Reasons to be a [Child Centred] teacher. My Primary Experience

Reasons to be a teacher, and a child-centred one at that. I was reading some people’s accounts about school days being the worst days of their lives. Most of them were mine too. I knew I wanted to be a teacher from the age of 5 or 6. The teacher asked us to draw what we wanted to do when we grew up. I wanted to be a teacher but 1. I thought the teacher would laugh at me if I told her and 2. all the other girls wanted to be nurses, so I drew a nurse. But I remember knowing I wanted to be a teacher. Because of my father’s rather itinerant work habits, I went to 5 different primary schools and 2 different high schools (in 4 different counties, 3 villages and 2 towns) and thus I was an always the outsider, and publicly humiliated and bullied by staff and pupils at all of the primary schools, and hasd a hard time at the high schools. Aged 4 or 5 in Luton, I had to stand by the classroom sink possibly in a waste basket (but I might be mixing Luton up with the Frampton). This was for finding a marble by the sink and putting it on my desk, then denying it publicly. I had only been in the school a few months, didn’t know this counted as theft, but the teacher’s thunderous voice let me know it was not a good thing. In Frampton-on-Severn I was slapped across the face (aged 5 or 6) by Elizabeth, because I got to the toilet first, and refused to get off let her wee before me. As if that wasn't bad enough, when we all got back into school, I tried to go and wash my hands, but was then publicly singled out to wash my hands on my own (mother and teacher had different ideas about hygiene!). But the humiliation was too awful and I never washed my hands again at school. In Whitminster, the next village school, I was so upset one day by leaving my satchel at school, that my mum and I cycled back over the canal, she with my baby brother on her bike. There was no one in the open school when we arrived, and then we saw the stachel hanging up in the headteacher’s office. Next day the headteacher threatened me (aged 7 ) with the cane. He said he would “tan my hide” if I went into his room again. Again I had no idea what I had done wrong. Luckily we only stayed in Whitminster for a few months before the next upheaval. We moved to Tanners Green in Wythall, Worcestershire, and I went to Silver Street School in Drake’s Cross. I think it was because I was tall for my age they accidentally put me in the wrong class! However after being there a few months I came 17th in some exams I don’t recall taking, and was made to stand in hall/on the stage with all the kids who had come first, second and third in their classes. I recall being mystified, and wondering what the effect on my relationship with the class would be. But I needed have worried. They had spotted how old I was by the beginning of the next school and then I had a new set of friends to make, but I was back with Mrs Kidger. I think it was When I was with the older kids that The Great Trauma began. There was to be a a concert. We had to sing and some people would have starring roles. I used to go to the “ballet” class in Frampton-on-Severn and was well used to being on a stage, but mostly as an elf. When I was six I went to the panto in Stroud with the Brownies and sang all of O Little Town of Bethelemen, even though they said thankyou after the first verse. I had tasted stardom and was ready for more. I loved it - the singing, the stage, the applause. I wanted to be a musician, and asked for piano lessons (the mother had her Pohlman in the house, a wedding present from her father). Back to Silver Street School. We were rehearsing For the concert. I was ready for the starring role and hoping be king or queen. When Mrs Kidger tapped me on the shoulder and then tapped Dermot Mackie on the shoulder, and one other boy, I thought great, I don’t need to sing with the rest of the class, I am going to have a main part. After the concert rehearsal finished Mrs K gathered us three together and told us we were singing out of tune, and so we were not be in the show. Went home in floods, mother came to school next day, confessed cheerfully to whoever that she couldn’t sing in tune either, and asked if couldn’t I mime. I mimed, trying to keep the floods back - as I mimed from then on for the next 21 years. Still do quite often. Mimed in assemblies, at weddings, in folk clubs, singing lessons. (I was having piano lessons in Kings Norton at the time, and had been dreaming of being a rock and roll star, but actually the piano teacher terrified me. I never said a word. I just laid the florin down at the top end of the piano, and played every dot infront of me, did whatever she told me. In September I sat at the front next to Susan, and in front of Roger and Yvonne. I was to discover that we were 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th in the class, and seating us like this also mystified me. Was she preparing us for high school? Still I Loved living in the countryside and Yvonne’s parents had a farm, and goat you could tie your scooter to. The following year I finally moved up a school year and met Mr Parker. I blossomed. He gave me all sorts of extra things to do and he would talk to me differently, and when my dad got a job in Leeds and he only came back at the weekends, Mr Parker let me learn a verse a week from The Funeral of St John Moore after Corunna in order to recite it to my dad when he got home and Mr Parker got me to