Giving up? · Wed Jun 11, 20:15 by Eleri Straker
Today I want to give up.
After years of teaching, I got the feeling that not only have I been left behind, but I’m also a dinosaur.
The change in my feelings about teaching started with the departure of my old friend and colleague Irene (Out with the old, in with the new) then went on through different incidents (which I may write about some day) and cumulated with ‘new’ initiatives at school.
Like most experienced teachers who have been teaching for years, I know how to do it.
But apparently, I need to be monitored. I need to present the senior management with detailed ‘paint by numbers’ lesson plans for schemes of work. In other words, to tell them exactly what I’m going to do in every single lesson.
I’m perfectly happy to provide outline schemes telling them what I intend to do with a particular text, what essays I intend to set, how much time it will take (approximately), what issues I intend to cover and of course, what my objectives are. I have no intention of informing them what exactly I intend to do in every single lesson at any given time.
This is not me being awkward, despite what some colleagues believe, it’s me being honest. While I know with each topic what my objectives are, what I intend to do and how I intend to deliver it, there is no way I can tell anyone specifically what I will be doing in each lesson.
Because I don’t know.
I may begin by planning what will happen in a specific lesson, but I don’t actually know whether this is what will actually happen, because a lesson is, to me, a living thing. It is dynamic, it changes as it happens. The kids might ask a question that leads the lesson down a different route to the one planned. Or I might have a sudden brain wave how something might work better. This is not losing control over the lesson, it’s called being flexible.
Take this morning for example, I have a new mixed ability yr 9 class. They don’t get poetry but I have to teach them Other Cultures poems. This isn’t a problem as I’ve mentioned somewhere that I like teaching poetry. But this class struggles and I have to teach them the poem Limbo which I actually find quite challenging. It’s about slavery and although I’ve taught it many times, I knew that I had to change the way I teach it to this group. So, before I went into the class, I had a free lesson and I remembered that I had a copy of the film ‘Amazing Grace’ (about William Wilberforce), so I searched the film for an appropriate scene to try to get the class to understand the point of the poem. I found a particularly affecting scene when a freed slave explains to Wilberforce in graphic detail what was done to the slaves. So that was how I began the lesson. I showed them the scene, then used my usual Socratic method to discover how much the class understood. I was pleasantly surprised how much they had grasped.
The thing is, this was a last minute change of plan. It wouldn’t have been in my scheme of work as it wasn’t in my plan. But it worked and I have no doubt that it made the lesson much better as it made a difficult poem far more accessible to the students.
This happens all the time.
When I began teaching The Winter’s Tale to my sixth form, I had a lesson in which I intended to look at the language Leontes uses in the first acts. It developed into a discussion on the nature of madness and what paranoia is. It was wonderful. The students began to look at words and see evidence of what they’d discussed (paranoia), so what developed into a psychological study actually then became an analysis of language. Again, unplanned. But completely successful and totally valid.
My results have always been good and I believe that one of the reasons for this is because each of my lessons is a bit of an adventure. It keeps the class on their toes and keeps me fresh.
I was trained (when Noah was a lad in the seventies)at a time when teachers were trusted.
I know how to do my job but I don’t know how to jump through hoops and if the senior team feel that to be able to teach, one has to write detailed minute by minute plans, as without these, I am clearly incompetent, then it becomes very clear what my next step is to be.
It will break my heart.
“White mouse for effort…” Dumbing down of Shakespeare – The Return
