Teachers - part 2

So, here we go with the first great teacher in my life.


Mrs Killock


I don’t know what happened to the music teacher that came before Mrs Killock in junior school but I do know she was quite an old lady and one day she was no longer there. She taught us all the old classic songs that still seem obligatory to learn as a child even now – ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, ‘Doh, a Deer’ and some African jingle in words no one understands just to be ‘culturally appropriate’ so on. She was, in many ways, the worst kind of music teacher because the kids loved her and loved singing the songs and so never realised that we had learned nothing. We enjoyed it because it was an easy lesson – but we learned that music was not a subject to be taken seriously. I see many music teachers doing the same today despite the fact the in the UK we have a national curriculum to prevent this. The children have no idea that they are learning nothing because they are always singing new songs and think this constitutes learning – it doesn’t, it’s just called practice. I don’t want to belittle singing – rightly, it is there in the curriculum too because of the importance it has. I don’t want any singing teacher to think I dismiss it’s value. But oddly, I think such singing lessons have killed off choirs in the UK. Why?


Well, we should have learned from history. Specifically, the mistake the UK made over recorders.


The Plague of Recorders


After the Second World War there was a shortage of metal and, as a result, of instruments in the UK. A need for cheap instruments meant that the recorder (a simple, cheap instrument made from wood) became the school instrument of choice. Millions of children learned to play it extremely badly and most hated it after the initial fun of honking a few notes through it. The rest, who had potential talent, tended to think of it as a ‘child’s’ instrument and moved on to more ‘adult’ instruments like the flute or clarinet as they reached high school. The result was that the recorder, as a serious instrument with hundreds of years of tradition behind it has all but died. In nearly 20 years of teaching I have only ever met one student who took it as a serious instrument and had reached grade 8 by the time she finished her GCSEs. In making use of this instrument’s good points we killed it off. Hunted it to near extinction, if you like.


Singing in schools is having the same affect. Many kids hate it or, at least only tolerate it for the ‘free ride’ it offers for a handful of minutes. Those that like it usually only do because they see the lesson as a chance to ‘get out of doing any real work’. As a result, few go on to more serious choirs at high school age and very few ever think of joining a choir as adults. Once, in the UK, every town boasted a choir. Now, only a few do and most of those are struggling.


Well, Mrs Killock was totally different.


She got us on recorders admittedly (but the previous one had not even done that) and actually tried complicated arrangements with us. She did still get us singing which is fine I guess especially as the songs were more serious and less ‘childlike’. Actually, she varied the lessons really well in this respect long before ‘variety of pace’ was a buzzword amongst teachers. But it is not for these reasons I remember her.


Ludwig Von Beethoven


One day she started teaching us about Beethoven. She taught us about his life and played us recordings of his music. She taught us about his three periods of work and why each was different. And she expected us to learn and remember. There was to be a quiz.


I was hooked. I had never known about musical history before. I had never realised that composers had a story and led fascinating lives. Suddenly the music made sense instead of being boring. I understood that ‘fate was knocking on the door’ in the 5th symphony because Beethoven was going deaf, I understood why the 3rd was ‘heroic’ because originally it had been dedicated to Beethoven’s hero Napoleon. I was fascinated by the twist in the tale that Beethoven had scribbled out the dedication afterwards when Bonaparte had declared himself emperor and became a traitorous villain in Ludwig’s mind. I got a chance to glimpse into the soul of a tortured man for the first time.


I worked liked crazy for that quiz and when it came I answered the questions confidently. When she gave the results back and I was top of the class, both she and I were surprised (I had never shown any ability in class before let alone interest in music - I didn’t think I had any interest myself). This was something I could do. I could learn, I could read, I could understand. I had always thought music was just something you could either ‘do’ or ‘not do’. Now I knew I could, at least, learn to appreciate it if nothing else.


And that one event was enough to keep me interested during three pretty dreadful years that followed at high school (a story for another time involving unrequited love, death and betrayal) until I decided that I really wanted to learn music properly.


Variety is the spice of life


As a teacher I look back and realised that Mrs Killock was the first music teacher to give us variety of task. Instead of spending 40 minutes singing a small selection of songs a couple of times each week, we sang, played, learned to read music a little, learned history. We dipped our toes in the water of musical learning. I’m sure some hated the history, but loved the singing. I was the other way around. The point was that there was something for everyone.


