I think my main reason for wanting to teach and specifically teach primary age children is the memory of my insatiable curiosity at that age. Every day threw up a whole ocean of questions: Why is the sky blue? Why do cows have four stomachs? Why can't I roll my tongue? What is gravity? Could Jurassic Park happen in real life? I could go on and on and on...
The best teachers, the ones I really remember, were the ones that made these subjects come alive for me - that pointed me in the right direction and gave me the tools to find these things out - and above all, made learning fun, engaging and something that I looked forward to every morning.
Today is our first Professional Studies day - which means that we are midway through a whole day of lectures, seminars, independent study and discussion groups and already, two things come up that made me think quite deeply. In this morning's seminar, we discussed the case study of a child named Michael. Michael has a number of behavioural difficulties that his teacher is struggling to deal with and the case study was structured in such a way that only a small amount of information was released at a time about Michael, his homelife, his school life, his teacher's homelife and the school's structure. After each disclosure we were asked: what is the problem, who has the problem and what can be done.
Within my group, at each stage opinions conflicted and it was interesting to discuss the various different viewpoints regarding one case study. I identified that Michael only seemed to have a problem with the female members of staff and thought that a number of reasons could be the cause of this; from an absent father figure and lack of authority at home, through to a cultural reason: we were not made aware of Michael's ethnicity or culture at the start and I suggested that if he was from a devout muslim background, then he may take issue with female authority figures (something I have experienced first hand with a family that moved to the UK from Afghanistan two years ago).
As mentioned, within the session, we were asked at each of the stages, who has the problem. Within my notes, I have apparently been very reluctant to assign blame to any one individual and indeed, it turned out that there had been a breakdown across the board, with failings within the classroom, the SMT and the school-to-home and home-to-school communications. I think that it is important to remember that Every Child Matters isn't just a concept and we DO need to remember that the children should be kept at the heart of all we do. It would be very easy to blame Michael for his behaviour, but I feel that in the most part, children aren't inherently naughty and it is our responsibility to try and understand that if there are problems they probably exist for a reason. A lot to think about...
Anyway, I promised you some inspiration didn't I? At the end of the session we watched a video entitled Inspirations: Everyone a Winner. The video told the story of teacher called Trevelyan May who was awarded Primary Teacher of the Year 2005. If I am honest, May is exactly the teacher that I want to be and I found the video SO inspiring! Rather than talk more about it now, I may write a separate post about it later - but first I would like to know your thoughts.
So here is my new hero Trevelyan May doing what he does brilliantly (and what I will hopefully do equally brilliantly in a couple of years time!):
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