Impossible and Irresponsible: 'Sacrifice-Everything' Teaching

I recently read Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman, an American mom and self-confessed neurotic who found herself in Paris bringing up three bébés with her British husband. As a new mother myself (P is now five months old: is he EATING TIME?) and having had my baby in Belgium, land of the 15 week maternity leave and 'Ow-Are-We-Losing-Ze-Weight?' conversations, I was interested in her observations of the difference between typical French and Anglophone child-rearing approaches.

Of course, it's the nature of the beast that this book is full of generalisations but that's not my concern here; rather, I want to explore how the child-centric parenting philosophy favoured by Americans and Brits is bleeding into the education world and making life particularly miserable for teachers. 

You see, Druckerman perceives that the average American parent (OK, especially mom, because women are fantastic at doing the guilt thing) is prepared to make multiple significant and prolonged sacrifices for the sake of their children. It starts immediately, from racing cribside to soothe the tiniest of newborn whimpers right through to ferrying Tommy to his tennis lesson and nagging Valerie to practise her viola. Time previously spent on everything from ironing to sex is cut down - if not completely cut out - in order to ensure that the little darlings are stimulated, engaged and encouraged All-Of-The-Time.

There's enormous pressure to do it, too - to whack on the (now discredited) Baby Einstein, to cajole, to coax development on. Druckerman namechecks Piaget and his visit to the States to expound his ideas on child development. The audiences started to ask what Piaget subsequently referred to as 'The American Question' - how do we get these stages of development to happen more quickly? He was aghast. Why would you want to hasten a child's development? The way he saw it, in most situations development would happen in its own sweet time and that, quite frankly, was soon enough.

Jean Piaget - 'You what now?'

The French share Piaget's despair at this 'sacrifice-everything-at-the-altar-of-child-development' push-push-push approach, Druckerman says. They're believers in encouraging autonomy in children within a cadre or framework but strive to retain a sense of équilibre - balance, not letting one part of life, such as parenthood, overwhelm the others. And guess what? French kids develop just fine. They tend to have less parky tendencies when it comes to food and they can entertain themselves without constant recourse to their caregiver (she hits the nail on the head when she writes that she 'just knows' the mum heading down the slide in her local park is an American. You'd never catch a French maman doing that). They do well at school, despite the absence of pre-school Kumon maths or harp tuition; the 'leave them alone' school of parenting thought seems to have seeped into the education system, with feedback from Druckerman's daughter's French school being limited to the point of 'If I don't say anything, that means she's fine.' Nor do the children seem too emotionally scarred by the whole experience, growing up on the whole to be well-mannered and well-adjusted.

Reading her observations - and, for all she throws in some token science now and again, her ideas are mainly founded on her observations - it struck me that if British parents are similarly prepared to give up their lives for their children to bring on their development it's really no surprise that they expect teachers to do the same. The British government, responsive to the hysterical cries of parents all of whom have a vote, continue to pile on pressure down the chain of educational authority command. Get those books turned around in 24 hours. Give every student feedback every lesson. In the horrific period leading up to examinations, be on call for anxious students from 7am-7pm (and out of hours on email, if my school's anything to go by). The parent is prepared to give up everything from their social lives to their sanity; so, therefore, must the teacher. 

Druckerman's reward for her selfless sacrifice? Well, she reports that her kids were irritable, poorly-behaved and unpredictable, and she was pretty frazzled most of the time. She describes how her self-esteem, relationship, figure and sanity all took a direct hit. For teachers who adopt the sacrifice-everything ideology, this may sound familiar. This hysteria about progression, development, advancement at all costs is doing no one - least of all the young people in our charge - any favours. At best, they're apathetic; at worst, they're stressed to hell. Thankfully, questions are being raised about the fallacy of linear progress, but until that message really sinks through, remember this: flogging oneself to the point of collapse doesn't make for award-worthy parenting or teaching. It's more than just impossible; it's irresponsible.

Yes, we are honoured with an incredibly important job as teacher, parent or both, but the idea that we have to give up everything else in our lives to do that is a ridiculous - nay, dangerous - one. So, post-Easter and in the run-up to exams, parent, teacher, student, one and all, give yourself a break. 

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(Andy Tharby wrote about this recently here - it was a little bit of encouragement just when some was needed. Respect, innit)

Teaching teaching? It's always the real thing.

