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 5th 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.