and can outshine the entire galaxy.)

What else? Doubtless he has other plans up his sleeve. I only feel sorry that, in the early stages of the project, when Jules and I were also helping, my part - examining the irregulars' environment, i.e. how close they were to their neighbours - came to a standstill before I even started, because nothing I did with SQL actually worked. Months later, Chris told me that in fact my task wasn't possible with current tools - I am sure there are other avenues, but I am no programmer and am an unlikely candidate to find it out. Waveney has tactfully described me as being "in a supporting role". That does seem to be my role in most citizen science projects, and it does seem to be helpful to at least the people and the communication, if not the data itself. Perhaps one day that'll change. If not . . . well, supporting people are very useful.

You can keep up with what Waveney (who has stoically ignored the nickname of "Doctor Proctor" I couldn't resist giving him) in the Galaxy Zoo Library, and do give him some irregular clicks. If you're interested in the wider issues of citizen science and education, please note that the Open University is among the umpteen bodies whose funding is being slashed. Some of us at Galaxy Zoo, me included, have studied astronomy and (in my case) mathematics, inspired simply by what we're doing and discovering - and it's the only chance for so many people to combine study with their jobs, families, and other real-life commitments. Waveney's PhD thesis will bring new knowledge to the field of astronomy, not to mention be a shining beacon for people who thought their chance to learn and contribute was over. Knowledge is not a drain; it's progress - so let's not let it go.

A letter to the students

Dear students,

I am writing from a dark memory of a time when young people did not do what you do today. I was a teenager in the nineties when the mere mention of politics, or indeed anything that took place out of the classroom or the charts, was considered worse than discussing homework. In 1997 I was 14 and, I now regret to say, very excited about Labour's victory - my classmates could not tell the difference between this and "fancying Tony Blair". To speak up about things that happened outside one's life was "sad". It was just not done.

So I suppose, if we have one thing to thank the Labour government for, it was annoying people enough to make protest a do-able thing. Or, perhaps the introduction of the Internet. Or even better education. Who knows?

I don't know why you are doing things that my generation was too cowardly to do. But well done, and for God's sake don't stop. Democracy is precious, and easy to lose. (I later went on to live in Spain, but abstained from voting for student leaders because I didn't understand enough of the language to make a choice. I didn't feel I had the right to bias the voting with an uninformed opinion. To my fellow students, whose parents probably remembered Franco, my not voting was shocking and distasteful, letting down of a hard-won value.)

I notice you're having to put up with the usual remarks - "these kids are too young to be out of school", "they just wanted to bunk off and have a fun day out", "it's just £7.50 a week once you're rich anyway", and so on.

Why go to school other than to prepare yourselves for the world? Not just to be a consumer, not just to get a job: but to be part of society, to change the world for the better, for nobody else will if you do not. As well as to partake in the greatest joy I know - that of knowledge. As a professor of teaching pointed out to a group of trainee teachers, there are only three groups of people who we tell where to go: criminals; the insane; and children. But you are not in school simply to get you out of the way until you're a grown-up. I know if often feels that way, and that's what you've got to fight. Your education is for you, and for other people too. It is not only your right but your responsibility to fight for it. To those who did - I am so proud of you!

It may be true that the fees would not, in theory, prevent anyone from going to university (the BBC page has a good set of questions and answers you should check out). The MP Tom Watson, and those who agreed with him, got a lot of kicking for "misrepresenting" the situation by pointing out that, if he saved £100 a month for his 5-year-old son, that would still not pay his tuition fees, for they are not upfront. A loan hangs around your neck for many, many years; but it's still better than paying upfront. No, what's going on here is a subtler but pernicious ideology.

Even before it's time to apply, there'd be the worry whilst growing up about whether or not it's worth going anyway. "It won't help you earn back the money you'd spend on it. Such-and-such went into banking without a degree and is now earning so-and-so." It's an off-putter from the start, especially for poorer families. Incentives for poorer students (see that BBC link) sound good but might create a divide, turn it into a situation of charity, and also would not help students whose parents of higher incomes discourage or refuse to help their offspring who want to learn (yes, there are those).

