Reflections on being an Older Teacher.

The other day, trying to thread a needle, I became deeply frustrated.  Every time I thought I'd done it, the thread just - well, missed. I cursed the onset of all things middle aged and groaned at God knows what further frustrations and indignities are to come as more than eyesight fades.
Of course it was more than just the unmended jeans that was getting to me.

The plain truth is that the future I thought was never going to be mine is here. I'm middle aged and counting.

Should I be put out to grass?

And with the return to school only a few short weeks away I got to thinking if it was time to give up?
Am I bringing enough to the big school table? Am I blind to my own shortcomings in the classroom?
Is teaching not a young person's game? If I can't even thread a needle.....

But I'm a blue sky thinker.  I still feel seventeen at heart.  I'm fit and my mind is buzzing like it never has before.  

I'm a blue sky thinker. 

There are just so many opportunities and so many reasons why older teachers are best placed in the classroom and not the retirement home.

1. We lived the past and we're not going back to authoritarian, unimaginative, dictatorial, system centred education. Despite its shortcomings we appreciate everything that education is today and can be tomorrow. We love change.

2. We love being digital natives, inspired by the creativity and connectedness of the net but we're passionate about many things the net just can't provide - a love of rhyme and rhythm in the spoken word, the intrinsic beauty of a book, the power of nature to nurture and heal, the need for others and a wicked sense of humour.

3.The powers that be may improve, recycle and discard curricula, methodologies and philosophies - but we know what really works.

4. We believe in every child not because we're told to but because we're around long enough to have witnessed many a struggling ugly duckling transformed into a beautiful, achieving, swan .

5. We've been practicing mindfulness since long before it became a buzz word.  We know everything passes and we've learned the hard way to judge not lest others judge you!

6. We know that every little tiger is really just a pussy cat.

7. We're needed. We have a serious store of general knowledge and educational expertise.

8. It's not always about what it seems to be about.  Upset is generally about something else.

9. We know how to mend all kinds of things - broken hearts in the staff room, broken dreams in the parent room, broken equipment in the classroom and not just the hem of a favourite old trousers.

10. Because we want to be there, in the classroom at the centre of it all.

Now I feel better.

So the new school year is almost upon us.  The sounds of summer are beginning to fade and the lure of the classroom is growing steadily stronger.
Dusting off my bags and books (lying neglected in the corner into which I had thrown them on the last day of term) my thoughts turned to organisation.  It's not a strong point of mine.  I tend to 'up-play' my love of untidiness - the littered desk, jumble sale classroom, Mary Poppins' bag and my inability to ever find anything just when I want it - well it's all a sign if a creative mind.  Isn't it?

The Reverse Cognitive Effect

Last year in my primary school we set out to tackle necessary structures such as organisation. It seemed to us teachers that children, weighed down by complicated home lives, busy schedules or helicopter parents who zoom in and 'do' for their children, were not taking enough responsibility for their own organisation. And this spills over, encouraging a certain laissez faire attitude and general disconnect from their own learning.  A kind of reverse cognitive effect.

In the shower, where all best thinking is done, I was pondering my part in modelling best practice and the changes I might make.  I fell to thinking about the Homework Diary, much prized in our school but quite frequently neglected by me.  It was high on most teachers' lists when we met to discuss the organisation problem.  I'm not  in the habit of checking that it's used every day or that parents sign it regularly.
Maybe that was a change I could make?
I can see the benefits -  the discipline of daily use, the ongoing record, the parental involvement and the sheer tidiness of it.
But I still have doubts that it's worth it.  I teach in the lower end of the school.  The time it takes to get all children to legibly record their homework is great and - I can't rid myself of the belief - better spent on other things. I have a class website and the homework is laid out there every Sunday in advance and looking at it generally requires parental involvement too.  

So that's that box ticked. There are other advantages too.  Parents can check while at work and relay the information to child minders.  They can come home and have an informed conversation about homework - 'how did you get on with all that addition in Maths?' There are links to useful websites for games and videos - much more than I could ever write on a board. I have offered to provide a print out for those without an internet connection but nobody has ever asked me!

Validate and Encourage or Punish and Deny?

For older students there is the argument that, well, they are older, so recording their homework in a diary should not be such a big deal.  But it is because, with honourable exceptions they just don't do it.  I witnessed one entrepreneurial young man being ticked off for using his phone to snap a photo of the homework written on the blackboard. Other kids really do have excellent memories.
When we teachers talked about organisation we also discussed education's role in preparing kids for the real world.
The real world wants kids who snap photos of their homework. And shouldn't we validate and encourage safe use rather than punish and deny children's connections to the digital world?
Yes, the key word should remain 'organisation', but not on the teachers' terms. Let kids get truly organised by deciding their own tools, be it the diary, the phone, the website, their memory or something we haven't even thought of!

We teachers have to relinquish the kind of old fashioned control which has us holding all the cards and deciding all the rules.
That way we actually free up the kids to take real responsibility.
Now what else could I get organised?