I’ve learned in my own teaching that you can never please everyone all the time. I used to think that kids only wanted to learn about pop and rock music but soon found that when I actually taught modules on this more arguments broke out amongst the kids than with anything else. If I played rock then half the class would complain loudly. If I played pop then the other half would complain instead. Oddly, if I played classical and made it interesting – told them the story behind the music as Mrs Killock had done – then I never got complaints at all. They could see the point even if this was not the kind of music they normally chose to listen to.


Take up a hobby today


So, these days, I give variety where possible and I try to put variety in my own life too. I recommend it to anyone really. Life is too short to focus on only one thing or become so obsessed with work you have no room for anything else. I’ve just taken up Japanese for that reason despite being overloaded with learning Bangla and a few other useful languages. I’m doing it just for fun, for a few minutes each day with a Japanese friend giving me a little help once a week. No pressure, no tedious hours spent on it, just something new.


If you haven’t already done so, I warmly recommend you take up a hobby. Not to be good at it, just to do something a little different in your life. 10 minutes a day doing something new. It has become recognised in the Business world as well as many other places that some kind of activity that is purely for enjoyment is good for you and makes you are better employee. More importantly, if it involves physical as well as mental activity then there are many health benefits for you too. Sport, painting, juggling – anything really. You could even take up an instrument.


But maybe not the recorder. Please.

Christmas Gifts

Dedicated to my father and all those who have passed through my life for a season.

Today at LAMB school in Bangladesh, I had to give an assembly looking at Christmas and this gave me an opportunity to be thinking about what this seasonal festivity means to me as a foreigner abroad. At the same time, after the assembly, we said goodbye to two students who have been with us for most of their lives, I think. The boy, Mueed, I don’t know every well – incredibly he’s one of the few that I haven’t taught here! The girl, Anumita, I’ve always taught. I know her very well and I am really sad that she is leaving.

Anu is going to join the Bangladeshi school over the road from us. This may seem an odd move considering that the education at LAMB is undoubtedly good. You may be thinking, if there is a Bangladeshi school very close by, why have an English Medium school teaching O levels and English National Curriculum syllabus at all? What is the point of teaching a foreign system?

It is a good point and one, I’m rather glad to say, I was not involved with when decisions about the school were made. I came in with the knowledge that O levels had been decided upon and the teaching had already begun so I just slotted into a system that was already there. Likewise, the National Curriculum had been followed for years, long before I came. I have no preference myself.

Nevertheless, the school was set up to be an alternative – in almost everyway – to the national system and to give options to students and their parents that they would not otherwise have had. This is important when we live in an environment where head teachers can still demand bribes to take on students, where teachers (and heads) can beat whole classes of kids and get away with it because the school has to give a ‘Transfer Certificate’ if a child wants to go to another school. If you take your child out of school because they beat her you will not get that certificate. Or where teaching is deliberately poor so that parents are forced to pay for private teachers to teach the subject after school in their homes – often the same teacher who was teaching poorly in the class! This is the expected way that teachers earn a substantial part of their income. For this reason, all teachers at LAMB are forbidden to teach privately.

Not all schools are as bad as this, of course, and many children leave LAMB and go to other schools where they are perfectly happy. We see many kids come into the school (it has a large waiting list of students who wish to join) and we see many leave. So why am I sad about Anu?

I think, more than anything else, it is because I have formed a relationship with her over the years, as I have with all my students. I took so long to decide to come to Bangladesh because of this kind of attachment. I loved the company of all the students I taught in Whitehaven, England and cared about what would happen to their education if I left. Now, here, I think the same when I see a student leave. What will happen to their education, their life, their hope, their future when they leave here? I can’t help but worry and feel sad that they have slipped away. I feel like I have got it wrong in some way.

So then, I have to keep reminding myself why LAMB school is here. We provide an alternative to the national system. It is right that parents exercise that right to opt in or out. Our job is to make sure students are prepared for either option. It would not be right if we somehow ‘trapped’ parents into our system in just the same way they can be trapped in the national one. Still, I can’t help but feel I must have got it wrong if someone felt they wanted to exercise that freedom.

