Lessons

On paper, Monday would look decidedly average. But I hate looking at things on paper. A head teacher once said to me, ‘on paper, you’ve only been teaching for two years.’ It was a strategic thing to say, said by someone who wanted a bargain. I was far from average even as a trainee teacher, I loved what I did and my educational career speaks for itself.

Back then, I just worked the classroom and everyday was an exciting adventure, learning and teaching at once. When ambitious bosses saw opportunity in me they appealed to my vanity and in no time I was picking up more and more responsibility… in education that is the word use to describe things that take us away from the children! Leaving the classroom in those early days was a mistake. Not because it was too soon or any such thing, and not because I miss it now and want to go back, although it was a great time. No, the regret is a good regret, one I can learn from.

Taking on extra responsibility was a mistake because I was led by vanity into making choices that weren’t right for me. What I did for vanity! Appealing to my vanity dealt to the approval junky in me.  I remember a colleague meeting me for lunch and saying ‘well Med, what is the plan… you aren’t going to do this for the rest of your life are you?’ I remember being taken aback by the question but people always seemed to see a future for me that I didn’t see for myself. In their view it was a better future... they saw wasted potential, opportunity and prosperity ahead for me. I’m someone who was fortunate enough to be told by many, excepting my mother, that I can do in life whatever I want. It sounds like an ideal and fertile start to life but it was one I would misinterpret.

Working in education is complicated, I guess like working in healthcare or other such services where there is a strong moral component to your work. It is an easy profession to dedicate yourself to; so many good people enter into teaching with a genuine interest in bettering the lot of children and there is never a shortage of things to do that could make a difference. It is a complex relationship that our masters exploit constantly. It is difficult for many to know when it is ok to go back to their own families and pursue their own lives without guilt and fear of judgment. For many, home time comes when they are truly exhausted. It was common place for colleagues to simply sleep and eat between working days, and little else. This psychological play on the part of our English education system squeezes the life from dedicated teachers and unsurprisingly, school holidays provide much needed recovery. Whilst in theory, a model of intense hard graft and longer holidays seems balanced; it is better suited to race horses than human beings.

Pressure has a habit of flowing. In education, London’s Whitehall pressures regions with targets, which in turn tighten the screws on local education authorities with financial incentives and penalties, which in turn pressure head teachers with the same, who come down on their managers and teaching staff with a culture of winners and losers, and inevitably this pressure reaches students and their parents. Yes, we pressured children each and every day to work harder, better and faster. When you say it like that… it starts to reveal how warped our education system is. I was often frustrated by how the day to day humanitarian work of schools was overshadowed by the will to just get children quiet and back in the classroom again.

Never in my training or my career as a teacher was I ever encouraged to convey the message that what children produced in work was good enough. Sure, we would praise… but it was a sweetener to sugar coat the message about improvements. Schooling was and is about constant and relentless improvement in this county. Targets are generated like sales targets in the boardroom, the graph steadily climbing upwards. But we were not salesmen and there is no big marketing campaign. The children that come through our schools in any one year are varied and unique, but on the whole one year is much the same as the next in terms of the variety and challenges it presents. But somehow, each year… learning was to happen better, faster and more efficiently. At every layer…. from impressionable children to tired adults, we were and still are training and nurturing discontentment.

Whether others work in education or not, if they live in the ‘developed world’ I suspect they will recognise this life too.

But reading Professor Paul Gilbert’s Compassionate Mind I know too that in all likelihood our ‘old’ brains have evolved for a tougher world of scarcity rather than abundance and we are hard wired to be ‘seekers’ and ‘wanters’, always preparing for a hard winter. We are discontent by design.

In life I realise now that I passed through happiness on the way to somewhere else. I didn’t stop because like everybody else, I wasn’t satisfied. I added complexity and stuff to my life to better it, thinking that this is what ‘being the best I could be’ looked like. Since then I have found new and greater joy in Alicia and Xavier. There it is again, a liquid silver lining that brought them to me.

It is time to stop writing now. But I remember why I left a career working in schools, the choices and freedoms I was exercising and why I started my own business as a handyman. I can see again where I went wrong and what caused this most recent episode of depression. The penny has dropped and tomorrow I shall write about it. I have always liked learning, even when it comes from mistakes as it so often does.