And during, the thing itself: it's become a market. Introduce the market and what matters is money, not education itself. Education becomes a "product", your degree is something you've bought, no longer a labour of love. And it must be paid for in the end. So if you never earn that £21,000 a year, then what? Who does pay? Would your course leaders spend their time preparing you for jobs that do earn this figure, and perhaps throw you out if you're likely to end up on a job that pays less? And what about the marketplace atmosphere itself: as businesses compete, would universities have to work against each other rather than together? Would the corporate branding, the package, the adverts to try and "sell", become the focus rather than what's inside them? More simply: would people concentrate on what looks good rather than on what's to learn, and learning, as a result, suffer? It's hard for a non-economist like me to explain. Perhaps some of you economics students can tell me whether or not I'm right. My feeling is this. We have the National Health Service and I'm bloody proud of it. We do not treat people on the basis of whether or not they have money. A sick person is a human, and a normal human helps another person; end of story. Markets interfere with straight humanity from the heart. I wanted to be a teacher and give education as a gift - no, not even that, for child-rearing is not a gift but something a mother simply does, and that's how I saw learning.

Maybe this is a bad patch before we reach a very different future. Have you noticed those occasional articles about virtual schools and everyone learning online anyway? Maybe that's what'll happen; maybe university will one day no longer be about leaving home. The cost of accommodation and living has risen too. I lived in a cheap hall which I thought was part of the experience; but these were knocked down one by one and more and more students around me spoke snobbishly of their expensive quarters, expressing horror at the idea of sharing a bathroom. Well, these things do have to be paid for. That should be a choice; but what if the cheap choice is no longer available? Tuition fees aren't the only thing to worry about. Actually, going back to myself again (and I probably seem pretty ancient to many of you!), I noticed the lecturers mourning how their courses had to become easier and easier, and only an MSc would be taken seriously, and thought - for goodness sake, university just seems to be a pampered boarding school. That probably is a waste of your time.

But back to this week. Whether your worry is education cuts, or tuition fees, and whatever people think about those: well done. You have to do two things to really make a difference: one is to check the facts, and the other is to make your voice heard. If you only do the former, no amount of learning will make any difference. If you only do the latter, people will continue to get things wrong. (Actually, that'll happen even if you do both, but you know what I mean.)

I want to give some special well dones now, but please don't feel miffed if you simply didn't have the opportunity to do anything heroic; these things often come to you by accident.

I want to especially congratulate these brave girls. The Guardian shows the van being damaged, but the BBC caught this photo, and I do recommend a look through this entire photostream. I notice they've been insulted as much as anyone: "The van had already been smashed up, what are these silly little girls going to do ? Turn back time?" Sadly, the idiots in your classroom may remain idiots for life; believe me, grown-ups can be unutterably stupid too. This grown-up missed your point, I think. You were standing up for peace and responsibility at your own risk. You were being human shields; you made an inexpressably important gesture.

"If they smash it up, it just proves the point that teenagers are out here today for violence," said one of the girls amid the chaos, her eyes darting left and right looking for the next vandal. "If we let the government portray us as violent then there is no way they are going to listen to us."

Well said, young lady.

After watching videos like this, I guess many of you will, understandably, distrust the police for life. Wasn't there supposed to be a time when they wore tall funny-shaped helmets and were helpful, pulling boys' heads out form park railings? (No, I wasn't around then, but I've read about them in books.) I hope things like this won't lead to a complete collapse of any trust between those with authority and those without. That won't get the country or education anywhere. But this is largely for authority to decide. Yes, there certainly were from the sounds of things a few morons and violent people at the protests, who ruined your cause and did nobody any favours but the paranoid. Make it clear those were not the majority.