Thankfully, Christmas has come at just the right time to help me find some kind of an answer to my anguish.

As a Christian school we are preparing for Borodin and remembering the gift given us in the form of Jesus as a child. The act of giving presents to remind us of this gift has been lost or destroyed for most in the West by the greed of materialism. Many shops obtain a vital proportion of their income from Christmas so if they fail to get it one year they go bust. Get it another year and they are rich. I can’t see the difference between that and gambling to be honest.

I think the original idea of the gift needs to be found again. It is not a thing but a person - Jesus. If nothing else the importance of another human being given for us is, at least, part of the point of this story in the Gospels. The things don’t matter – people do. The gift I will receive, this year, is my family and my friends wherever they are. It is the love that comes from those you love that sees you through the year. It is the people who pass through your life. It is Anumita and Mueed and all the other many students I have had the honour of knowing – even on a very small scale.

This Christmas, I want to be more aware than ever, that I have all the gifts I could ever need right here with me now even if, physically, some of them are thousands of miles away. I need to appreciate that sometimes those gifts are temporary, meant to be in my life for a season and then to go again.

My family and I are struggling with not being home. We miss the UK, the snow that everyone there is complaining about, the decorations, the cheesy music and the warm glow that is all around at this time of year. But one day we will be back and then every Christmas we will be missing Bangladesh instead! We will see all the problems back in the UK and long for the perfect images that our memories trick us with and pine for Bangladesh. It is good to miss the past - but not if we fail to see the present slipping past us.

Instead, I need to be able to say ‘This is where I am now. This is here. This is the gift for me right now.’ I need to say thank you for those who have been put in my life. And I can be thankful for the gift of those that were with me in years gone by. Whether on the other side of the world or having gone to another world I can miss them and rejoice that they were entrusted to me for a little while.

And I can use this to remind myself that what I have now is equally entrusted for a just a short while. I must not let it slip by unawares.

Why I don't want my kids to get an A

Sometimes I think I am the worst kind of educationalist. After all, I don’t believe in education.

Let me qualify that. I don’t believe in education the way the West says it should be. And, as a result, I can honestly say I don’t want my kids to get the best possible results at school. I don’t want A grades, I don’t want a fistful of A levels, I don’t want a 1^st at university and, as they are budding musicians, I don’t want Distinctions at all their grades.

Does this sound a bit dodgy from someone who has been teaching for 18 years? Hypocritical for someone who is proud to have seen many hundreds of students get their GCSEs, A levels and degrees and been a part of that? Bizarre utterings from someone who has tried to push musical talent to find its best in every student and had many go on to become professional musicians themselves?

Well, it all depends on what you call education and why you think we should be teaching it at all.

For many years, I saw in the UK an increasing pursuit of education at all costs. Schools proud of almost all of their GCSE students taking up A levels, or how they have pushed more ‘D’ grade students into the ‘C’ bracket and so on. Universities now seem to be full to the brim of students who, years ago, would never have made it to a degree at all.

I have to question the motives of the institutions that allow this to go on. It is fairly obvious that most of the time it comes down to money (either saving it or getting more of it) and a lot has to do with prestige. Schools want to outperform others locally and, with OFSTED breathing down their necks, they feel compelled to do so or risk losing jobs.

But being here in Bangladesh has helped me to voice the deep suspicion I felt for years in those institutions. Why on earth do we want to educate children at all?

Now don’t get me wrong, I love learning. I even love taking exams. And I certainly love pushing myself further to develop my skills and knowledge. This I want to encourage in students. I want them to surpass themselves and, in doing so, to deepen their love for learning. But do I really care if they get an A or a B or a D? Not really. Most of what I learn now I am really rubbish at (you should hear my Bangla – beshi karap) but one young man taught me that it does not matter.

Many years ago, whilst at university, I began teaching students on the piano. One boy came to me and barely uttered a word in every lesson. But he listened carefully and slowly worked his way through music books. Very slowly. He seemed to have no real talent at all. Indeed, after many years we started Grade 1 work with a year to take the exam. We ran out of time. I had to buy new pieces and have us start all over again because he took so long. The traditional teacher’s advice at this point is that the lad had no talent and should give up.

