Less Than A Year

By Peggy Thomas

"Children are individuals and should be treated as such"

Senior management in a fictional London school claimed to believe this.

So why did Peggy Thomas get in trouble when she put it into practice?

Read on...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stablegate
• Release date: Jul 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995648814

Book preview

Introduction

The Way it Spozed to Be by James Herndon and The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy both have the same plot: a teacher goes into a school with high hopes, has what he, the children and the parents regard as a successful year, and is fired at the end of it. It’s not an unusual story; plenty of other books tell the same tale.

As I stepped off the underground train on the first day of September 1991, en route to Meadowview School, these books were in my thoughts. Would I spend the following year writing a similar one? Like a drowning man reviewing his whole life in a matter of seconds, I looked back over my varied career as I made my way towards the station exit. First there were the student days in New York in 1963, when I volunteered in a settlement house in the Lower East Side, helping children with their homework under the supervision of a social worker who had seen everything. I remember being impressed with the children’s optimism and vitality.

That’s the year we were married and when my husband’s student days were over we moved to his native Britain. Babies soon followed and eventually I became involved in breastfeeding promotion. During twenty years as a breastfeeding counsellor, first with La Leche League and then with the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers, I slowly absorbed an idea of fundamental importance: the child is born good.

This idea leads to the understanding that a young child’s behaviour always serves a purpose for him, which means that where behaviour is undesirable, the adult must address the circumstances or conditions that led to it. Gradually I abandoned the philosophy of spare the rod and spoil the child that I had been brought up with.

It is clear that a belief in the innate goodness of the child is what separates the therapeutic from the punitive response to bad behaviour. This idea grew from my observations of children and conversations with mothers and was crystallized by Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good. This outstanding book makes an iron-clad case for kindness and compassion.

On that bright September day I couldn’t have spelled all this out in this way. All I knew then for sure and for certain was that every child is innately good. Thanks to a re-found belief in God I now knew why: the child is good because that’s the way God made him.

I wondered who would share this view in the new school and immediately thought of Brenda, the headteacher. I had been with Brenda for two and a half weeks during the previous July and was very impressed with her relationship with the children. The organisation of the school seemed a bit shaky, but I could live with that. The big question was, Can I work here? and after seeing Brenda in action, the answer was definitely Yes! Of course I was prepared for the need to compromise in many ways, but I was confident that in the area where I couldn’t compromise – respect for the child – I wouldn’t be asked to.

Meanwhile during all the years of raising a family and helping women breastfeed, I was teaching, for what is child rearing and counselling, if it isn’t sharing what you know with other people? The logical conclusion to this, which I hadn’t arrived at until our youngest child came along, was to teach her at home until age 11, when she chose to go to secondary school. By then I was tutoring children and adults at home. I progressed from that to part-time teaching in private schools, where a recognised qualification isn’t required.

A desire to do more, and perhaps to be taken more seriously, led to the one-year Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE). Securing the Meadowview job was a very satisfactory conclusion to the year. It seemed that all I had been doing with my life up to then had been in preparation for this job. It was the ideal way for me to contribute to the lives of children and parents. I expected to spend the next ten years there, which would take me up to retirement age.

By the time I was at the top of the stairs, showing my travel pass to the ticket collector, I had completely dismissed the Conroy and Herndon books from my mind. Whatever its faults, the school I was going to was nothing like the American ones described in those books. There’s no way teaching in this school could be as bad as it was in those, I told myself.

I was right. It wasn’t anything like as bad. My story is different in other ways as well: I didn’t last the whole year and I wasn’t actually fired.

1

LANDING A JOB

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Kiri scanned the room and pounced. Janet!

Well, I get dressed, then I have breakfast.

No, no! What’s the first thing you do? She pounced again. Peggy!

I lie there and try to figure out what day of the week it is. Then I get up and go to the loo, then …

Fine! Fine! The first thing you do is get up. Then you get dressed. Then you have breakfast. This is sequencing. You can’t teach algebra without sequencing.

The astute reader will understand that this was a lesson in teaching infant maths. Children don’t just count smarties these days. Maths now means algebra, data processing, geometry and much much more. In one year of the Post-Graduate Certificate in Education we were exposed to the rudiments of maths and nine other subjects. It was a bit like having lots of immunizations prior to a trip to the tropics. The exposure was brief, but not so long-lasting.

