Tale of journey into teaching turned out to be an education
October is the month of secondary school applications, when those of us with children in the last year of primary school must decide where next to send them. Which one of these massive, pitiless institutions, with their armpit smells and “behaviour policies” and outsized children sporting 5 o’clock shadows, could possibly be a safe repository for our delicate darlings?
Top of my own list, by happy coincidence, is Mossbourne: the famously strict east London academy that provides the setting for Could
Do Better (Radio 4, every day this week). The title refers not to one of its pupils, but to a trainee teacher: the former journalist Lucy Kellaway. In 2016, after 32 “cushy” years at the Financial Times, Kellaway decided to “throw it all away and do something brutal instead”. Becoming a maths teacher seemed to fit the bill. At 58, she was too old to join the graduate training scheme Teach First. So she set up a new scheme for retraining older professionals, Now Teach, and enrolled herself in the first year’s intake.
The whole thing required huge cojones, but also (as Kellaway admits) an optimism bordering on naivety. “When I started, I reasoned I’d be a natural,” she confesses at one point. “I like kids, I’m good at maths and I’m a bit of a show off. What else is there?” A great deal, it turns out – as this funny, honest, often rueful audio diary of her first year in the classroom reveals.
In episode one, we hear her bidding farewell to a room full of bemused FT colleagues. “On the face of it,” observes one, “taking a 90 per cent cut in salary to work five times as hard doesn’t sound like a good idea.” More pertinent still is his prediction that Kellaway might struggle with the loss of freedom. Good journalists are trouble-makers; good teachers, especially at a school like Mossbourne, have to respect the rules.
Hoping to inspire pupils with pure charisma, Kellaway is reluctant to be strict. She turns a blind eye when, for example, they fiddle with their rulers instead of keeping their hands still on their desks. “I have to be persuaded that those things even matter,” she confides in Episode Four. (I confess to having binge-listened to every episode.) But her much-younger, tougher supervisor is not impressed: Kellaway is giving the pupils mixed messages about the behaviour policy, creating problems for the other teachers. “I feel that I’m in special measures myself,” gulps the chastened trainee.
Teachers’ survival stories are always fascinating. With her gift for storytelling – and an internal conflict that neatly mirrors the liberal/disciplinarian ideological divide in education – Kellaway makes this one irresistible.
Pearl: Two Fathers, Two Daughters was Radio 4’s Saturday drama, although that felt like a strange category for it. This hybrid creation interlaced two perspectives on grief: Simon Armitage’s adaptation of Pearl, an anonymous medieval poem about the death of a daughter; and Gerry Mccann’s reflections on the loss of his own daughter, Madeleine.
Grief is one of the hardest emotions to convey, and neither element of this drama quite succeeded. In the poem, the dead girl appeared as an apparition, lecturing her father on how he mustn’t feel sad because she was having a lovely time in God’s house. That might have been a consoling thought for medieval parents, but to today’s more secular ears it sounded like pious flim-flam.
Mccann spoke touchingly about his firstborn child, and about the dreadful ordeal of learning to live without her. But he has always seemed an essentially private man, thrust horribly into the public eye, and that remained true here. Only once – when he described how he searched frantically for his lost daughter in their holiday apartment, scrabbling in cupboards and under the sink – did we feel the true heat and derangement of parental grief.
The stated aim of Gyles Brandreth’s Poetry By Heart (Radio 4, Sunday) was to persuade us all to learn poetry, “for the sake of your brain, as well as your soul”. Brandreth enlisted a Cambridge neuroscientist to explain how the “rhythmic patterning” of poetry does good things to our synapses, helping children to communicate better and old people to stave off dementia. But the poems he featured were persuasive enough.
The Duchess of Cornwall recited the opening lines of Matilda (“who told such dreadful lies, it made one gasp and stretch my eyes”), while Judi Dench described how her father woke her every morning with The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night/ Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight…” It made me want to get practising right away.