Older and wiser – teaching oldies
I once taught teenagers. Now – what joy! – I teach keen, clever oldies
Thirty years ago, I was given a terminal cancer diagnosis.
The only uncertainty was how long it would take. I was 35, mother to two children aged five and seven and head of a school English department. The chemo regime would be tough. The job had to go.
After a lot of chemo and two relapses, I emerged, three and a half years later, unsure what to do while I waited for the next relapse.
I mourned the loss of my career; I had loved my teenaged pupils and missed teaching terribly. So when a friend asked if I could help out on a course for adults she had undertaken to run at our local arts centre, I readily agreed. The subject was ‘Women and Words’ and I set about constructing a series of talks.
We had 12 participants: 11 women and one man. At the end of the term, they asked if I would run another course. As my most recent scan showed no sign of cancer, I agreed again. We galloped through ‘Ten Great British Plays’ (I’ve no idea now what they were) and we had 14 participants. That was 73 terms and 27 years ago. We now run three parallel classes and have approximately 80 regular participants. A few of the original 12 still attend, all now in their 80s or 90s.
For family reasons, I never returned to schoolteaching and while this is not the teaching career I had imagined, I reflect on the losses and gains.
Two principal losses stand out. There is nothing as exciting as firing the imagination of the young, providing a stimulus that thrills and inspires them to think or read further. My short schoolteaching career furnishes some warm memories of this kind.
The second sense of loss is wholly selfish. Unlike my colleagues who worked through to retirement, I have few younger friends in former pupils who stayed in touch. There’s a handful, but nothing compared with what it might
have been had I taught longer and as I get older, I increasingly regret this.
But I could never have anticipated the gains. First, there is the diversity of our participants. Regrettably not the same ethnic diversity our Ealing neighbourhood might suggest, nor a great diversity in age, as most are retired, but a huge diversity in their origins and life experiences.
We have many former teachers and also accountants, dinner ladies, careworkers, film-makers, engineers, home-makers, musicians, medics, lawyers, dog-walkers and those about whose previous lives I know little. We even have a sizeable contingent of men.
The ‘teaching’ is different from attempting to engage the minds of the young. I produce the text we are reading and some background information on the assumption that someone in the room will know the answer to whatever questions come up – an assumption that is invariably justified. The wealth of knowledge and experience in the room is inexhaustible, and we all learn serendipitously from one another.
Our current delving into literature relating to women in wartime is deepened by the participants’ stories of their own or their parents’ experiences – everything from impoverished childhoods in Lancashire back-to-backs to Irish diplomacy; from a prison ship off the coast of Shanghai to post-war German starvation; from a siege in Iran to internment on the Isle of Man.
Discipline is rarely a problem among the adults, though our standing joke is that the literature is the price they have to pay for the coffee break. And there is no time-consuming marking! Nor are there parents’ meetings; conversely, it is my participants’ children who get in touch when their parent is ill or has died.
The most enriching thing is the warm friendships that have grown out of these adult classes. I have lost count of the hip and knee replacements we have shared. Janet will hobble out the week before her op and we’ll cheer when she returns, minus Zimmer frame, several weeks later.
One class now has four participants in wheelchairs. We have seen one another through deaths of spouses (including my own), our children’s marriages, divorces, comings-out and emigration, serious illnesses, downsizing and the arrival of grandchildren. We have lost attendees to problems with sight, hearing and mobility. A few have faded into dementia. The deaths, when they happen, diminish us, but we carry on. We have two or three new participants each term who quickly seem to have been with us for ever.
I have grown old as my students have grown old. I am now, although still at the younger end of our age range – in my mid-sixties – a grandmother and both croaky and creaky. But I am buoyed by the incalculable privilege of teaching those who come purely for the pleasure of learning – a treat for any teacher!
The zest and vitality of the groups provide me with new ideas for topics and I have planned ahead. I am ready with courses for the coming two years.