Articles

Back to School

It was a bright, dewy Monday morning, David Witherspoon was teaching thirty-two children in his classroom at the Primary School near where I live on the South Coast.

This Monday like so many others I’ve experienced was not extraordinary; just another April morning in rural Hampshire. I was sitting rather uncomfortably at the back of the classroom, at a small desk specifically designed for the ten year olds filling the room; just watching, and listening; a normal day in a perfectly normal English Primary School.

Witherspoon was taking the class through some maths exercises. He set them a multiplication sum, and then the children worked out the solution, and so did I.

“Why did you put the decimal point there?” Witherspoon asked as he walked past one of the children, and the ten year old replied, “because it belongs there Mr Witherspoon.” Cool answer, I thought.

The majority of adults – if they’re not teachers or help out at school in other ways rarely see inside a school classroom while it’s in session. We’re more used to getting our news from papers or the evening news, which usually only report on the negatives, like vandalism, and problems with kids unable to read properly. Life in a school becomes a blur with all the other things that pass in and out of our consciousness each day. Which is precisely why the morning spent inside Witherspoon’s classroom was proving so interesting.

It was quite improbable that news would be made here today; there was no conflict, no violence. And yet what was going on was so important; as in thousands of other classrooms around the UK at this very moment, children were being formed into what they will become when they suddenly turn into the next generation of grown up British citizens.
I watched David Witherspoon with the children. Compared with the pay expected in business and industry, teachers are paid ludicrously low wages, but as I watched Witherspoon going from desk to desk, I was reminded that his job – and the job of every school teacher around the country – is so much more important than the things the rest of us do in the name of commerce, or writing as in my case!

He stopped to help a girl find the meaning of a word in her textbook. He explained to a boy why the multiplication he had just completed was wrong. He bent over a desk to answer a question from someone else; not because they had asked, but because he could see they needed help.

It would be easy not to care. Usually there’s no-one looking over the teachers shoulder, and in a primary school especially, the people you’re in contact with every day are too young to really know if you’re doing a good job or a bad one; they have no frame of reference. They trust you.

It’s often said that children’s characters are shaped at home, but it seems to me that children spend so many hours in school, the classroom experience becomes central to their lives. A bad home environment can damage a child forever, and an indifferent school environment can bring results every bit as ominous. That one thought makes the British Educational System an awesomely powerful machine; both negatively and positively.

So what can a child pick up in a positive classroom environment? Well certainly that progress is one of life’s essentials; if you stay in the same place you were yesterday, you will never grow. Also that it’s important to be curious, to ask questions. It’s equally important to make an effort to be correct, not to be sloppy; or to not really care if you’re wrong about something.

Those attitudes are almost as important as the specific information David Witherspoon was teaching. When you’re a ten year old, if your teacher lets you know that he or she cares that you’re learning, and cares that you’re reading has improved, cares that you are trying you’re best to master complicated mathematical ideas – if those things happen – then you’re going to be a ten year old who stands a much better chance of becoming a successful and happy adult.

That’s what I was thinking in Witherspoon’s classroom – and also how parents blindly turn their children over to strangers who will have such a monumental effect on their lives. Even the most concerned parent can have little control over what goes on in the classroom – and yet that’s where much of what the man or women that child will grow to become is determined.

It’s an enormous responsibility teachers have – and it’s made all the more so when you realise they are among the least thought about group of the British working population. We expect them to be there, and we give our children to them, and then we go about our own daily lives – seldom thinking about what they mean in regard to what the people of this country; and ultimately the country itself will become.

So I sat at the back of the room of the local Junior School, in a minute desk, straddling it like I would a bike – my legs sticking out at an uncomfortable angle into the isle. David Witherspoon announced it was “free reading time,” so the children reached into their desks to pull out their book.

They sat silently in their miniature plastic chairs and opened their books to the page they’d stopped at last time. David Witherspoon stood at the front of the class next to the whiteboard, he looked out at the thirty-two children; and then he looked at me, a grown-up sitting behind a tiny wooden desk; he smiled a half smile, then went over to Millie in the front row to help with a particularly tricky word.

David Witherspoon must be a proud man, and I felt proud for him too.