But how could I do this when I knew from his mum that every morning he would get up and immediately practise without having to be told to do so? He was doing everything right, he was just taking a very long time to do it!

I have never been over-awed by student’s talent – I’ve seen a lot of it over the years but students themselves tend to see it that they are the only ones who have it. I have had to deal with students and parents who thought their little darling was the talent in the school and should be given special treatment. I have never agreed with such a way of thinking, instead, it is the ones who show the effort, the love, the desire to learn that interest me. And so I stuck with this boy.

Eventually, he took his grade one exam – and got a merit! Then he went on to do grade 2 and got a merit for that too. And so on it went until, eventually, he was a very fine pianist with a string of grades. He taught me a lot in doing that. No matter how difficult or lacking in the traditional view of ‘talent’ a student is, if they have the desire to learn I have the patience to teach. Conversely, no matter what skill or genius they have, if they are lazy or obnoxious then they can go find another teacher.

So what does this have to do with my kids getting an ‘A’ or my views on education?

Well, here in Bangladesh education has a purpose. Get a grade, get a job, get a wage, get food on the plate for you and your family. Simple. Honest. Necessary.

But in the UK it is ostensibly about that but really it is – get a good job, better than the next guy. Get more money, work less, have better holidays and better stuff. Avoid having to do the crap jobs.

And that last sentence is where I really have a problem. The person I have learned more from here in two years has been my ayah. Poorest of the poor, no real education (she can read and write Bangla to a level but that is all), with many in her family to look after yet she is hard-working, honest, efficient, and intuitively clever and thoughtful. The last person outside my closest and personal friends I respected this much was Mark Ashton, our wonderful vicar from the Round church, Cambridge who, even up to his death earlier this year, showed the most amazing knowledge, care and compassion I have ever had the honour to witness. And I see similar in Bangladesh, the same hard-working down to earth, humble and honest attitudes from people who have very simple jobs.

The fact is, we still have to have people do these essential jobs. We need farmers, crop harvesters, road sweepers, cleaners, cooks, plumbers, builders and so on just as much as the doctors, teachers, politicians, lawyers and other so-called ‘intelligent’ careers.

But our insistence on seeing these latter jobs as more important or better or more worthy or deserving of greater respect is utterly abhorrent to me. How can I tell one man or woman that because they grow rice I am more important than they because I teach others to become doctors and save lives or similar? Whose work am I eating from my plate each day? What will those imaginary ‘saved lives’ eat each day? If you leave it to me to grow my own food I will starve! I can’t do it! I have no idea how to keep plants of any sort alive even though I teach kids all about plant nutrition and can tell you the chemical formulas behind plant growth. Head knowledge and actual experience are very different things.

So… my kids? Well I am quite proud of myself that, thus far, I have not done what many friends predicted would happen. I am a bit of a rebellious teacher and I have been told many times “Ah, but it will be different with your own – you’ll see”. Well, so far the critics have been completely wrong. I don’t want my two children to get the top results, be top of the class or end up with the best jobs.

I want them to be happy.

That’s what I have learned here. That even in the midst of troubles, poverty, crisis and death, Life pulsates all around. The ones I respect here are not the boro lok - the rich and the important. They are the ones that whatever their circumstances have found peace and take joy wherever they can find it. That is a gift the West can never give to the people of Bangladesh. I think we need to learn it from them.

I want my children to learn well and make good use of their educational time. I want them to learn how to learn and how to enjoy it and this is what I have always tried to give my own school kids. The best compliment ever paid to me as a teacher was not actually said to me. It was after a particularly difficult and boring music lesson I had to give to some year 7 students. As they were all leaving I overheard one say to another “I really love music lessons. I’m no good at it, like, and I can’t do it well but I really love the lessons”. The kid had no idea I was listening but I was deeply touched. Even after a ‘dreadful’ lesson, if I was keeping kids interested in being in the class and keeping them on the road to learning it really did not matter what I taught them or how well they did. They were learning to love learning.

I want my kids to learn, love it and get the best grade they deserve. I want them to get grades that, in the end, they can say “Yep, that seems about right”. I want them to get the level of job that is appropriate for them. If that means stacking shelves for the rest of their lives because that is the right intellectual level for them and they will be happy doing so then I will be so very proud of them. We need shelf-stackers!

