The Older I Get The Better I Was Update and Tribute

I started teaching in 1976 and spent four years and two terms at my first school, a High School in Rowley Regis. Someone very recently posted a teaching staff photo on Facebook and it stirred some powerful emotions: I wasn't on it; I’d only just left when it was taken and in spite of my absence it’s a good photo! The colour quality is good and it captures the essence of the memory I have for my former colleagues. As is the way of things on Facebook, someone posted another photo, a black and white one of the Staff Football team: we were playing the 5^th Year (Year 11’s now) in a match that celebrated their final year in school and the restorative (albeit temporary) power of the male ego: you know, “The older I get, the better I was,” sort of thing. No one took it dreadfully seriously a light-hearted piece of “pupil engagement”.

1976 marked a time when challenges to the assumed comfort of education as a key player in developing a productive and employable workforce were raised; notably from the political left. Jim Callaghan and Shirley Williams each voiced concerns about the worth, value and relevance of what was taking place in our classrooms. In doing so they added fresh fuel to a debate that eventually led to changes that have in so many ways “wiped the smiles off the face of education.”

And there is the starkest of differences: fun. Things like this happened regularly and often:

·          Teachers running lunchtime activities (Formal)

·          Teachers running lunchtime activities (Informal)

·          “Catch Up Classes”

·          Teachers having time to socialise and build up productive relationships with the kids

·          Teachers having time to socialise and build up productive relationships with each other.

·          Whole staff social events

·          Spontaneous “stuff”

As I reflect on the journey we’ve been forced to take, it feels that we have lost some of the essence of purpose that made a job a calling. It’s hard to look at the “progress” we are alleged to have made without concluding that it has been successful largely in an unintended outcome: it has made a calling a job.

The above reflections gained an additional poignancy this week as I read (again on Facebook  about the death of a former valued colleague, Bob Ashwood. Bob was a talented teacher, a great colleague and one of the rare people whose character becomes part of “what goes on around here”: they effortlessly shape culture. The warmth and esteem in which Bob was held is clear from the response to his untimely death from the people he taught. Bob helped keep the smile on the face of education and his passing creates a reflective space that is occupied in no small measure by talent, integrity and a lightness of touch that is often only the property of professional heavyweights. His work outside of teaching is captured in this link. http://www.athleticsweekly.com/news/athletics-community-pays-tribute-to-bob-ashwood/

It feels that Bob’s life was about “a calling,” one that touched countless numbers of people from many walks of life.