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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Life as a leaf

26/11/2013

3 Comments

 
Picture
'Ejiri in Suruga Province' also known as "A Sudden Gist of Wind' by Katsushika Hokusai
Teachers say that young people are excited by wind. Undoubtedly true, but they are also excited by chips, rain, wasps, blinds falling down and pheasants tapping the window in geography. You have to get your excitement where you can in school and being buffeted by elemental forces and shrieking as you bucket across to Art is more fun than walking with due care and attention to other yard users.

There is a cosiness to the warm and hardworking indoors while a storm rages outside. I love the Rolls Royce purr of an expert’s classroom and the happy immersion of young people tussling with something they’re just working out how to do, that’s just beyond their grasp. I love hearing teachers and children confident in technical language. I love seeing them seize really powerful knowledge, to understand the world and change it for the better. I especially love going to Maths and seeing young people chewing their pens and clutching their hair while they try to repeat something Sir made look pretty straighforward.  
I am ashamed to say I have been skittish with maths teachers – I once described a conversation between a timetabler and the Head of Maths as dinosaurs calling across the swamp – but because I’m the Head they have to be patient with me.  While I chuckle at a former colleague describing A level Further Maths as The Sum of all their Fears, they treat me kindly, hoping I’ll find my way back to the yard soon and leave them to get on with the numbers that keep the building standing and make the earth turn.

It was maths in the wind last week that stopped me chuckling. Looking up from upper and lower bounds through a lot of hair Child, 14, grasped her neighbour’s arm with ‘but what would it be like to be a LEAF?’  We looked through the window at the storm and the poplar trees swaying and the leaves swirling, then got back to work. I thought – but the world would make you a leaf caught in the wind. Unless we are very careful with you it would exploit you and measure you and design you with a template and scissors and hurl you from one expectation to another.  I thought - we know a bit in schools about being leaves in the wind, about being at the whim of changing external forces so that we are blown hither and yon, castigated for raising a thoughtful protest as we try to protect you from the storms of change.  

How different our lives would be without that wind beyond the window. If education was de-politicised.  If there was a check on change that meant that no child could have his examination course changed mid-track. If the role and value of teachers and schools, of knowledge and scholarship and the needs of a good society could be decoupled from the election cycle.  If a College – like the medics have – could be a gatekeeper for our training and development, and speak for us in a calm and scholarly manner. A check and a College – now that would be a change in the weather.

Poetry, like maths, usually has an answer.  I never see a windy tree without hearing great Larkin challenging me to begin afresh, afresh, afresh.  Our great good fortune in school is that we can do that with every young person who shares part of a life with us, and while they’re young they can experiment and make mistakes secure in the knowledge that we’ll help them to begin afresh. Yet young life is so complicated and unforgiving now. Mistakes are preserved in cyberspace in perpetuity making a fresh start harder.  Poverty and debt makes it hard to feel free as a leaf on the wind.  And the education system, which should give them a reliable and secure start is recalibrated annually, trapping young people in caprice and uncertainty.

What would it be like to be a leaf?  I’d love it if she never knew.

CR 26.11.13

3 Comments

Digger man - thank you

14/11/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
Our eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month started unpromisingly. It was gloomy and drizzly and we had a special gift from a local dog right in the middle of our big space, which a noble Deputy guarded from 1800 pairs of feet. Part of the path was under appropriate levels of mud and there was a digger on a mound in the next field noisily doing its digger thing in full view of everyone.

After the usual amount of command whistling, Thomas Tallis fell silent and all eyes turned to the military trumpeter. Last Post, silence, Reveille; and the digger man, silently standing next to his cab, hard hat in hand, head bowed. We had our moment, which ended, as all community moments end here, with applause and some hugging. Then we happily if damply badgered each other back to class.
On the way the usual number tripped over each other, jammed themselves in doorways or sought a scenic route, but within 10 minutes we were settled again and back to work. The memory of the dead faded and we returned to endothermic reactions, French verbs and, inevitably, the Treaty of Versailles.

The visiting trumpeter expressed admiration for our solemnity and then asked me why children hug each other so much now. This is a reasonable question as hugging has developed to such an extent that many a child’s 20 minute break is made up entirely of hugging friends in sheer relief that they have survived the last two hours and then hugging again to fortify them for the next two. Being a northerner, I’ve always assumed it was a cheap way of keeping warm and wished it had been invented when I was freezing half to death in the 70s. He observed ‘Your children seem very happy.  It’s not like it was when I was at school’. I resisted the temptation to give him my usual spiel about children being generally happy and schools being society’s best hope for the future and just grinned like a lunatic, proud of a happy community.

Anyway, his validation of our best efforts to honour the dead within the confines of a multi-use games area mattered to us and I’ll pass it on to young people and staff alike. Better still, his joining us and taking part, and liking us.

Good local schools run best when the community knows them, loves them and want to support them. From the governors who discuss everything from toilet flushing to school vision on endless dark winter nights, to the retired professional who gave us a Mozart and Debussy recital at lunchtime; from the lady over the road who called in to admire our new building, to the 700 families who came to sixth form open night; from the church over the road who pray for us to the man at the bus stop who tells us when the hordes behave well as well as when they behave stupidly. We need you all: everyone who understands that teenagers can be unwieldy and foolish and everyone who smiles at us and wants to know us better. You help our children understand that communities involve effort and a just and sustainable democracy is made up of local people of good heart.

So, a great big Tallis tick to our Poppy Day hero, an unknown citizen who made our act of remembrance his own. His courteous participation turned our school effort into something as meaningful for us as the Cenotaph ceremony and authenticated 1800 young efforts. Digger man – thank you.                                                                                                                                                                                

CR 14.11.13    
0 Comments

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Thomas Tallis School, Kidbrooke Park Road, London SE3 9PX
T: +44 (0)208 856 0115   F: +44 (0)208 331 3004   E: headteacher@thomastallis.org.uk
  • Home
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