Why am I a teacher? Really?

I began writing a blog post a few weeks ago about some hilarity or other of life in Israel (Purim, the Jewish holiday where everyone dresses up and gets absolutely smashed – sort of like Jewish Halloween, except with rather more meaning) but it seems to have been hijacked by my ongoing existential quest.  So instead of blogging about my all-nighter with friends in Tel Aviv celebrating Purim, I have decided instead to share with you the thoughts I’ve been having regarding why it is that I’m a teacher.   Because recently I’ve not been that sure why I am and given that I’m staring down the barrel of another 30 years teaching it’s really worth finding some kind of meaningful answer to that conundrum.  I do believe that this is the job I’m going to do for the rest of my life and, as with my search for meaning in the belief I have in God, it’s worth exploring what that means.

I read an article in last Friday’s International Herald Tribune where the writer, a university lecturer, had a brief conversation with Dr. Martin Luther King which totally transformed the way he thought about his life.  (You can read the article here: http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx)  It wasn’t about civil rights; it was about why the writer had chosen to do a Ph.D. in art history and it caused the writer to completely re-evaluate why he studied Renaissance art, its moral and religious content, and the decision he then made to become a teacher in order to for him “to help students identify and examine their own values”.  It got me to thinking about my own choice, at 17, to study history and the subsequent choice I made at 22 to become a history teacher.

I sort of fell into teaching, almost by accident (or providence?  Hmmm.).  In my third year of university I realised that I just really like studying history and so I wanted a career that would help me continue to do that; after finishing my B.A. I then completed a Masters in American history (recurring joke said to me by everyone I met: “Wow, that can’t be taking you very long”) and went to teacher training college in Bristol to do a PGCE.  The plan was to do the PGCE, get my qualified teacher status, bugger off to the Caribbean for a few years teaching at a cushy international school then go back to university and do a Ph.D., eventually becoming a university lecturer.  Somewhere along the way that plan got completely derailed and I ended up teaching for 8 years in the inner city in Bristol, which job provided me with both amusement and frustration in equal measures.  There's nothing quite like being told to f**k off on a regular basis by 13-year olds to keep you on your toes; I wasn’t quite like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds but there was certainly never a dull moment.  Here are some examples of the sort of shenanigans I had to deal with:

• During my training year, on placement in one of Bristol's roughest schools, I left a fairly boisterous (i.e. completely mental) class for a minute to talk to another member of staff in the corridor.  I turned around to discover that one child had rammed a desk up against the door, preventing me from getting back in the room.  Brilliant.
• The time I taught a 13-year old kid with tattoos, whose father was the local drug king-pin; when I asked him to tuck his chair in at the end of class he just looked at me and laughed.
• A fight in my first year of teaching at Henbury between two of Year 9’s finest (and heftiest) girls, which I proved so completely incapable of dealing with that my much smaller colleague (who was also 3 months pregnant at the time) broke it up while I attempted, in vain, to disperse the audience that had gathered in seconds.  Kids have some sort of weird sixth sense when it comes to fights in school: they seem to pick up the location of a fight by osmosis and a crowd forms in seconds.
• The kid who climbed out of the first-floor window of my classroom in order to escape a detention, shinnying down the drainpipe and legging it to the farthest corner of the field.  Needless to say, I never actually got him into detention.  Not once.
• The student who decided that it would be a really good idea, again once I was in the corridor talking to another member of staff, to saw through the electric cable of the OHP – massive bang, sparks everywhere, the kid came hurtling out of the room and a smell of electrical smoke lingered in my classroom for the rest of the day.  You’d think I’d have learned by then not to leave my classroom.
• The kid from the Caribbean, just arrived in the UK where his parents had sent him to get him away from the drugs and guns culture, who showed up to school late, reeking of very strong marijuana and carting a bibi gun.  My room smelled of dope for the rest of the morning and I think the kid ended up going back to Anguilla.

Despite the intensity of working in the inner city with kids who came from the most deprived backgrounds – every kind of abuse, one or no parent, abject poverty – I always felt like my work at Henbury mattered.  There is something very special about being involved in the lives of children for whom life seems to have stacked the decks in a negative way and though it’s incredibly hard to cope with the pressure day-in, day-out, I always felt that it was worth it.  Then I moved to an international school in Jerusalem, full of the children of diplomats, UN workers, missionary workers, local notables, and I started to feel like I was totally redundant.  These are kids who are (on the whole) very well-motivated; really, some days it feels like they could have a robot at the front of the class and some of them would still ace every exam.  So I got a little depressed: am I making any tangible difference to the lives of these incredibly privileged, and often entitled, kids, lovely as they are?

 

After a few days of pondering and asking others and thinking about education as a profession, these are the conclusions I have reached, and they are by no means final.  Firstly, I guess that being a teacher means that you are, inevitably, some sort of role model.  Even if the kids think I’m talking total rubbish, I’ve been trying to work out what the values are that I want to communicate.  Honesty is probably the main one; I firmly believe that honesty and integrity are two of the most important qualities any person can display.  Kindness would be another.  More than treating all people, whether they are the Prime Minister or the cleaner, with dignity and respect, I think I want to them to recognise the importance of saying things that build people up, rather than drag them down. 

 

I guess also that part of my job is to help students to become enquirers (to use horrible teacher speak).  To encourage them not to accept what they are told but to question for themselves, to draw their own conclusions based on the evidence in front of them and to think for themselves.  Within history as a discipline, I hope that their time in my classroom teaches them the significance of cause and consequence, teaches them something about human nature and demonstrates that the study of the past informs the future.  And after reading that article last week, I realise that I also want my students to question their own ideas and values, to be ready to listen to someone’s opinion even if they disagree with it and to be ready to change their minds if necessary.  Allowing oneself to be wrong sometimes is a hugely important thing.  I hate being wrong.  It’s a running joke with some of my friends, that I’m always right (no, genuinely, I am) and if I get something wrong in class I always tell the students to enjoy it because it won’t last long.  But learning to be wrong, to accept that and to move on is an essential part of education.  I have a quotation from Winston Churchill on my board that says “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” and every now and again I remind myself of that idea.  I also have a sign on my classroom door which says “No bananas” (eurgh), so they may think I’m not taking the Churchill thing that seriously.  But I am.

 

It’s good to have purpose in life – the Bible says that where the people have no vision, they perish – and I suppose it’s also good to take a long, hard look at the career you’ve chosen and remember why you’re in it.  Sometimes I think I’d make more of a difference working for an NGO, or as a nurse, but this is the career I’m called to so I have to work out why I do it as well as where and how it is that I make a difference, no matter what school I’m in.  And actually, at the end of the day, working with teenagers is absolutely hilarious - sometimes intentionally, sometimes less so.  Having said that, my dad gave me a little sign for my classroom when I qualified which says (as per the one above) “There are two good reasons for being a teacher: July and August”.  All that holiday is definitely a massive plus…

 

This was totally me when I taught in the inner city...

Next time on A Brunskill Abroad: Purim, Pesach and other Jewish holiday mayhem, plus more Brits on tour – I think I nearly killed the latest lot with all the sight-seeing.