SETTING A STANDARD IN TEACHING ____________________________________ Why is teaching children difficult? It's difficult because there is an increasing gap between a child leaving his house and arriving somewhere he generally does not want to be. I commiserate with the student. A lot of teachers don't want o be there either; I don't commiserate with the teacher. Education is about learning, not teaching. It is not about qualifications. It is not about self-esteem. These follow from what the child wants to know and will learn for himself, not what you implant in his brain as part of a supposed 'education' whether you want to or not. The most important thing to remember is that children most often don't want to be at school; whatever our so-called adult moral attitude and the 'we fought for your education' stuff is. If children want to learn something, they will ask. But they won't ask some miserable person who demands their attention (at all times, sonny) and probably doesn't answer the question anyway. At the same time they will not be happy 'learning' stuff that is of no interest to them. Our system of schooling is traditional, it's not natural. Children learn despite the system and they learn what they want and reject the rest with poor behaviour. It's the only way they have to fight back. 'Now shut up and get on with that (totally mindless, boring) worksheet.' I love teaching. I love the kids (especially the 'bad' ones) and I love learning. If I want to learn something useful to me, I ask a kid, he knows. If he wants to learn something he doesn't know about, he asks me. Undivide and conquer. People, some of us know, earn respect. When they have respect, they have authority. But it's not the authority of a bully. How do you make a 'learner'? You show him how to learn. You can't teach everything (or anything to some-one unwilling), so you show how to learn. Then leave it up to the child. This is not always a success story, however, but it's better than what we've got. A teacher is some-one who is asked a question or is shown (in less primitive societies, like aborigines) how to learn. It's a question of survival. Being forced to reject any education is the worst thing you can do for a child but that is what is happening. A teacher must be a personality. An 'adult' would not go some-where to learn something where the teacher was a dead-head boring old fart. Why should a child? Do you remember whom you liked at school? Why? What's wrong with going to school with a smile, where you haven't taken your own problems there. From what I've seen, the best loved teachers (and most successful to themselves and their students)  are those with a personality, who don't think their god's gift to education, who are not full of themselves but willing to share their humanity. I believe most teachers are like this but they are hampered by the system which is out of their control. viz the 'Education Departments' and their political bullies. Time we got rid of these people and had some proper management. Years ago, I attended sminars on the Local Management of Schools, what happened to this notion. Given proven managers and not petty despots, I feel this would have been a good idea, at least a more widely discussed one. Teaching to a class, especially an unwilling one is where you act your role as an actor. After all, if you don't act anger, you risk murdering some brute, girl or boy. If you are really angry, you've lost it, might as well go home, the students would be grateful and undoubtedly follow suit. Good luck to them. I've worked with children with special needs (I know they all have them, so do I) and I've done a lot of Relief/Supply teaching in Mainstream (or rivulet). Going to school with an attitude is what you don't need. Your students have an attitude, to which I think they have a right in the present circumstances. I am not the first to say all this. I won't be the last. I'd just like some real people to listen to one of us. Teaching should be wanting to help people learn, whoever. It should perhaps be teaching to the converted (not preaching). It's our job to help them get converted; not by bullying and coercion, we get enough of that from so-called leaders, whose only lead is up the garden path but by setting an example of humanitarian effort. What we need to ask is what is education for? I'm not going to say, think about it and come up with your own ideas. If it is to inculcalte the values and mores of society (or worse, your own), then you are in the wrong job, sorry. That's how Hitler's, Bush's, Churchill's and so forth are made. Take a look at how other countries go about helping younger folk to learn. Do is work? If so, why? Educating younger people is not about control (well it is but it shouldn't be). Present education is stagnating the populations of the world. It is now, less than ever, producing illiterate people who only are forced to bow to the dictates of others, not to decide that they have had enough of this nonsense. Neither health nor education should be anything to do with politicians. They after all failed at all else, that is why they are politicians.

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