Whenever I point to the success of people who hardly ever, or never went to school (e.g. William Blake,  Mark Twain and Buster Keaton), I get the same reply:
"But they were exceptional people.  Others would fail."
It hardly ever occurs to anyone that they were successful because of their lack of traditional schooling, not in spite of.
John Taylor Gatto observed:
"As a teacher, I found that genius is as common as dirt."
The model of traditional schooling that most nations slavishly follow is becoming more and more anti-educational, more fixated on the academic side, and long ago became huge factories for producing tomorrow's workforce.
As I have said before, children are naturally curious and, largely left to their own devices, will learn far more than in school.  And they would, most importantly, love learning instead of loathing it.
The basic tools of learning are literacy and numeracy.  Once they are accomplished, the world is yours.  Like the keyboard of a piano, once you learn the keys and scales, you can compose anything.  Once you have learned how to drive, you can go anywhere.
Yet, even with literacy and numeracy, schools are failing terribly.  For children not to be able to read and write by the age of 10, reveals what poor teaching they have experienced.  I exclude children with certain conditions and learning difficulties.
With any luck, in the distant future I fear, school will be a thing of the past.

Recently, I found a photo, from the Western Daily Press in Bristol, in April, 1975.  It is, as you can plainly see, one of myself as a tiger in a children's theatre company show, and Oliver (aged 4), sitting on my leg.

The story of Oliver is a sad one, or at least was when we met him after one of our morning shows.  His mother, Anne Gubbay, was in tears as she explained to us how Oliver had never smiled or laughed in his life.  She had dressed him in a cowboy outfit and brought him to our show, in the hope that he would find something to chuckle at.

But alas, Oliver kept his stern face throughout.
We showed him the impressive puppets and clowned around as actors, but to no avail.  When he sat on my leg, I talked 'tiger-talk', which was no more than nonsense about cowboys and tigers.  Still, not a flicker.

Looking back on it now, I am sure that Oliver was on the autistic spectrum, especially since he hardly spoke to us.  It was beyond shyness.  But I sincerely hope that Oliver, who would now be about 36, has matured with a sense of humour.  I would love to know.

Of course, I felt a failure that day, but I don't know what else I could have done, or any of the theatre troupe.  It was the mum's distress which was so upsetting.


I apologise to my readers about this post two days ago. I had difficulty transferring the photo to the post and so I ended it abruptly and without the photo.
I'll come better prepared next Sunday.

At the risk of turning this blog into one on dogs, I would like to repeat a story, and in the process, ask if anyone of my readers has a copy of the programme. The possibility is remote, but hope springs eternal!

Some years ago, perhaps 7 or 8 years ago, Channel 4 broadcast a programme about two teenage boys, both young offenders, with histories of brutality at home and crime in public.

Separately, the boys were given a dog each, a pup, but not newborn.  They were monitored over the weeks that passed.  They had to feed the dog, walk the dog, wash the dog, and watch out for any reason to seek a vet's advice. 

In one case, the boy was overwhelmed by a creature that was always happy to see him, never judged him, and gave him unconditional love, all of which had been denied him in his life.  A dog was able to give him what his family did not!  After a while, the boy snapped.  He broke down completely, the first step in his recovery and his search for human love.

Unfortunately, the other boy did not respond much at all.  He took care of the dog, but the dog's adoration of him did not shatter his suffering, so damaged was he.  I remember thinking:

 "I hope, one day, his wounds will heal."

Dogs have saved lives, and not just physically.  They are, to quote a modern cliché, wonderful 'anti-stress machines'.  They just love to be loved.

Next week, back on track, whatever that means!

Reading aloud in class is a pleasure for some pupils but an agonizing, humiliating experience for many.  Of course, those who enjoy it are already good readers, but for those struggling to become literate, it can cause them to abandon their efforts, if mortified in front of their peers regularly.
Even one to one, kids can feel constantly judged and made to feel stupid when learning how to read fluently, no matter how patient and sensitive the teacher is.

There was a television news report some months ago, about a scheme that was tested in some primary schools in the north of England.  This scheme involved getting poor readers in school to read to dogs, i.e.one dog to one reader, and adults out of sight.  Naturally, the dogs chosen for this experiment had docile dispositions and were trained to sit or lie and listen to the reader - i.e. look at the reader, and 'listen' to the story.

What happened ?  Surprise! Surprise!  All the children involved improved their reading ability, in some cases substantially.  What sounded like a crazy idea works, and for a good reason - the readers do not feel judged by a dog and they don't fear being corrected all the time.  Most young children believe that the dog is actually listening to the story and enjoying it, so they want to read more.

One little boy said: "I looked up all the interesting things about dogs in the Guinness Book of Records, and told Murphy them.  I think he was very interested, at least he looked as if he was."

I recommend that all primary schools adopt this scheme, depending on the availability of dogs, because there is no shortage of children who need such a scheme.