recite it to the class beforehand. (Don’t ask why I chose that poem. I just found it in a book, liked the feel of the words and probably the rhythms of the words). Mrs Kidger and her class hadn’t finished with me. There were three girls who took it upon themselves to barge me and my friends in the playground, and then one day they filled all our pockets full of rubbish; in revenge I wrote pig pag and pog and three little scraps of paper and put one in each of the girls pocket. They told Mrs Kidger and she called for me and told me off. I was terrified, and in vain told her they started it. . I couldn’t see the fairness of this, again quite mystified. But she even trumped herself with some proper teacher cruelty in that last week. I was in Mr Parker’s class full time now but the girls did knitting with her once a week and I was making a turquoise and coral striped hot water bottle cover for my dad. However it wasn’t finished, and in order to take it to Leeds, I had to bring some money in. I don’t know why I didn’t bring any money in. Mrs K summonsed me, and publicly handed the knitting over to the bully girls. I left for Leeds. Mr Parker asked if he could keep my composition book, promising to send it on [which he did]. And he and also the headteacher, Mr Matthews, then corresponded with me for two or three years - they were both 60 and retired the year after I left. Mr Parker wrote he thought we had another George Elliott in our midst. It was only years later rereading his letter that I knew what kid of a man this George was, but I alfresdy knew it was a compliment. that he had faith in me, and cared. At Harehills County Primary I brought the house down upon myself with the southern accent. It took my brother 3 weeks to shorten all his vowels. For some reason, I suppose bloodymindedness I kept my southern drawl for decades. I was white, everyone so far in my schools was white, but I had curiously enough been brought up anti-racist by by dad. He was Welsh, crossed Uffa’s Dyke (as they say), and shelved his Welsh accent in his mid teens. One story he told us was that he had been with a group of colleagues, shortlisting candidates for interview, and the boss man said oh we can’t have him - he’s a Taff. Later my dad told us how when he was giving a lift to a hitch hiker once, and the hiker started making racist comments about black people ( don’t think we got the details, but on the lines of Enoch Powell I imagine). My dad stopped his car at the next roundabout, gave him a lecture and chucked him out. I remember knowing, but without knowing properly that Miss Fielding was a racist. She was horrible to me, but at least I didn’t get the ruler. And I knew, without knowing why I knew she was picking on Martin Goldman cos he was Jewish. I was traumatised watching her give him the ruler (not seen corporal punishment before). Two things from my year and a half at Harehills. Alison Phelps-Jones was top of the class and teacher’s favourite. Being clever was not Alison’s fault, nor was her being favourite. By now I was comfortable with having that position and was setting about proving my worth. We had a spelling test. Miss Fielding said ‘tongue’;I thought she said ‘ton’. 19 out of 20! What! I raised my hand, then her approached her on her plinth. ‘Very well then, spell it now!’ Very flustered at her irritation I of course misspelt it. There, she said, you wouldn’t have got it anyway. Distraught at the injustice I resumed my place, still second to Alison PJ. Later that term, I was now sitting at the back of the class and howling “I want my mummy” to the great amusement of my classmates. But worse was to come. I had by now got a friend. She was Dorothy Padgett; she lived in Bayswater Grove and we used to bunk off after being marched along to St Aidans Church Hall, Roundhay Road for our school dinners. Dorothy had lost her mother, and her 16 year old sister had stepped up. School grassed us up and my parents forbade me to see Dorothy. I thought it was cos she lived in a back-to-back and was poor, but I don’t know why I thought that. At first we lived in a flat on Wetherby Road, but we had a social ladder to climb, which sadly included private education. The Greater Humiliation was that entrance exam to Leeds Girls High. I remember taking my 11+, sitting in the school's big Victorian hall rubbing my squeaky new shoes together, half casually wondering what we there. It was really really boring. But my parents thought I could don better than Roundhay School (near to where we lived, and crucially where my classmates and neighbours would all be going). I got through. I don’t know how Miss Fielding found out. I didn’t think she was interested in me. She made me stand at the front of the class and then she made them all applaud me. After I was the poor kid at Leeds Girls High School and then the posh kid at Allerton Grange Sixth Form. When I did my PGSE and the started teaching at Foxwood in Leeds (1980) I wanted no one to go through what I had done, and set about being the most child-centred teacher there could be. Did courses, examined my own teaching styles, listened to the students, and regularly took aprt in residentials, often also dragging my primary age daughter up and down Pen-y-Ghent. And also met up with Charlotte Emery and together we took the world on. And many other amazing teachers. And hundreds of amazing students, some of whom I am still friends with. So Foxwood School gave me the best days of my life, but it was as a teacher.