There is much to be learned from the fall of teaching
It’s the first thing you learn on growing up. It’s all mucked up. When you were young, everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Then, when hitherto you had run after the world, you find the world is running after you. And it is hell-bent on flushing your head down the toilet.
Call me wet behind the ears, but I’ve a feeling the teaching profession in the past was guided by a lighter touch. Now, all aspects are regulated, from the angle of teachers’ mortar boards to the length of their gowns. The once-respected profession has a poor image today, with reports this week suggesting that graduates regarded it as “boring” and not containing enough risk or opportunities for travel. I see.
Would you excuse me a moment? [Pops head out of window]. Well, still seems to be the planet Earth. I’ll just nip next door. [Loud shouting and clattering is heard]. Neighbour says that, no, this is not a parallel universe, even if our houses are technically parallel.
Well, what planet are such graduates on? Risk? Do they wish to work on the customer service desk at RBS? Travel? Would they rather wear a little pill-box hat and waddle doon an aisle warning passengers to shut up as the plane is coming in to land? They would rather that than nurture the nation’s nippers? Surely not.
Teachers’ pay also came up this week, as it does every week, though while it comes up, it never seems to go up, even if just the bursaries offered to maths and physics pedagogical students would keep many decent, rate-paying hobos happy.
Other stories this week suggested that student teachers were stressed out before they even reached the classroom and that car mechanics spend longer learning their trade than do teachers on some fast-track options. I’ll let you into a little secret here, though you’ve probably gathered it for yourselves in recent years. Workers who do practical things with their hands – building, installing, repairing – are probably the most valuable people in society. For years, we’ve invested airy-fairy, impractical dilettantes such as lawyers, executives, philosophers and journalists with an elevated status (was joking about journalists), whereas the people who make things work were deemed as somehow inferior. Now, the shoe is on the other hand, and the Practical People are starting to receive their due – and that includes training though, as some people pointed oot online, the real learning is done on the job.
You can’t let folk become like me: the sort of person whose first move, faced with the job of painting a shed, is to go on Amazon for a book called How to Paint a Shed. You’re not going to learn teaching from a book (“The bit where you stand is called the front”), though you probably will need guidance on how to organise lessons and perhaps some instruction in oratory and how to hold a difficult crowd.
Anyway, who says car mechanics aren’t stressed when they graduate with their PhDs and are faced with bunging their heids beneath their first real bonnet?
One sympathises with teachers, though. It’s what I always thought I’d do, though teaching’s loss became journalism’s disaster.
Recently, I even considered becoming a teaching assistant but was told by one such that it mainly involved wiping up vomit. I don’t want to sound like a bigot, but I’m not really your man for vomit and, offered some, will generally say: “Not today, thank you.”
I don’t think I could cope with today’s militant parents either, nor with their little brats and their “rights”. My usual reaction when I hear the word “rights” is to think: “These ought to be trampled on.”
And I guess my teaching methods would find little favour these days: “If you decline to learn Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome by rote, Kanye McCluckertie, then you will amount to nothing – just as I did.”
In the meantime, let me leave you my business card: “Moaning, grasscutting, gutter-clearing, didactic hectoring.” Please don’t get in touch. I am fully booked for months ahead. Mainly with the moaning.