Young and old learners, students, school pupils, all those who want to learn - I've been reading article after article of what you've been doing. I'm smiling at the BBC's list of your activities around the country, and am intrigued at the UCL takeover (Update: They have a fantastic blog, do check them out!). Honestly, when I was your age I'd given up on my peers ever getting off their navy-blue-skirted bottoms and doing a thing - you have raised the profile of humanity. (Did you know that Paul Lockhart describes you as "the ones most often blamed and least often heard?") But most of all I'm moved by the words of Laurie Penny, who was in the kettle with you and wrote in the Guardian and the New Statesman. I was scared for your welfare, yes. I wish I'd been able to get to you all with food and drink and warmth, not to mention miraculous toilets and medication for those in need. It horrifies me to think of you being out there for so long, essentially deprived of things even a prisoner cannot legally be denied. The humiliation for some, as well as the cold and hunger and other discomfort, must have been terrible. But even then a lad told Laurie Penny not to add a book to the fire to keep you warm, because you're not Nazis. Let safety and comfort be secondary. You knew that, and I expect many of you would do it again.

As a last resort. If you can't go to university, don't stop learning. Something has happened which I hate, and that is the all-or-nothing situation all learners are in: you cannot leave school early, as some people want to do as much as others want to stay, but once you have, that's it. Adult education is very difficult to get into and often terribly expensive. But people have been doing something long before David Cameron came up with his "big society" ideas: they've been learning informally, alone, or together, online. I run Cardiff Skeptics in the Pub and the Galaxy Zoo Forum, both of which are essentially movements for people to discover things together. (Obviously what I say here is from me alone, not from either of these movements. We grown-ups have to clarify these things for each other's benefit.) You can be in on either of these - young Rhys Morgan is a 16-year-old skeptic, and we have young people who learn to classify galaxies and contribute to real science that goes in papers. There are many, many movements like this, peaceful organisations, cheerful groups of people whose brains are filling with beautiful things and who can do a great many things as a result. You'll be welcomed in. If they have to take over education for a time, that's not a good outcome, but it's better than nothing.

Let's all do what we can, our different things, to keep education going.

Much love and praise from Alice, who wanted to be a teacher, and hopes she can be a teacher in other ways.

How to Prove you're Inclusive: Be Slick

February 2018: Although I gave up this blog long ago, this post now worries me and I want to add some updates.

The central point - that what I witnessed from a schoolteacher, and what I was taught as a PGCE student, were stupendously crap lessons in inclusion, and seriously backfired - remains unchanged. What has changed is my knowledge, and I have a lot of people to thank for that.

What the people described in this post purportedly wanted to teach was about unconscious bias and how it feels to be isolated. What they ended up teaching was "don't trust your teacher. They'll have a go at you for doing exactly what they told you to do."

I wrote that I was a basically naive and straightforward person and liked myself that way. It never occurred to me that a person of colour might not be able to be that way, even if it was their nature, because they'd always have to be on the lookout for threats or duplicity. I wish I had thought of that.

I wrote that it wasn't good to always be worrying that what you say is construed as racist. I didn't realise that that is only the point when you're surrounded by white people looking to have a go at each other (as I was at the time). I didn't know that saying racist things can be done by the most innocent people with the best of intentions - that it's not about using bad, specific, well-known words but a whole power dynamic that affects people's employment, likelihood of going to prison, life expectancy and a hundred other things. And that intention doesn't equal impact. And that if you're accused of racism, that's not the worst thing in the world and defending yourself with the old platitudes about having friends of colour, etc, is not the way forward. Rather, knowing that you've grown up in a society and culture that systematically advantages white people means it can happen to anyone and a better response is, "Whoops, sorry! Thanks for letting me know. I'll try and learn more/think this over/do better next time," and even though such growth can initially hurt, it's very gladdening in the long run to know more. And trust me, people will respect you a lot better. I wish I had thought of that.