When I left school after A levels I was militantly anti-university and determined to be a bin man. Indeed, my first job was putting radios and speakers in to cars – quite a physical job because I had to do lots of drilling and cutting and lifting of seats out of cars. It didn’t need an A level in Maths to do it. I loved it. But another vicar, Peter Lawrie, from my church as a youth – St. Johns, whitwick – very wisely pointed out to me (poor man, I was accepted as one of the family so he got to hear my outrageous rants on an almost daily basis) that if I, an intelligent and qualified young fellow, became a dustbin man I was taking away the job of another who did not have my qualifications and could never do the type of job I was ‘mentally’ appropriate for. He was right. If had remained doing car radios I would have been bored stupid within years and probably hating life by now. I needed the more intellectually demanding work.

So, if you are a student and you hate the idea of going on to university – don’t go! But, beware, the job you get instead could be the rest of your life. Can you live with that? If you can, then go for it and be proud of the work you do.

For as long as we insist on telling people that one job is more important than another rather than honest work being more important than dishonest, we will continue to have the unhappiness in the workplace - the selfish drive for better pay, better conditions, better possessions well beyond that of basic human needs. We will continue to have too many students taking university and dropping out feeling failures instead of happily pursuing a valuable job that requires less mental energy but more physical. A car mechanic and I are just as clever as each other. Only my job hurts my head at the end of a long day and his hurts his hands.

We should work with the view of doing the best we can rather than pursuing the easiest and most comfortable option. If, in your work place you are saying “There must be more than this” than ask yourself  “Do I want more for me or do I want more so I can benefit others better?” If we don’t, we will never be satisfied. Greed is always hungry.

Of course, after all this expounding and theorising (which I do practise with all children), I realise that my father was doing this with me long ago when I was too young to get it. He used to look at my report card from school and totally disregard my As and Bs. He knew I was clever, he didn’t need no teachers to tell him that. Instead he looked at the numbers by the side that indicated effort. God help me if he saw 3, 4 or 5 which was satisfactory to very unsatisfactory. Anything less that 1s and 2s meant trouble because I was not pulling my weight, not doing my best. My family are very sporty but, alas, I am not. Yet, if my school report indicated that despite the E grade I was putting in really very good effort then my father was happy and made me feel proud.

But then I was always very proud of my father too and as the first anniversary of his passing away approaches at the time of writing, that pride has never diminished. Yet, I am not aware of any A grades he may have achieved and he never went to University. He worked hard all his life and had a reputation for being honest. He did his best and I don’t think he could have asked for more from himself. That’s what I want for my kids.

All of them.

Opposites Attract

“Right then,” I said to the attentive Grade Eights “Today we shall look at magnetism. And I have some magnets right here to show you.”

This was a moment of some excitement for both the students and myself, I have to say. In the course of the two years I have spent at LAMB. Most of the subjects I have taught have been science related. Not bad for someone who qualified as a musician and has spent most of the last eighteen years teaching music. Although my teaching qualification qualifies me to teach “any subject” to “any age group” there are some subjects I am not likely to try my hand at.

Physical Education, for instance.

Anyone who really knows me will need no telling what a disaster it would be if I was left in charge of a bunch of teenagers to use what I consider to be illegal weapons in the form of cricket bats, balls and that most deadly of weapon, the skipping rope. Even worse if it was my Fourth Grade class who sit attentively for me in our science class but, I suspect, would become as stealthy and lethal as Ninja dwarves if allowed anywhere near shuttlecocks and racquets. And then there is hockey. The thought of me controlling (just not possible) a group of teenage girls playing that particular form of abuse does not bear thinking about. I suspect I would find myself in hospital as much as most of the losing team (and a fair number of the winning side too).

Similarly, despite great artistic skill buried deep, deep within my soul, I think that teaching art could only result in either a new wave of artistic expression that would leave the Dadaists speechless or a disaster in the classroom of epic proportions which would result in the cleaning ayah not speaking to me for the rest of my (presumably short) life.

Still, most other subjects I have taught from time to time and I very nearly went down the maths/science route for my own career before choosing music so this is a reasonably safe area for me to teach. Except for one area.

Practicals.

