The head of my infants' school, in Sydney in the 1950s, was a formidable, eccentric woman called Miss Campbell.  She scared the parents and pupils, but we loved her for her mad ideas and crazy schemes.
At the end of assemblies, she would inspire our imaginations by saying:
"Now, go to your classrooms as giants."
And we would walk on tiptoe, stretching as high as we could.  The next day it might be:
".....as frogs" or ".....as elephants" or "....as trumpet players" etc.


She often performed Punch & Judy shows, with other puppet characters - in a genuine, striped, beach tent.  These performances quite often interrupted lessons, just because she suddenly felt the urge to put on a show for us.


When she hauled me out of class to play Joseph in the Nativity Scene, I went whiter than the sheet she wrapped me in.


When the mothers gathered in the playground just before the end of the school day, Miss Campbell warned them to 'stay outside the gates until the last bell sounds'.  Many mothers ignored this warning, and so Miss Campbell walked into the playground one afternoon, turned on the hose and soaked all those recalcitrant mothers.  Today, that would no doubt cause an uproar, but back then, nothing happened - except that all the mothers remained outside the gates from then on.


My own mother had an altercation with Miss Campbell, with me as an onlooker, over the issue of school uniform.  All I recall now is that my mother terminated the argument with the words:
"Miss Campbell!  You educate Lindsay.  I'll dress him!"


Incredibly enough, my brother met Miss Campbell in the 1990s, when she was in her 90s.  She remembered our mother, John and me.


That kind of crazy but imaginative teacher is now in an ever-decreasing minority.  I don't agree with drenching parents, but I do wish that there were more inspired teachers around.
OFSTED's 'ideal teacher' is the opposite of Miss Campbell - a box-ticking automaton.
May the new year see the demise of the OFSTED ideal.

The human rewards of teaching are supposed to offset the pressure, responsibility and relatively low pay of the job.  Fortunately, they do, even within a rotten system.
Occasionally, a pupil will do or say something that makes the whole thing seem worthwhile.  Teachers yearn for these moments.


When I taught English at secondary level, I was keen to improve the pupils' oral skills, so I implemented a 5 minute slot at the end of most lessons, devoted to impromptu speaking.  Each pupil would select a card at random, on which was written a single word, e.g. Money, Television, Music, Food, Cars etc. They then had to speak on the topic for at least one minute, without pausing longer than five seconds.  The more they practised speaking off the cuff, the easier it became and helped increase their self-confidence. The exercise was voluntary, some enjoyed performing, while others feared it.


One boy, Jacob, would attempt the exercise again and again, without much success.  He usually dried up after half a minute.  On one occasion, as he returned to his seat, he looked at me and said:
"I hate doing this, but I want to get better".
I gasped with delight.  This is the kind of comment every teacher wants to hear - an expression of determination and self-motivation, the only worthwhile motivation in human existence.  The 'carrot and stick' approach might be motivating, but it is self-motivation that is the gold key to learning.




I wish my readers a very Merry Christmas, and may 2015 be a splendid year for you all.

As a teacher, I occasionally told the pupils the story of the remarkable Helen Keller.
Born in 1888, in Alabama in the USA, she went blind and deaf at 18 months, because of a virus, probably meningitis.
Fortunately her parents were wealthy enough to afford a teacher for their 7 year old daughter.  Annie Sullivan was employed to care for and teach Helen.  It didn't take long before Annie realised that this child was highly intelligent, and fiercely wilful.
Because of her condition, Helen's parents let her roam freely, take food from plates, and more or less let her do as she wished.  Annie also realised that unless Helen could communicate with the world, she would never escape the darkness and silence she lived in.


Annie and Helen fought many battles, some quite violent, but the day came when Helen suddenly understood that the water she could feel from the tap was what Annie had been trying to spell on her hand.  From the early recesses of Helen's memory, when she could see and hear, the word 'water' came to mind.  From then on, Annie taught her to spell, to write, to read and even make speeches.  Helen earned a university degree, wrote 12 books, and befriended such people as Mark Twain and Alexander Graham Bell.  She learned to read Latin, Greek, German and French in braille.


Of course I told this story to emphasise the moral of the tale - if Helen Keller, blind and deaf, could achieve so much, then we, with all our senses, can achieve anything.
I even got the pupils to close their eyes in a very quiet room for 5 minutes, but most couldn't bear more than a minute, to which I'd say:
 "Imagine 86 years like that".


