Nigel 
July 28th, 2009
Confused? Thinking? Somewhere else?
Teaching is the best job in the world, and the worst.
I miss the daily interaction with young, agile minds. If I couldn’t write I’d be pining for facing a puzzled class and trying to explain things better.
One sixth former used to argue a lot. Either he would pick up on something I said, or I would challenge something he said. Often I’d fool around by arguing against a view I actually agreed with. After one argument he threw up his hands and said that was it, he wasn’t going to bother arguing with me any more because I always won. No, I said, please keep trying. Several times recently you’ve nearly won, and I want you to defeat me at least once.
The whole class, including me, applauded the day he was successful. The experience was a joy. The result was real education, though not listed on the formal exam syllabus. I should add for the clipboard guys reading this that in a fifty minute maths lesson the students are likely to learn more if you take five minutes in the middle to do something completely different.
At the end of one lesson a small boy prone to losing stuff walked confidently up to my desk. “Please sir, why have you got an English dictionary on your shelf?”. Why not? Well, because I wasn’t an English teacher. No, but I was a human being. His mouth dropped open. He stared at me as if I’d just been beamed down from Alpha Centauri and he’d caught site of the tentacles. I explained that I was interested in many things, not just Maths. He looked confused. I pointed out a rock climbing guide near the dictionary, some maps, a text book on astrophysics, some psychology books. He blinked uncertainly. “The thing is,” I said, “I’m not a teacher, I’m a human being. And I don’t teach Maths, I teach people.”
Teaching is an all-consuming career. Vicki Davis wrote in one of her recent blogs:
I love the students and love what I do. And yet, every year, before it all starts, I count the cost. I find myself asking myself, “How many more years can I do this?“ “Will I hold up?“ “Can I make it?“ Things I ask myself while running but that I never asked myself until I started teaching, even when I was a high powered General Manager at a cell phone company. I never used to wake up and ask myself, “will I hold up?” I just went to work and did my job.
Good teachers know that good teaching comes at a price. Good teachers also know that it is worth every cell of our body that is shed a little early.
You don’t come home tired, you come home exhausted with your bones aching and your head spinning and at least one pile of exercise books to mark before morning. Most days I would have been on the go virtually non-stop from 8.00 am till 5.30 pm. When you have a class in your room you are responsible for them every single second, and it takes less than a second for some problem to explode.
I don’t miss having to control classes, do playground duties, do parents’ evening after being drained by a day’s hectic teaching. I don’t miss being required to invigilate external exams when I had 150 exam scripts waiting to be marked. I don’t miss rude kids. I don’t miss arrogant parents. I definitely do not miss the unending pressure and stress which coupled with my chronic depression ultimately foreced me to take early retirement.
But I do miss the times when something I said or did made a real and permanent difference to one of the kids.