Now, it is a well-established rule in the science world (at least in the one involved with education) that if an experiment can go wrong it will go wrong. I regularly suggest to my students that if they do an experiment that actually goes right then they must take care not to damage the universe further as when an experiment goes right the whole universe is destroyed and instantly replaced with an identical one (who says I can’t screw with their minds at least a little bit). We would never know it has happened, but it is just damned annoying to know that it has.

On a more realistic plane, I do have the very real fear that if I am responsible for an experiment I could be responsible for a whole range of deaths and disfigurements. Electrocution, acid burns, poisoning, glass shards ripping out eyes, hearing loss, fingers trapped in contraptions and (most heinous of all) tea spilt on the teacher’s laptop. I have not heard of a single school in the UK that has not had some kind of accident usually resulting in a trip to the hospital. Of course, the staff there will have been fully trained and experienced, they themselves having conducted hundreds of experiments so that when it goes wrong (and it will) they know they did everything right. I don’t think I could ever be entirely sure.

So, I will teach theory up to any level of complexity but I do not do experiments. Instead I spend hours downloading videos from the internet (legally, I hope) of others doing experiments to show the kids instead. Generally, this works well but, well, it must be said, it can be boring. I’ve not yet fallen both asleep and off my stool whilst actually talking and teaching but I have come close. I am reminded of the teacher at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter stories who died during a break time and didn’t realise it, so has carried on teaching ever since. That could be me one day.

Some of my students (not many, I’ll admit) tell me I am more interesting than other teachers who are all boring and this is nice to hear, even if it is that when talking to said ‘other’ teachers it transpires the same kids said the same thing to them except with order of teachers reversed! Still, I would hate you to think that I was deadly boring. But even I sometimes think an experiment or two wouldn’t go amiss.

So, it was for all this reasoning that there was great excitement that I had got a bunch of magnets out for the Grade eight science class. Magnets, I thought, are perfectly safe short of flinging one into someone’s eye. Even I, with my lack of practical experience, can handle magnets. Though playing with magnets would seem a simple and boring thing to do in a UK high school, here in the Dinajpur region of Bangladesh the resources we have are very limited though they increase with every coming year thanks to helpful donations from many supporters all over the world. And the fact that ‘Uncle Ken’ does not normally touch anything he is suspicious of being ‘scientific’ in purpose (let alone ‘sportslike’) meant that this was a special occasion.

I had just been teaching static electricity and putting forward the concept that opposites attract and like charges repel. We had drawn up diagrams of magnets with North and South poles and how the magnetic fields point towards or away from each other depending on the polarity. I took out two magnets with their poles clearly indicated.

“So, let’s make sure that you have all been paying attention.” I said with that smug air of a teacher who knows he is on safe ground “If I move the North pole of this magnet towards the North pole of the other, what will happen?”

“They will repel, Uncle”

I confirmed that I considered this a most excellent answer and proceeded, slowly to push the two north ends together demonstrating in practice the wisdom of my teaching.

Kerchink went the magnets as both North ends stuck themselves together with such satisfying speed as to leave no one in any doubt that, far from repelling, they had in fact shown every indication of being attracted.

I doubt I could have been more embarrassed had I come to school and too late realised I had forgotten to put any clothes on (well, ok – maybe that one would top it) and the class (including another teacher who was observing me teach to ‘learn’ how I do it) burst into laughter. I, in true Basil Fawlty manner then did it again and again, putting South and South together, watching North and South repel and so on in some vague hope that somehow the result would change. It didn’t.

Having gone from the heights of excitement and confidence, I now plummeted to Eeyorelike depths and realised that my hopes of demonstrating controlled nuclear fusion in the science lab before I leave were irrevocably and permanently put on hold. I could not make even the simple laws of magnetism work in the classroom.

In truth, it was funny and I quickly did what any self-respecting teacher would do. I blamed someone else.

“Oh.” I said. “Someone must have written N and S the wrong way round.” True enough, though one magnet had the letters etched, the other had them written by hand in pen and must have been written in error. The class was pacified and we moved swiftly on. The class departed at the end of the lesson and I was left to ruminate on what had happened.

This, I thought, is why I do not do experiments.

Still, it could have been worse. I could have been teaching hockey to girls.