When I met my first wife, she was hanging about in the company of engineers, an earthy bunch who generally called a spade a spade.
Let me tell an anecdote. She’d apparently been rabbiting on about me and how they’d now have to get a king sized bed in. I walked into the after work bar where she’d been holding forth and one of her colleagues proclaimed, ‘Nah, a double will be more than enough.’
One job group they didn’t have much time for was teachers, of which I was one. Their criticisms of teachers ranged from inflated sense of importance and being ‘lefties’ to teachers’ opinions so simplistic and amateurish that they weren’t worth heeding. And all those holidays!
Holidays
In a society where the politics of envy is the prevailing philosophy, teachers’ holidays were a never ending bone of contention and reached ridiculous proportions when they were made to come in and ‘work’ during school holidays.
For a start, any teacher worth his [her] salt is going to spend a substantial portion of that time preparing for the new term, cleaning the classroom, arranging things, photocopying, ordering in and so forth. It doesn’t need a prescriptive regulation to achieve that.
For any forty minute lesson, a good teacher devotes another fifteen to twenty in preparation and this used to be drummed in to student teachers by their teacher trainers.
So, back to those holidays, what you had were staff sitting around creating work, to make them look occupied, when their preparation had already been done, they were substantially ready and for what? To assuage a section of the community with absolutely no idea, which perceived all teachers to be on a cushy number.
Usual criticisms
Don’t get me wrong – lazy teachers are the bane of any head teacher’s existence plus their habit of only being able to see the micro-world of their own classroom, rather than the big picture. Such people also tend to be squabblers over unimportant matters, not unlike the children they teach.
One of the greatest criticisms of teachers is that they’re not in the real world. It generally helps if they have families, IMHO but that’s no guarantee of realistic approaches to life which they pass on to children and the number of times my staff had parent-teacher interviews and were insisting on their classroom rules at the expense of common sense were too numerous to mention.
A lot of this came from the political views of the teaching profession. In a job where the key components in classroom management are compassion and good order, these dovetail neatly with the socialist view of the compassionate society, while free enterprise and initiative can be seen as dangerously subversive.
Preparation and example
The criticism that teachers are lazy because they work such short hours is total hogwash. In any profession you’re going to get the lazy who come to lessons on time or even a few minutes late, [a big no-no in teaching, when you should be there ten minutes early to set up].
One of the best tests of this was the use of cassette players. The teacher rushed in five minutes late, noisy children sitting around aimlessly and then started to cue the cassette to its place, nothing set up on screen, discs not in place and feeling under pressure.
On the other hand, walk into a good teacher’s room and she [he] is there when the first children arrive, probably setting things up round the room, notes are at hand and she can share a joke with the child and listen to his/her latest news.
Discipline
At a seminar I once attended, one young teacher asked about discipline and my little contribution was that the best way to maintain discipline was firstly not to worry about it, to make it a low priority on your list. It also helped if you knew your material back to front, were well prepared, had set up the materials and you didn’t see the child or the parent as an adversary to be negotiated or contained.
At university, my best lessons were the speech practice topics where I had very little immediate control at all, everyone was deep in argument, gesticulating and haranguing and it would have taken ten minutes to quieten them all down. Better to let it run its course.
In the end, one of the most helpful things for discipline was simply to care. If the kid knew you really liked him, it made it so much easier but better was to only say no when it was absolutely necessary. How many people say no automatically without reasoning why? ‘Well, it’s the rule, isn’t it?’ Why is it the rule in the first place?
Saying no
There’s not a lot of difference between the home and the classroom in this.
A friend of mine has no problem with discipline at all but his wife has constant trouble.
Her approach is to threaten and say, ‘If you do that again ..’ Then next time she says, ‘If you do that again …’ When she does give punishments, she hasn’t the heart to carry them through and they know they can always get round her.
The result is ongoing discipline trouble and stress.
He has a different approach. If he says no, then it’s no. It never alters, even if he hasn’t the heart to impose the penalty. ‘You step across this line and you don’t get this treat.’ The kid steps across the line and she doesn’t get the treat. Never has, never will.
He has no discipline trouble at all and he compensates for that with good humour and treats, within certain boundaries.
In teaching, the golden rule is never to threaten anything, never employ the term “if”, unless you’re prepared to go through with it.
Example: One girl who hardly ever attended at university turned up one day and from the beginning, she showed not the slightest intention of getting into the topic. Instead, she sat there, looking down at her feet and making little dance movements with them.
That was one thing but the moment she started trying to engage the attention of those in the group with the lowest attention spans, I stepped in. ‘Go,’ I said. ‘What? What have I done?’ she appealed to the group as a whole. I opened the door and waited five to seven minutes till she’d gone, her last words threats to sue me.
Then I got back to the lesson, apologizing to the group for the scene.
Educational fads
This one has been saved for last and it’s my pet hate.
There’s a staff of teachers discussing which English textbook to use next year – Streetwise, Opportunities, Knockout? For better or worse, a book is adopted and immediately half those teachers appear in the staffroom at breaks, muttering out loud, hands flailing, ‘Oh I can’t use this text – it’s impossible.’
Still, it’s adopted and the parents are slugged for the cost of the textbook, the workbook, the exam maximizer, the cassettes and the study guide. They’re told it’s the latest thing in education, the ants’ pants.
For two years, all is well but then a new intake of staff doesn’t like this book imposed on them and the rumblings become a chorus of dissent so the whole process begins again in the name of progress and hey presto, a brand new textbook is now adopted and parents are slugged yet again.
Next year it starts all over again when some new educational fad comes into vogue, some academic from Canada or Australia having written in a journal that the latest research indicates that children should learn a different way.
Welcome to the prevailing state of education.