I’ve been around for a while, starting teacher training in 1982, moving into education support in 2007 and semi-retiring a few weeks ago. During my time in the classroom, non-teaching friends were always coming up to me and saying: ”I couldn’t do your job. I can’t think of a way of making Newton’s second law of motion interesting and engaging to a variety of learners with different needs and abilities”.
No, they weren’t. They did say the “couldn’t do your job” bit, but added: “I’d end up getting angry at the kids and beating them up.”
It’s all down to two interlinked myths about teaching. Number one: once you’ve got the class quiet, you can tell them things and they’ll learn. Number two (and this may be a generational thing): children used to have respect for teachers.
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Is there a single child of the 1960s or 1970s who cannot think of an example that challenges these ideas? The unpredictable, short-fused tawse enthusiast whose charges sat fearfully gripping trembling desks as a fog-bound, droning lesson failed around them, broken up only by the pseudo-random admonitory thwack of leather against whatever wood classroom furniture was made of in those days? Respect? Our measurement of R values was somewhat flawed back then.
What would life be like for these hypertensioned, beetroot-bonced bampots in this period of online learning? Returning from yet another semi-retirement socially distanced bike ride, I check social media and mailing lists to see that my young (that is, not yet 60 like me) teaching friends are showing extraordinary resilience, imagination and collaboration to give their students the best possible experience in the worst possible circumstances of this coronavirus pandemic.
Most of the teachers from my own era would have been the same. However, I doubt if the board-duster dam busters with their “who scares wins” motto could have coped. I know who has my respect these days, and it’s completely distinguishable from the fear spread by those teachers of old.
Gregor Steele has worked as a physics teacher and at SSERC (formerly the Scottish Schools Education Research Centre)