It is really valuable to know about unconscious biases, and not to waste your time getting angry, feeling guilty or scrabbling around for overused ways to defend yourself - but rather to find out what specific ways some people receive advantages or disadvantages, and press for your school or workplace to address these. When you see people of all genders, colours, sexualities, physical and mental disabilities and more all flourishing, then more inclusive thought is probably going to come much more naturally to you!

I also expect that in another ten years I'll look back at the kind of stuff I write today and be embarrassed or worried at having missed something really important, and therefore unknowingly leaving people to suffer. So I want to keep learning.

In the meantime, I recommend you follow some awesome people on Twitter, who've taught me a huge amount: Sunny Singh, Katelyn Burns, Chandra Prescod-Weinstein (who I hope is back on Twitter soon!), DN Lee, Ijeoma Oluo, "Elainovision", and many more who I can't remember offhand but who you'll see me retweeting a lot.

Anyway, I doubt this old post gets read any more but just in case, here it is, with the limitations as described above.

* * * 

A couple of years ago, as many of you know, I was doing the science PGCE - training to be a secondary school science teacher. As many of you also know, I didn't complete the course. But many things happened during it which I'd still like to share. Here's one of them.

A well known trick to get people thinking in science lessons is to give them a surprise. For example: Here are the four fundamental forces, which do you think is the strongest? Put them in order. Then, once everyone's claimed that gravity is the strongest, put a magnet on the table and use another magnet to make it jump up - demonstrating that magnetism is stronger than gravity.

(At least, that particular strength of magnetism is stronger than Earth's gravity. Do the same experiment on a neutron star or with a really pathetic little magnet and you might get a different result. *Update: how embarrassing. I'd missed the point of the experiment. The Earth has a much larger mass than the magnet and that is the important thing. If you put 1kg of magnetic stuff and 1kg of non magnetic stuff next to each other in space, the magnetism will - for this given weight - carry much more force than the gravity. Anyway, back to this post.)

I witnessed a similar method of teaching in a PHSE lesson (Personal, Health and Social Education) for a year 7 group (11-12 year olds). It made an excellent point. The task: get into pairs and draw what a bully looks like and what a victim looks like.

The pupils spent some considerable time at this task, getting the angle of the cigarettes and baseball caps exactly right, showing teeth and stubble, paying attention to the way people were standing. The pictures were detailed and graphic. They took a great deal of trouble over them.

The form tutor then went up to the board and drew two identical stick figures and said: "Exactly the same."

The point being that you can't tell that someone's a bully just from what they look like. And they went on to discuss what to do about bullies.

The problem with that was that those kids had really put a lot of effort into their work, only to have it universally rubbished. Next time they might be a lot more cautious about going to so much trouble. They might start fishing around for what the teacher's not saying. Get into the habit of that and lessons become a game of "Guess what is in the teacher's mind", as well as "Avoid taking any trouble, you'll only look stupid." Neither of these attitudes are conducive to learning. I don't recall there being any discussion about why bullies were perceived to be big and scary-looking, let alone the teacher acknowledging the work the pupils had done.

The very same week, I attended a day at college focussing on people whose English was not their native language. It was not taken by our regular professors, but two ladies from a public project dedicated to helping such people - I forget the exact details. Some of their demonstrations were excellent, such as one of them playing a gypsy lady who only spoke Spanish trying to get her kids enrolled in a local school, and the other playing an indifferent council worker who shoves a long complicated form at her, is embarrassed by her half-English-half-Spanish attempts at asking questions and keeps her head down hoping she'll go away. I enjoyed a lot of the day and felt even more determined to help the (very few) non-native pupils in the schools I worked in.