However, there is a deeper dimension to the Helen Keller story.  In her superb autobiography of her first 22 years, she says:
"Don't feel sorry for me.  If anything, I feel sorry for you.  Everything I touch, or smell, or taste is an adventure, whereas those who have all their senses tend to take everything for granted".


When I told this story, I would add that when Annie Sullivan died, having been with Helen for almost 50 years, Helen Keller was at her bedside, holding her hand.  On one occasion, in mock self-pity, I asked the class:
"How many of you will be at my bedside when I'm dying, holding my hand?"
The boys sneered, but one girl looked at me and said, sincerely:
"I will".
To contain my emotions, I assured her that it would probably be the number 38 bus that flattened my future.

I once heard a boy say to a teacher in a school corridor:
"I'm not lying, sir.  I just have a vivid imagination".
This spin spurred the teacher's wrath to shouting point.  That kind of lying is part of the games pupils play with teachers, to wind them up mercilessly.


However, when a child lies to a parent or teacher, the first question asked should be:
"Why is the child lying?"
 The answer is more damning of the adult than the child:
"Because they are afraid to tell you the truth".  To simply punish the act of lying is shifting the blame.


The best story I ever heard about lying and how to curb it, comes from the school Summerhill, in Suffolk.
The school had a 15 year old boy who was an inveterate liar.  He lied needlessly about all sorts of things, and Neill, the head, was concerned about this habit.
One Friday morning, Neill received a phone call from the boy's father, asking Neill if he could accompany his son to Saxmundham Station that afternoon, for the train to London. He then reassured Neill that he would return his son on the Sunday evening, along with the fare for the return journey - £5.  Neill agreed to this arrangement, went to the boy during lunch and repeated his father's wishes, handing the boy £5.
However, after a conversation with his wife, Neill realised that the phone call had been made from a local phone box, the boy impersonating his father to get a weekend in London.
Most heads would summon the boy, force him to confess and then punish him for lying.
Not Neill!  He waited until after lunch and then took the boy aside and said:
"Your father just phoned back.  He made a mistake with the fare.  It's £6, not £5." 
And he proceeded to give the boy an extra £1.
Neill walked back to his office.  It took about 10 minutes before the boy appeared, slammed the £6 on Neill's desk and said:
"You're a better bloody actor than I am!".




As a sad footnote, I have to report the death of John Morris, the wonderful teacher I gave a birthday tribute to on this blog, on June 29th.  I am honoured that his son has included my post on the tributes online.
Following on from last week's post about good teachers, if anyone wants to see just how effective an excellent teacher can be, please click on the following website:
http://www.johnsmorris.net/tributes.php#top

A question I have asked many people over the years is: "How many good teachers did you have at school?"

The usual answer is 'One' or 'Two'.  This is not a good statistic, considering that most of us have about 30 to 40 teachers in our school-life.

So what makes a good teacher and why aren't there more?

The best teachers are not just passionate about their subject but are also vitally interested in their students, determined to inspire, inform and enrich them. They engage their students, not just talk at them as if they were an audience. Patience and a sense of humour, and the ability to draw out the best from the students are also virtues.  This is a perfect paradigm, and even the best teachers have their 'off' days.  They know that so much of class work is ploughing through a mostly tedious syllabus.

Too many people become teachers for the wrong reasons.  Nobody becomes a teacher to become rich.  It is entirely vocational, but even so, too many new teachers are unrealistic about the stresses and problems that schools entail, especially these days.  They naively hope that they can constantly inspire and convey their enthusiasm to all the students.  The present rate of young, new teachers leaving the profession is not just shocking, but also speaks volumes about what it's like to be a teacher in a school in the UK today.  Even the most dedicated are quitting.

Again, too many become teachers for instant power.  No other occupation places you immediately in charge of 30 or so people who must bend to your will.  A teacher's power should be used judiciously, not arbitrarily and not often.  Unfortunately, the abuse of teachers' power is frequent on a daily basis.

A few teachers have admitted that they joined the profession 'for the hours and the holidays'.  They soon learned that the hours of 9 to 4 are always extended - marking work, preparing lessons, meetings, report-writing etc.  As for the holidays - teachers need them in order to restore their energy supplies. 

