For the past few years, I’ve been trying to spin straw into gold. It’s a thankless task and very unrewarding, financially and emotionally. In my case, the straw was small , uneducated children, aged 8-13, who were to be turned magically into well rounded, responsible, caring individuals who would eagerly soak up learning and drop fronted adverbials into their conversation at appropriate intervals, remembering to mark them off from the remainder of the sentence with a comma.
This should not have been a problem. I am a trained teacher, with a wealth of experience and a sound knowledge of my subject. I actually quite like children. And I am pretty good at explaining what they need to know and enthusing them to learn. However, I do need to start teaching where the child’s knowledge weakens and their curiosity begins. I can’t leap in at page seventy-three simply because it’s Spring Term Week Two and the curriculum demands it.
The children in my school were reluctant to learn. They had issues at home. They were hungry, tired, anxious, over-dosed on Fortnite and terminally bored. Their general knowledge was limited to the area within a five mile radius of their homes, and the contents of the latest most popular You-Tuber’s video.
School taught the youngsters to be bored.
So far, school had taught these youngsters to be bored. Individualism was discouraged; learning was restricted to the content of the specified curriculum; reading was for a test; writing was mainly restricted to slotting the correct word into the gap on a worksheet. Success was arrival at the end of the session with the minimum mental or emotional energy consumed.
I tried. I really tried to enthuse, to inspire, to engage, but I, and the other staff, were tied by the restrictions of a curriculum with very unrealistic expectations. The children were friendly and generally tolerant of my attempts to educate them, but they did not want to learn.
Disruption in the Classroom
Meanwhile, in every class there were a couple of pupils who, sometimes for understandable reasons, would disrupt, argue, shout, throw pencils/ books/ rubbers/ bags, swear, walk out, slam doors, insult each other or me, and generally make the place uncomfortable and unpleasant. Of course, these children need help and support and … education. But there’s no time or space for social and emotional education. Everything is tailored to an endless round of tests and retests. If you pass, you move on to the next test, but if you don’t you retake it. If you are poor at English and Maths, but excel in Art or PE, your chance to shine is removed, while you spend more time practising past papers of tests which you simply are not yet ready to attempt.
At last, after twenty years of hoping and believing schools would get better and teachers would be allowed to teach again and children would be encouraged to learn, I finally gave up. I handed in my notice in February, left my school at Easter and am now heading into the happy ever after. I have freedom, flexibility, choice… and no income!