“They're a pretty low ability bunch.”
She told me as she opened the door to the classroom and, once in,
introduced me to the class, then left. They were a bottom set and
knew it, and seemed to take some pride in it and let me know it. I
imagine like The Dessert Rats took to Rommel's pejorative, or
similarly The Old Contemptibles after Kaiser Bill called them
England's contemptible little army. I had the sense it was the same
sense of pride as Hell's Angels felt; something brought about from a
recognition of being at the end of a long line of no-hopers – a
class full of what Arlo Guthrie called the Last Guy.
From the getting to know you badinage,
it was clear to me that these people were actually quite average
teenagers with a couple of livelier minds bouncing around too. They
were as interested in me as I was in them and they allowed me to ask
some tricky questions like why they thought they were the bottom set:
why they were apparently so proud of it and why would they be in a
bottom set? To cut a long story short, they had been labelled as any
number of things, for which I could see no real reason, except that
they fulfilled these historical judgements up to this moment – it
always had been this way and always would. They had absolutely no
belief in their intellectual abilities and nothing had happened in
their short lives to disabuse them of this lack of belief.
Of all my classes in my teaching
career, I am most proud of them, even more than those that entered
Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge and all the other Ivy
League schools, because they developed belief in themselves and shook
off other people's prejudiced burdens. It was a two way thing, they
believed in me that I could help them get their GCSE in science and
it was a bit like having your home fans cheering you on, or an
audience willing you on to higher and higher peaks of musicianship. I
have seen this so often in my career, that I wonder how some teachers
and it is usually teachers, get away with it. Furthermore, who in
God's name have allowed these people to be teachers; to have access
to the plastic, pliant minds of children. Surely, this must rank
highly as a crime against children; as child abuse.
School years should be the best years
of our lives, but often it is just something to be endured, and
endured with some resentment. I think schools should be places that
foster self-belief based on continual and relentless achievement and
where all parties to the learning community show unswerving belief in
the ability of others continually to achieve; to find their best and
do better. Implicit in this is an obvious affection between teacher
and student. Naturally, the teacher has responsibility for
establishing this, and granted, it can be a tough job sometimes, but
the teacher must remember that before you is someone's pride and joy
and deserving of the best. Even if the student is not someone's pride
and joy, they should be and so the teacher should behave accordingly.
This does not mean that discipline goes
out the window. Imposing sanctions for poor behaviour that preserves
the dignity of all parties reinforces positive relations, especially
if one's students see that you adhere to the same principles of
dignity, discipline and diligence that you expect of your students.
Sanctions should be applied immediately and with a proportionally
that should be left to the teacher's professional judgement. There
has been a lot of movement away from this idea of late in Britain
and, like many of the changes was predicated on a lack of trust of
teachers, so one-size-fits-all, highly prescriptive centralised
policies have been implemented. When a misbehaving student
understands that the teacher has the authority and discretion to
apply these sanctions, they will have a lot less latitude to continue
their misbehaving. And anyway, people like to know the limits and
that the limits are strict.
Teachers should be geniuses in the
Einsteinian sense of being passionately curious. I'd like to extend
this by positing genius as an aesthetic phenomenon in recognising
intuition and inspiration and acting upon it. In this, I am in total
opposition to someone from the TDA who said on radio 4 that teaching
is much more of a science. In fact, I think that this is one of the
most idiotic notions I have come across for many a year. This implies
a do-this-get-that-every-time thinking, i.e. a simplistic application
of behaviourism. I see this in the bought-in, inflexible and
imperative curricula that come complete with lesson plans, which
include imperatives for differentiation. This is wrong on so many
counts. A recent
article in London's Evening Standard by the heads of five major,
English public schools would appear to reject this trend in
education.
This essay is unfinished, but below is
an indication where it should go:
Genius is an art/ realizing intuition
and inspiration skills/content syllogism of skills/content
Creativity in all things from pastoral,
curriculum, pedagogy... and all considered as a whole
Cross-curricularity history of
thought/theory of knowledge
Fun/humour
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