A complication was that this was an area with an almost exclusively white population. One of the demonstrators was brown-skinned and there was one Muslim girl in one of the classes I taught, and I think that was about it. We did have a lot of Eastern Europeans - I was living with three of them, and they were the nicest housemates I've ever had - but all of them were pretty fluent and generally I think doing fine. For me, a born Londoner, who'd spent the previous six months in Brighton, this was not my natural environment at all; and the acute, carefully-worded, self-conscious discussions about it made me extremely uncomfortable. It was like suddenly having to be incredibly conscious of the fact that the sky is blue, and that if for a moment your mind happened to drift into thinking of the sky any other way, that was morally wrong and everybody would know. And for the locals who did not venture far outside their area, this whole business was theory, not practice.

In fact, the area was so homogenous that in many schools, ESL (coded term for English as a second language) pupils often had to be protected from trainee teachers struggling to pass their course - you have to provide evidence that you have done specific work on these pupils in order to get your teaching certificate, but there were far fewer of them than of trainee teachers!

What also worried me was that the demonstrators did not seem to be offering realistic strategies to help non-native speakers. They seemed to be coming from an all-or-nothing perspective - these people need to be with full-time interpreters, for example. They also spoke at length about how gypsy children were legally entitled to a third of the year off school for "cultural reasons", but were unclear whether or not this level of absence would lead to the school being penalised for the effect this would have on the league tables. All in all, asking this much from people unused to anyone remotely different from them was, I could sense, engendering resentment and indeed jealousy, rather than being constructive.

But I may have been biased, for these people dealt me a humiliation that still stings today, two years on.

They set us an activity and sat us all down at tables of ten or so people. They kept us in strict silence, and then they went around with one of those sheets of star stickers. (I loved those when I was tiny.) Reminding us to keep absolutely silent, they put one onto each of our foreheads, not showing us what colour it would be. One guy whispered to his partner, "What colour am I?" and was told. Once they'd finished doing this, they cried out, "Now, still without talking, sort yourselves!"

"Into what?" somebody asked.

"No further instructions, just sort yourselves!"

Yes, it did dawn on me that these stars were supposed to represent skin colours. But I immediately dismissed the idea as too childish for a professional postgraduate course. For one thing, everyone knows their skin colour, but we didn't know what colours our stars were - presumably, we were supposed to find out. And they'd just done that wonderful demonstration about the poor lady unable to ask any questions. So I concluded this must be about non-verbal communication.

I waved my hands at two girls who both had green stickers on their foreheads and mimed them coming closer together. Immediately their eyes lit up, everybody else caught on and that was how most people did the experiment. I promptly found out this way I had a green sticker.

Yeah, you can guess what happened. Because I agreed to be sorted by colour, and because I had started it, I was shown up to be the racist, the enemy of everything they were trying to do. All right, not in so many words. "You started it, and that was good," they said in that uniquely ironic tone . . . and went on to ask two people how they'd felt - one had been the only silver sticker, and one hadn't got one at all. They played their parts beautifully, mourning how left out they'd felt.

The other science teachers to be (most of whom I didn't feel liked me very much, and who I generally avoided) had been at the back, and had seen exactly what was coming and simply all sat together. They claimed they'd sorted themselves "according to our subject" and were publicly praised and held up as an example to us all.

Ranting about this to a friend that evening, she nodded wisely and said, "Oh yes, there have been psychology experiments about that."

Can you imagine how I felt? Duped. Stupid. Mortified. Hopelessly, hopelessly guilty, as if I'd committed a crime against a sector of my fellow human beings who were already being victimised. I'd always hung around with the international students at university. I'd chatted with my Ghanian housemate in Brighton about Steve Biko and how unbelievably stupid some people could be; he'd always cheerfully told me what it was like to be black - no big deal except when people made it so. I'd lived in Spain for a year, and experienced not understanding a word of lectures, failing most of the exams through my bad Spanish, having chalk thrown at me presumably because I looked different, and having to correct hilarious assumptions about England such as that we all live like spoiled lords and have breakfast in bed (yes, really!) . . . and, on the other hand, much more importantly, I'd experienced people genuinely taking me under their wing, slowing down their talk, not minding my mistakes, lending me their notes and not expecting any major gratitude. How could I defend myself? Anyone who says "I'm not a racist" is usually about to add "but I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one."