While mere academic success opens the door to teaching, we will continue to produce teachers who are mostly average, and that, educationally, is simply not good enough.

Among the many illusions society clings to, 'school' is one of the most damaging.  So ingrained is the sado-masochistic concept of school in the human psyche that people laugh and smile when a parent says: "She hates school." As if that is supposed to be the normal, natural reaction to a place of learning.

"We all hate school!  School is boring!"  Yet society expects high academic results by the end of our experience at this contemptible place.

If school held any interest for children, they would willingly attend, as they do in some countries.  Unfortunately, the school systems in most countries are fiercely anti-educational, limiting learning to boxes called classrooms, instead of experiencing all aspects of life.

John Taylor Gatto identifies school years as a time when you 'grow older but never grow up'. 

Or as the great John Holt put it: "School is where you go to learn how to be stupid."

The basis of our schooling is militaristic, conformist and ludicrously academic, and even though it causes harm, we are so inured to the damage that we consider it all worthwhile.  Nothing much has changed for at least half a millennium, evidenced by two of the greatest minds England has produced, Shakespeare and Blake - both poorly schooled but highly educated.  They have given us a glimpse of how school has remained unaltered and unchallenged for 400 years:

In As You Like It, Jaques observes:

"The whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school"

William Blake's poem The School Boy is equally damning:

"...to go to school in a summer morn,
O! it drives all joy away;
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.

Ah! then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour,
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learning's bower,
Worn thro' with the dreary shower."

Mass hysteria has broken out again over the issue of school uniform, school authorities hell bent on forcing parents and pupils to conform - the 'look alike, think alike' mentality.

Let's dispense with some of the usual myths peddled by non-thinkers on this subject:

1) It  provides a level playing field and therefore makes everyone equal

Children are not fools and they know very quickly what type of background their peers come from.  They are natural judges of how poor, rich, geeky, cool, trustworthy etc. someone is, regardless of clothing.  Besides, once outside school they wear what they like, at home and in public.

No two pupils look identical in uniform.  Pupils find ways of circumventing uniform, little ways of defying it, e.g. wearing earrings, jewellery, odd socks, hair colouring, ties ridiculously knotted so that the thin end is much more prominent than the wide end, etc., etc.

As Emma Jacobs pointed out in her splendid article in The Guardian on 7th November:  "Teachers spend time and energy policing uniform when they could presumably be teaching us."

It is human nature to defy stupid policies and each pupil, in their own way, makes a statement of individuality, something anathema to authority. It is almost an amusing irony that private schools are the strictest when it comes to uniform, when almost all the pupils are from the same socio-economic strata.  So who are they trying to fool?

2) Uniform fosters a pride in the school

If pupils are so proud of their school because of the uniform, why don't they wear their uniform outside school?  I would guess, no pupil does.  If you choose to join a club, you might be proud to be a member, but joining was your choice.  Pride in a school uniform is yet again an adult idea foistered on pupils and therefore meaningless to them.  If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, then it runs parallel to the road of 'Adult ideas for children'. If pupils are proud of their school, it is always for reasons other than their uniform.

3) Pupils will compete to have the latest fashion if there is no uniform

They do anyway, outside school, which, after all, occupies most of their day.  And besides, so what? Quite often, in non-uniform schools, pupils compete to see who can look the scruffiest or weirdest. I couldn't care less what pupils look like or what they wear.  I was only ever interested in how interested they were in the lesson.

Teachers I have known who have worked in uniform and non-uniform schools have said the same thing - there is no real difference in behaviour between the two. When the last school I was in had non-uniform days, the general behaviour of the pupils was somewhat better than usual.

What you wear and learning have no connection.  If they were connected, most university students would fail all the time.  The notion that wearing a uniform is somehow related to academic success is illogical and therefore absurd.  As Emma Jacobs succinctly puts it:

"Finland's schools top international league tables and don't have a school uniform, while the UK has the uniforms without the stunning results."

The concept of uniform is authoritarian and conformist.  The message is clear - "Don't you dare behave as an individual!"

If a school is obsessed with uniformity, they have missed the point of education in a big way.  Schools should be focused on learning, knowledge, diversity and creativity, not bloody uniform.