What usually gets me up in the morning is the alarm, a small child clambering into bed with me in the early hours or my next door neighbour’s motorbike as he heads off to work before dawn. But the other thing that gets me up in the morning, particularly on the dark and miserable winter days, is that I am making a difference. It might not be to every student, every day, but I am making a difference to someone every day that I am a teacher. I work a lot with students who are behind their classmates in literacy and this can cause all sorts of problems - bullying, disaffectedness, laziness - but the impact I see most often is that a student’s curiosity for the work around them has been quelled.
It’s not just that they can’t access the curriculum that they’re being taught, it’s that they can’t just pick up a book, or a magazine article, or a blog that interests them and simply read the words on the page. Students are told all the time that they must read more for enjoyment and we have quiet reading time, library lessons, books and poetry to be studied, history sources to be analysed and recipes to be followed. But to those that don’t enjoy reading, it is a painful and often misunderstood process. Why would students continually put themselves through this pain when it is far easier not to read?
This is where I come in. I work with the disaffected and the disinterested and it is a case of finding that curiosity, that spark of interest in an otherwise bleak outlook on reading. Sometimes we need to dig very long and very deep to find it, but it is there. Children are curious beings, from babies burbling at the new sights around them to toddlers’ incessant “Why?”. By the time that these students come to me, the innocent “Why?” has usually become the more belligerent “Why should I?”. It is up to me to show students the benefits of reading words, not just for their education, but for living in the world around them, for making sense of it and finding their place.
Sam Harvey is an English, music and drama teacher in the South West