And the main thing I learnt was: never believe what other people say. If they tell you to do something, they probably mean you to do something else.

And, even if the possible trap should be far too childish and basic to be the focus, that doesn't mean it isn't.

Hardly healthy.

Also, I learnt that theory and models that bear no relation to reality are still very prevalent. What has a suddenly and arbitrarily placed star sticker, whose colour you don't know, have to do with permanent skin colour? Nothing that I could see. What was the big deal with sorting ourselves into groups, when groups are how both pupils and trainee teachers did most work and how people congregate socially anyway? It would have made a lot more sense to say "Don't you dare talk to anyone with curly hair/blue eyes/who wears glasses" and then afterwards, if they must, "How did that make you FEEL?" Would I have wanted my fellow Spanish students to feel guilty that I didn't understand the lectures, that I was very pale in comparison to them? Don't be so ridiculous! Did I want a full-time interpreter? Splutter! What sort of person could possibly want that sort of thing?

Not at any point during the day did we ever get near discussing the classroom or realistic situations. Not once was the issue raised, for example, of "What do you do if some kid makes a racist remark?" or "How do you go about getting such-and-such some help with something you can't deal with alone?", let alone "What if someone's being bullied for the colour of their skin?" No, the day was about legalities, and an in-depth examination of ourselves, after which I felt unable to face the others - and which I'm still embarrassed to write about. I can hardly tell if I'm more embarrassed at being so publicly conned, or in case anyone really thinks that I would seriously split children into skin colour groups or something.

To be honest, while I've learnt to be very skeptical of claims, I'm a very straightforward and trusting person. That makes it easy to set traps for me. But it also makes other people feel safe when I'm there. They don't have to dig for extra meanings, or worry that I want something different from what I say. In the context of the classroom, I suppose that would mean it would be easy to lie to me about why you haven't done your homework - but it would also be setting a good example. As in: don't be slick, don't be devious, don't show off, there's no need. Just be curious and nice to others. That's how I try to run the Galaxy Zoo Forum, and that was how I tried to run the classroom, and it seemed to work all right. There are plenty of things I don't like about myself, but my trusting nature is not one of them. I like myself that way. Why should I become distrustful and suspicious and see tricks everywhere in order to avoid being labelled a racist? How does that make sense?

The more people start setting traps for each other, the less honest we can become with each other - and, frankly, the less we'll then be able to talk about real problems and what to do about them, for all energy will go to defence. And how can you enlist a group of people to help you deal with something when you're frightened of what they're going to publicly call you? That's how to get everyone to keep their head down and not draw attention to themselves - and when something needs sorting out, it wouldn't get done.

And is worrying and worrying about whether or not you're a racist really productive? Does guilt, self-consciousness and an avoidance of certain words really improve the situation for other people? (Update, May 2013: if said language is oppressive, of course yes.) Or does it just make you feel scared and them feel awkward? Here's an extreme example. For another, I've heard of people being condemned for saying "black coffee". That, dear friends, implies that there is something wrong with being black, but that you as a white or whatever else colour person are too sanctimoniously polite to say so. I cannot think of anything more isolating and humiliating than to be thought inferior, but for those around you to smugly think the better of themselves for using elaborate language to avoid saying so - and probably wanting a receipt, too. Get lost.

Myself, I like Allan Sandage's quote: "All humans are brothers. We came from the same supernova."

(From Hubblesite.)

Oh, and as a parting shot, that group of trainee teachers who were publicly praised for spotting the trap and therefore being non-racist? One of them, the very next morning, referred to one of the demonstrators in disgusted tones as "That Paki".

Whether you're black, white or bloody rainbow coloured - what do you think?