WMI

I suppose that it was in the year 1973, after a year at Teacher’s training college, that the powers that be finally let me loose on real live children. One of the minor attainments I had achieved was some long forgotten course which allowed me to teach Mathematics in a primary school. I became, if you like, a ‘Weapon of Math Instruction’, a WMI. So in I went to a teaching practice at a Primary School in the Oxford village of Abingdon. I was absolutely terrified. I had no idea what to expect. I had no idea how I was going to control a class of little characters, let alone try to teach them anything. It was only 5 years or so after Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech. To this day that apocryphal moment in history is a true WMI, in this case a Weapon of Mass Instruction maybe! The great man’s speech has probably assumed a higher relevance over this past year as a result of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. Anyhow in the 1970s, Davidson was inspired by great oratory. MLK’s speech was still at the front of my mind when my first teaching practice loomed. I resolved to go into the classroom very well prepared. I suppose that I didn’t really believe that I would be able to hold the wee takkers spellbound by my oratory. Would they hang off my every word? Would their gabs gape with wonder as I recounted an inspiring tale? Of course not. There is something about ‘I have a set of multiplication tables’ which does not quite match ‘I have a dream’, does it?

So there I was stood before the class wearing my best bib and tucker, face crimson with fearful embarrassment. Mr. Evans introduced me to what was going to be effectively my class for about 6 weeks. Like every other student teacher I had been filled with new innovations. Child centred education, whole language learning, use of visual aids. I carried with me the words of Brian Darlington. “Children learn by doing, not by watching and queuing”. So that statement alone gave me the opportunity to lay out a brief plan and get the children actively learning.  I could, I hoped, hold my audience long enough to start them on an activity. Then it would be but a simple matter to wander around the classroom, offering snippets of advice here and an encouraging word there before drawing things to a relieved conclusion.

So the children did end up ‘doing’. Their ‘watching and queuing’ was indeed at a minimum. Only trouble was that they were not doing precisely what I wanted them to do. My deeply planned day book, hours of preparation on the previous night quickly became victims of unforeseen circumstances. The ‘outcomes’, so emphatic and categoric in the plan, were nothing like what they should have been. My fatigue at the end of the day left me wondering what I was doing wrong. At one point I pencilled in my goal for the following day as being ‘My sanity” and, for the children, “Leave them less confused”. (I guess if I had been beginning my career today I could have adopted the “Leave no child behind” policy. “Leave no child confused” has a certain meaningful ring to it, does it not, Dear Reader?).What was the disconnect between the tasks and the goals? Why did my plan not flow towards a logical conclusion? So I became angst ridden and concerned that the class would be behind in the curricula and that I would never complete what I had set out to do, that I was brow-beatingly useless, what had I done, should have joined the circus? Anything was better than what I was facing every day. If you have read my memoir “Kilt in the Closet” you will know that I struggled mightily in a profession that did not come naturally to me.

It took a long time before I was able to control my frustrations at what should have happened but didn’t. None of it seemed to get any better or easier. Then some time in about my 4th year, most of the stress, the anger, the frustration seemed to dissipate and finally disappear. Instead a fatalistic calm settled over the Davidson demeanour. It was an acceptance that I really wasn’t very good as a teacher; that I was failing  my young students. Having accepted this, a peculiar peace settled over me.  I resolved to look upon my work days as something of a necessity but also a mental shrugging of the shoulders, an acceptance that even if I could do very little that was good for the students then the least I could do was be a consistent presence and turn up for work every day. So at some long forgotten moment in a past that I have somehow mislaid, I resolved to change. I decided to present a calm devil-may-care demeanour, defying the inner Davidson turmoil. Accordingly I arrived at work every day with a beatific smile on my face. I sat around the classroom chatting to children, laid back in my chair, nudged a particular direction here, suggested a possible solution there. My whole demeanour changed. I suddenly rediscovered my sense of humour. I floated casually around the classroom rather than flitting like a hyperactive, frightened rabbit from crisis point to crisis point. I moved from being a frustrated fluster to a slow, steady state of grace.

Lo and behold, the new calm demeanour produced in the children a new calm demeanour. “Wow,” you may say, Dear Friends, “We always knew he was slow on the uptake but 4 years!!??” If all was still not sweetness and light then there was, at least, a sunny upland on the horizon. If you have read my story you will have understood that my secondary school practicums were not a bed of roses at all. My time at Cranford Community School in the London Borough of Hounslow, my first teaching post, was marginally better. There I went from being a Latin teacher to teacher in charge of the Unit Group, a small group of Emotionally and Behaviourally Disturbed teenagers.

My point is, Dear Reader, that much though I liked the learning that I received in my three years at college, I wish I had been told that I should approach the job as if I didn’t care, as if all schools were designed simply for me to have fun and banter my way through the day, laughing and joking and teasing the children. Yes, indeed, I was a slow learner but maybe if I had been told that going into class of a morning was really just a cause of the greatest and happiest of privileges then I would have had a better chance of improving children’s lives and minds. Eventually I found Phil Stillman, the teacher in charge of Audio/Visual Aids, at Cranford School. Phil had done his time in the classroom and found himself an easier niche. Nobody could ever find Phil when they needed him so that he became known as ‘Still Philman’ by most of his colleagues, but he was kind to me. I learned that showing the movie of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to teenagers was far better, and easier, than reading the play with them. It had nothing to do with the beauty of the Shakespearian language, nor the nuances and pithy perception of the human condition but was all about watching a movie and not listening to a boring old teacher. And, of course, a play is meant to be watched not torn apart through deathless analysis. More is learned about the human condition through watching humans than being told about them.

Then in my later career I was able to subdue my panic when a senior student who should have been in his final English exam turned up at my door. When asked why he was not sitting his provincial English exam along with his peers, he explained, in a most condescending manner, that he was ‘exhumed’ from his English examination. I should have been relieved that if he was likely to be using such malapropisms, then his absence from a formal English exam was indeed a blessing. On another occasion the children were given a picture of a pirate ship about to be dragged to the depths by a gigantic octopus. They were asked to write a story about it. One student went at the task with gusto.

“The massive octopus came up from the depths, climbed all over the ship and dragged it under water using its eight huge testicles.”

Oh dear! So you can see that the version of Davidson 2.0 was able to encourage creation. Some of the vocabulary was awry but at least it was attempted.

So those of you, young teachers about to set out on your teaching careers and about to be presented with your WMI in June or whatever is the equivalent in your country, then my advice to you is to go into work every day as if you don’t care. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Expel all vigorous movements from your repertoire; cultivate slow and steady. Find fun in failure; find laughter in unlikely places. Tolerate, tolerate and tolerate. And, Dear Teacher, when all else fails tell the wee takkers a rattling good yarn.

Congratulations to you, Rona Davidson, on becoming a teacher in this most difficult of years, Uncle Pete and Auntie Irene are very proud of you.

Be safe, Dear Reader.