Families with a dog, or a perhaps with a neighbour's dog, should try this out on their young ones if they are losing their confidence as readers.

Nicknames can be hilarious, savage, apt or devastating.

Whenever a pupil is referred to by a nickname, I always ask the pupil if they like being called Snowy, or Babyface, or whatever.  Since nicknames are almost always chosen by others, it is best to check with the bearer of this sobriquet if they are happy with it or not.

Young people are particularly good at hitting their target when it comes to bestowing a nickname on a teacher.  I was taught at secondary school by a maths' teacher who was called Neuter Gender by the boys.  When this curiously colourless, straight-laced man heard his nickname, he had a breakdown.
Conversely, some teachers relish their nicknames, as much as Margaret Thatcher did when she heard that she'd been called The Iron Lady.  Again, I had a teacher we called Ming the Merciless (after the grim villain in Flash Gordon comics). He referred to himself in class as Ming. We were both amused by this and also annoyed that he knew and delighted in his nickname.

Some nicknames can be therapeutic.  As I have mentioned in a previous post, when I discovered that the pupils called me Volcano, it was a warning to calm down.  And the more I relaxed, the better a teacher I became and lessons became more enjoyable.

Sometimes nicknames virtually become the person's name.  I have a friend I call Snake, and to this day I don't know his real name.  I might have known, a long time ago, but now he will forever be Snake.

The funniest thing about last week's post was that it was unfunny, especially since the topic was humour.

So this week, I intend to repeat a few short examples of humour that I experienced in schools.
I recall that my Latin teacher, in 1960, was asked: "Sir, what was Julius Caesar like at parties?" 

A sneer from the teacher was followed by a detention for the boy who asked the question.  Kids have been using this cheeky device for a long time.  One of my pupils once asked me: "What did Richard III say to you about school uniform?" 

I was tempted to reply that he believed that cheeky boys should be smothered in their sleep, but it sounded too awful if you were unaware of the story of 'the princes in the Tower'.  Besides, Richard III has been maligned enough.  Instead I replied, coolly: "He'd never heard of such things and therefore had no comment to make."

Non-sequiturs, usually uttered naively, can be amusing as well as surreal.  In the middle of a fairly intense English lesson, when the students were so involved about the novel we were studying that their questions reached a high level of enquiry, one boy put his hand up and asked: "Sir, where did you buy that shirt?"

At the time I didn't find his diversionary question funny, but I did laugh afterwards.  Then I read that the comedian Greg Davies, during a brilliant drama lesson, when he was a teacher, was asked, out of nowhere: "Can you do the lambada?"  He said it took him ages to stop laughing.

I once asked a primary school boy what Florence Nightingale's moniker was, expecting him to say: "The Lady with the Lamp." Instead of which I got: "The woman with the light," as if she had been a cigarette-girl at the Balaclava Cinema.

One of the best 'howlers' I have ever heard of came from a P.E. teacher I knew in Sydney.  During basketball practice, a boy was severely winded when the ball hit him in the stomach.  The teacher explained to the lad that that he'd been hit in the solar plexus.  The next day, the boy's mother appeared at the school and demanded to know why a teacher told her son that he'd been hit in the sexual polar!

Enough of the heavy stuff!  After the serious blasts of the last two weeks, I thought that I should lighten the mood and talk about humour in school, especially in the classroom.
From my experience, too many teachers see cheek and banter as a disrespectful attempt to undermine their authority, and sometimes it is, but often it's not.  Personal jibes should be dealt with, but I have derived huge amounts of pleasure from humour as a teacher.
When I started life as a teacher, in my early 20s, I discovered that within a short while, my nickname, bestowed by the pupils of course, was 'volcano'.  This upset me quite a bit, and gave me a message to calm down.  I found, over the course of my teaching life, that the more I relaxed, the better the lessons were and the better the communication between the pupils and me.  And humour became a useful tool for both learning and defusing tense situations.


Advice given in staffrooms at the beginning of the new school year, especially to new, young teachers, is often: "Don't smile until Christmas!"  Many teachers feel that if they drop their teacher's demeanour, or smile, or, heaven forbid, laugh, the students will lose all respect for them and then riot.
Such a notion is unfounded, in fact, the opposite is true.  The more you show yourself as a real, fallible person, the more respect you will get.  A recently retired teacher said:
"I never really showed myself to a class, fearful they would rebel.  Now that I know that they never would rebel, I am sorry I never showed them the real me".  Sad, but quite common.


I shall never forget the late Brian Glover, the actor, famous for his role as the sadistic sports' teacher in the film Kes, being interviewed on television many years ago.  He revealed that he had actually been a teacher, before he went into acting.  He reassured the audience that he was nothing like the character he portrayed so brilliantly in Kes.  The interviewer then asked if he missed teaching and he replied:
"Oh yes, heaps!  It was the best job in the world."
"Why?" asked the interviewer.
"Because it was so funny, often hilarious.  Kids are the best audience and the funniest people in the world". 
You can see why I remembered that interview.