Why? · Thu Mar 23, 20:52 by Eleri Straker
I was asked the other day why I went into teaching. After all, the conditions aren’t brilliant, the pay is even less inspiring and the clients – the students, are often obnoxious, mouthy and – how dare they – ungrateful!
The answer, I admit, didn’t immediately spring to mind. It had, after all, been a particularly bad day. Half of my year eleven students (that’s fifth form to those of us still thinking in 1970s speak) hadn’t done their coursework, didn’t want to do it and couldn’t see any valid reason why they should. (And while they were at it, couldn’t see any reason either why the students who wanted to achieve decent grades should be allowed to do so!) My year ten students, a mixed bag of (on this day) the lazy, the disaffected and the plain ornery, were also being particularly unpleasant. One boy, big, tall and loud, (but also, annoyingly, very bright – something he would deny to his dying day as it’s not ‘cool’ to be bright) had told me in no uncertain terms (and language) what he thought of me and my ‘crap’ lessons. I have to admit, that as I walked out of that classroom at the end of yet another fraught session, I couldn’t think of any good reason why anybody with half a brain, a decent degree and even half an ounce of sanity would go into teaching.
Then I walked into my next lesson. Year nine. Shakespeare. And I remembered.
I’m one of those peculiar creatures who met the Bard when I was eleven and I fell in love. With a man who had been dead for four hundred years. A man whose plays had confused and bored generations of school children. A man whose words had reached out to me across the chasm of the centuries and spoke of life and death and love. And in that year nine class, with the ghost of Macbeth squatting like and evil spider in the corner of the room and his hapless wife screaming her despair to an unheeding heaven, Shakespeare spoke again. To a new generation who were entranced and enchanted, drawn irrevocably into the morass of ambition, murder, black magic and despair. For that hour, Shakespeare walked the corridors of my school, firing the imaginations of my thirteen year olds like a latter day Spielberg or Jackson with a passion for learning that I had been afraid had been lost forever. And I remembered. This was why. It’s not the ‘failed’ lessons that matter. It’s not the rudeness of the disaffected. It’s that spark. Every teacher recognises it. It’s when something happens that inspires both students and teacher. It’s when magic happens. And this is why we do it.
