New Year’s Eve is always a time when you look back and reflect. I think the whole world had a rubbish year in 2020. We were all in doodo , but some of us were in deeper than others. So I won’t dwell on what was quite frankly a shit year.
I will look back over my teaching career though and think about what a patchwork it was. Some amazing experiences, and some not so amazing!
I think what triggered this was the fact that I am still being remembered fondly (and supported) by girls (now women) from my first ever form class from Helenswood Maplehurst School in Hastings back in 1985. I guess I do have a legacy, and have already touched so many lives. Sally Peckham, as was, gave me my biggest ever commission so far, when she asked me to make portraits of her mother’s spaniels. Here are Millie, Woody, Annie & Ginny.
I am entirely grateful and absolutely thrilled by the stunning review she gave me afterwards.
Following my probation year in East Sussex, we moved even further away from my home town of Ilkeston...just a little bit! We went out to Zimbabwe and worked for a Catholic Organisation called CATORUZI, which stands for Catholic Ancillary Teachers Of Rural Zimbabwe.
Oh, what an adventure! Exciting and sad in equal parts. I worked in a very poor rural school, teaching poor African children in a school called Mutemachani. Which means, whose is this black thing? I taught Cambridge O level English to “children” who couldn’t even spell English, let alone write in paragraphs.
One “child” I taught was 29, one year older than me. His education had been disrupted by fighting for Independence for Zimbabwe so it was no longer the colonial stronghold of Rhodesia.
For the children from the Mutemachani Primary School next door, I was the first white woman they had ever seen. I remember being out in the school grounds surrounded by a circle of hundreds of curious children. Close...but not too close. One or two behind me were brave enough to stroke my hair. They had never seen hair that grew downwards before. But like my mum used to threaten me: the bogeyman will get you, they had been told: Behave! Or the white man will eat you! Nobody came close....
The children all showed so much respect to me and all their other teachers. If they filed into the staffroom to hand in homework, they crouched a little so their heads were lower than mine and proffered their book with both hands.
I had classes of sixty. Four children to one textbook. Nobody talked when I spoke. When I stood at the front of the class and cleared my throat to speak, you could literally hear a pin drop. Nobody ever quarrelled over which page they were on. There was no bickering, no backchat, no shouting out.
My best student was a guy called Trusty Mapfoche. Trusty by name, and trusty by nature. I think now of some of the gifted and talented students I have taught in my long career, and he was definitely one of them. How the dice was loaded against him! Despite all of this, he achieved a B grade in English Language and in 1990 I had a pass rate of 67%. So that means that forty out of a class of sixty achieved a grade C “O” Level. I wonder whatever happened to Trusty Mapfoche, and where his life led him. I wonder if he ever thinks about Mrs Parker?
And then at the other extreme from the days when I was so respected were my days teaching at a school in Swindon. I moved from teaching small groups of troubled teenage boys at Swindon Pupil Referral Unit to teaching at this school which was the bottom school in the new OFSTED league tables. I won’t name it, and I won’t use the actual names of children there.
At the time, I was teaching graphics and three dimensional design in the workshop. The graphics studio was entered by double doors which were padlocked shut. If I was slow getting there, one of the boys had manipulated the padlock and broken in. “Do you want Lewis to show you how to do it, miss.” I had the local cat burglar in my lesson.
In the workshop for the first practical woodwork lesson with the year 7s, the bell was about to go, so I positioned myself between the double doors of the exit and said:”Right! Time to clear up. Put the tools away and sweep the benches.” They laughed. “You are not going out to break until you have cleared up.” They laughed some more....
What did I know?! They climbed onto the workbenches around the room, shimmied up the windows and squeezed out of the narrow top windows....like rats off a sinking ship. Gobsmacked, I was.
Then there was the time in the graphics room.... the furniture was ancient lift up school desks. Very rickety. I positioned myself between the doors. “Clear up, and stand behind your desk.” One fourteen year old girl, who was built like a young carthorse, ran around the room jumping from desk to desk like some sort of grotesque mountain goat. I was gobsmacked and relieved in equal parts. How could such a lumbering lummox be so agile? And how the hell did one of those rickety desks not buckle beneath her?
So these days, my teaching is on a wholly different level. I even manage to get through my whole lesson plan, and there is chatting but it is pleasant banter. And my students thoroughly love doing their homework. I am so blessed that my students are some of the nicest, sweetest people on the planet. They have become firm friends and they continue to support me, and are my greatest advertisement.