We don’t, as a rule, tell professionals how to do their jobs properly - though many of us feel we can comfortably point out to a teacher where they’re going wrong or how they could do that little bit better.
Politicians, parents and the press are particularly prone to it. There are declamatory political party manifestos, thundering newspaper editorials or vitriolic online comments. Why? We’ve all spent a good chunk of our lives in the classroom. We’ve scrutinised teachers up close for extended periods. We’ve seen the good, the bad and the downright awful. But it’s also because we are so interested in schools. We were formed there. We have children there. We get the fact that so much is at stake in shaping the generation to come.
What is striking in Kate Clanchy’s superb reflection on 30 years in the classroom, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, is how little we really know of the reality or complexity of teaching.
Clanchy invites us to meet some of the children she has taught during the course of her 30-year career. She provides piercing portraits of children in crisis; young people on the move; adolescents struggling with sexuality; and teenagers trying desperately to fit in.
All human life is here. Pupils’ dilemmas on their own may seem small.
But they embody much larger and complex issues like religion, politics, belonging, identity, nationality, class and money.
How does a teacher deal with being handed a red rose each morning by a senior pupil?
We join her as she teaches sex education to pale, freckly, uptight 13-year-olds in small-town Scotland; and quickly realises how her approach of role play, which worked so well among the confident multi-racial London kids, fails spectacularly.
And we see how in urban Essex, with its Towie influences, casual sex and vajazzles, a culture where youngsters feel compelled to adjust to a very narrow definition of “normal” and where any deviance is threatening.
At a school “inclusion unit”, Clanchy tries to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to bring learning to a shuddering halt; but quickly realises the limits of undoing damaged lives, family expectations and grinding, inter-generational poverty.
There are the dilemmas facing teachers of love in the classroom. How does a teacher deal with being handed a red rose each morning by a senior pupil? Or what does an educator do when a confused and innocent youngster tells them that they think about them all the time? There is the option of laughing it off and treating it as a ludicrous joke; or the formal complaint route with all the life-changing, school-destroying consequences it can entail for the pupil.
Clanchy doesn’t hide painful mistakes, small humiliations or crushing defeats. She recounts her efforts to help a Kurdish mother and her son at her local asylum centre, where she volunteers writing letters. When the boy seems to be unfairly expelled from the school, in a breach of due process, she takes it as her personal mission to ensure he is re-admitted.
She takes on the school bureaucracy. She appeals, complains and, months later, successfully forces the school to readmit him. Success.
Clanchy's empathetic and sensitive vignettes are a reminder of what a demanding and highly skilled profession teaching can be
The boy wants to join the army and it is crucial that he finishes out the school year. Depression, though, means he is now in a heap. Just weeks later he is expelled again, this time by the book, and the family’s life comes crashing down again.
Clanchy’s empathetic and sensitive vignettes are a reminder of what a demanding and highly skilled profession teaching can be. She has a poet’s eye for detail and her evocative writing is a celebration of what is surely - in the right hands - the most creative, passionate and influential of jobs.
Confident answers, as she admits, are few; mostly what she has found are even more questions. What does emerge with striking clarity, however, is an unquenching love for the job.
“Today, the corridors are full of the young, of new pupils, and of old pupils renewed,” she writes. “Things have happened to them over the summer; they are different, experimental people, full of themselves , eager to tell me about it. The register is fresh with names; the exercise books are crunched open at the spine, the pages blank and smooth as Larkin’s spring leaves.
Begin afresh, they seem to say, afresh, afresh. I fall for it every year.”
Carl O’Brien is Education Editor