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As an NQT, I'd await my GCSE class with bated breath. Dawn had a regressive disorder and forgot things as quickly as they were taught ("It just fell out of my head,” she'd say, bewildered); Simon had severe learning difficulties and, when I called his name, cocked an ear like the German Shepherd he'd allegedly been raised alongside. Jordan was a rising star in the brutal world of Thai kickboxing; he might not have been able to spell 'egg' or 'bacon' when taking sandwich orders on work experience but apparently he was very, very good at violence. Happy-go-lucky Leon went to far-right rallies at the weekend with his dad, fired up on Stella and xenophobic chants. They reminded me of the Bash Street Kids except my Toots, Spotty, Smiffy and Plug had a darker side. A couple had been on social workers' books for most of their short lives; many of them, to use Ofsted's trusty yardstick of social deprivation, received free school meals. 

And me, their dedicated teacher? Why, I was a bastion of inspiration! Ahem. Not quite. Mainly it was hard. There were battles of wills and batterings of egos. There was Jordan arriving late one day, putting his head down on the desk and announcing wearily, 'Don't you f***ing start' before I could open my mouth. There was me begging Leon to 'TURN AROUND' and another boy chipping in with an operatic 'briiiiiiiight eyyyyyyyes' Bonnie Tyler would be proud of. There was some leaping on tables, but not prompted by poetic inspiration - rather, a wasp drifted unwittingly in through the window and pandemonium erupted.

Did I mention it was hard? Harder than a nanotechnology PhD or scraping dried-on porridge off a bowl, i.e. really, really hard. And so I referred desperately to the trusty teaching manual of the time - The Teacher’s Toolkit by Paul Ginnis - with limited success. It seemed the rules didn’t apply to 10B4. Confusingly, a new strategy would work one day and backfire spectacularly the next. 

I was following good, sound, ‘proven’ teaching techniques: why wasn’t it working? I confided in fellow NQTs and wailed to my mentor. I locked myself in the staff toilet for a therapeutic cry. I observed other teachers and marvelled at the pockets of learning magic they created. The penny finally dropped when I realised that good teaching wasn’t about slavishly adhering to someone else’s ideology, but about using knowledge and experience of a group of students to confidently tread an intuitive line. It meant being consistent alongside some well-judged flexibility. It was about being fully present in the classroom and using every nugget of information available from the weather forecast to what was on the canteen menu that day in order to gauge what would work. Tentatively, I started to trust my judgement. I deployed whizzy stuff - felt-tip pens, cultural hooks, tiered lesson objectives, electronic tickers and timers, music, whiteboards, bite-sized chunks - but built in ‘down time’, easy-on-the-brain tasks, deviations from The Plan as appropriate. And, very gradually, the occasions where I felt like an abject failure were outnumbered by those where I felt I was effectively managing tough students.

The recent hype about the latest How to Teach tome, Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0, got me thinking about those heady NQT days. I even bought a copy, despite my aversion to the chest-beating machismo of the title. Sucked in by Lemov’s impressive credentials, I diligently studied and tried some of the techniques. My first discovery? They weren’t so different to tips my battle-scarred NQT colleagues shared over a decade ago, except Lemov’s strategies made use of snappy alliterative titles and mnemonics. The emperor’s new pedagogical clothes? Perhaps. 

And then I hit upon the same problem that strikes whenever I try to apply some reading to the reality of a classroom: ironically, given the emphasis Lemov places on presence, I actually find myself less present than when I’m trusting my own intuition. His ‘champion tips’ were honking in the back of my mind like a car alarm, distracting from the real business of responding to the students in front of me. 

The good news? Teaching is undoubtedly a craft and, fortunately, a refineable one, otherwise those toilet cubicle tears may have signalled the end. The bad news? Unlike what many of Lemov’s devotees imply, books don’t hold all of the answers. I’m yet to find the most valuable lessons I learned in my NQT year - how to spot a student texting under the desk from twenty paces, how to know when someone is genuinely desperate for the toilet as opposed to wanting to make vigorous wanker signs at another classroom window - in a handbook. That comes with experience, intuition and guts. Teaching books have their (limited) place. However, I like to think of them as the equivalent of the driving theory test or an antenatal course: valuable preparation but, as any parent who’s been up all night with a screaming newborn or new driver who’s found themselves doing an elaborate fifteen-point turn knows, very definitely not the real thing.