WHEN AN OLD CRICKETER LEAVES THE CREASE
I started my teaching career at Edmund Waller Junior Mixed And Infants School in New Cross, South-East London in September 1967. I wore a corduroy jacket over a tattersall-checked shirt and I choked inside the only tie I owned, a black-knitted slim-jim left over from my mod days only a handful of years before. On the first day of term, I walked through the cast-iron gates with absolutely no sense of what lay before me beyond the immediacy of the moment. And as I stood before a class of fifty 8-year-olds, I contemplated that moment in dry-mouthed terror.
I wasn’t called to teaching: I drifted into it when my three-year course at Goldsmiths’ College came to an end and the options on cheap pints in the Student Union bar and free rehearsal space for my band were closed. The post at Edmund Waller came my way when I wasn’t really looking. Somewhere on a stairwell, in a classroom doorway, in a corner of a clamorous playground I realised that there might be grimmer places to be and duller ways to pass the time.
Forty-one years and seven schools later I am still teaching. But in four weeks I shall drive through a different set of cast-iron gates with as little sense of momentous occasion as attended that first going in one hundred and twenty three terms ago. And, as is fitting, the waters will close behind me and the tides will continue to ebb and flow with the same indifference to my absence as they showed to Canute’s presence.
No regrets, but many powerful reflections – on what once was and what is now; on what matters most within the child’s experience of school, and on what matters the least; on that which has changed immeasurably and on that which has endured. But principally on the countless faces and bodies and voices, all whirling in a Hollywood carousel – those students on whom I may, for a time, have had influence, and those who in turn may have reached me; those on whose lives my impact may have been less positive; those who arrived, shone brightly for a while and then moved on.
Not for me in passing the immortality of Mr. Chips or the ignominy of Miss Jean Brodie. It’s time to go and I shall go quietly.
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Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
Paulo Freire
...
NEW SHERWOOD
What do you do when,
from dream to mortar,
you build a school?
Is it like building a house
with the values locked
into the discipline of bricks
on bricks? Or is it like
the building of a church,
into which somehow
you must incorporate
the numinous, the hushed,
the obedient? (Here
the story’s easier to tell
behind rich windows, in
the organ’s smoky voice.)
Or is it like a glass
solarium, prima vera
all the year, an investment
of light, the incubator’s
catechism chanting hare’s foot
weeping fig and fern
to glory; fruits exotic,
hand-reared and fat
and green and uniform.
Don’t build. Just find intact
(albeit cracked and leaky)
a house that’s there
already, one that’s rooted
firm and knows its skin;
that’s free of pain
and ghosts, with trees
and half-forgotten gardens,
mossy cold-frames, twisted
vines and sudden sundials
in the long, uncultivated
grass. Then let us blow
like puffball parachutes
in a random wind,
the achene fruit
that falls and germinates
when and where
it will.