There were thirty of us: twenty-nine women and one man. We were taught in two groups of fifteen. None of us asked why we needed to be taught in groups of fifteen while five year-olds need to be taught in groups of thirty. There’s another question we never asked: what if the good practice we learned in college is unknown in the school we find ourselves teaching in? I had seen things during teaching practices for which a student would have failed the course: teachers screaming at children, dirty water tables[1], art activities consisting of children gluing shapes cut out by the teacher in a pattern dictated by the teacher. In the year after leaving college I regretted many times not having asked this obvious question.

When my story begins, the days in college were over. I had been interviewed by the borough and assigned to a school. It remained to be seen if the headteacher would be willing to take me on. The approach to the school was through a vast housing estate. I didn’t notice any burnt-out cars and there wasn’t much litter, but there wasn’t a lot to lift the spirits either, though I did see a few wagtails. Clearly the name of the school, Meadowview, represented a triumph of imagination over environment.

The school had been built in the early fifties with slabs of concrete. The door was painted chipped orange. In the foyer stood a full-size bronze goat. It now strikes as very strange that during my eleven months at the school, I never learnt the provenance of the goat. Brenda, the head teacher, appeared as I opened the door and received me graciously. She was short and perfectly groomed. Her shiny black curls and healthy complexion gave an appealing look that combined well with her air of brisk efficiency. We spoke for a while in her office, a chaotic den piled everywhere with books, papers and the relentless manuals of her trade.

Brenda told me that in September the Infants would consist of two Year Two classes, my Year One and two Reception Classes, with twenty children in each. There were more children than usual coming up from the Nursery, which accounted for the two Reception classes. She didn’t explain why there were two Year Two’s.

Primary schools were expected to produce their own original policies for each of the ten required subjects, but Brenda told me that Meadowview didn’t have any policies because the previous head had considered them unnecessary. That seemed a little odd considering that the previous head had left two years before. She didn’t say and I didn’t ask whether she favoured the so-called emergent writing in which children invent their own spellings in the early years and gradually acquire conventional spelling as they move up through the school. She didn’t say whether the school used a published maths scheme, or if teachers were expected to create every lesson from scratch. There was, however the beginning of a behaviour policy. Brenda and her staff had produced a draft of this, involving the children and parents. How they were involved was not made explicit.

I was interested in how the children and adults in the school related to each other; I found out when a child wandered into Brenda’s office without knocking and asked if she could leave her skipping rope there. In no other school had I seen a head so accessible to the children. As for the lack of policies, this seemed an advantage. Brenda hinted that they would all be addressed during the coming year. The implications of this were very exciting; it would be great to be in on all the policy making right from the start.

Brenda was clearly too busy to take me around the school, but invited me to look around on my own. The lay-out was quite simple, much easier to map in one’s head than those old Victorian buildings with no principal entrance, full of staircases that lead to nowhere. The main door of Meadowview was just a few steps from the huge gates in the high chain link fence that surrounded the school. Between the main door and the playground door opposite, was a small lobby like a wasp’s waist, with the building bulging out on either side. To the left was a suite of offices which included Brenda’s and opposite these, the ladies’ loos, a kitchen and a large staff room. Continuing down the corridor were reception classes, a staircase and a nursery.

On the other side of the building was a large hall with a stage and piano, a windowless forbidden area (the caretaker’s space) and another hall like the first one. After all this was a large separate dining area. The two halls, used for assembly and PE, were open to the corridor that ran alongside them. Opposite the second hall were the junior classrooms on the ground and first floors. The staircase went up to another level. The broken furniture on top put me off further exploration.

The playground was a huge paved space and in addition, there was a large jungle at one end with trees, tall grass and a raised fish pond. The building was hardly in mint condition, having suffered from ten years of Mrs Thatcher’s meanness, but it had an inviting lived-in look.

After my tour, I found Brenda still in her office. It was hard to think of questions and having a migraine didn’t help. I told Brenda I had a headache so she wouldn’t think I was always that dozy. She asked if I often got them and I said I did. Realizing a bit late how that must have sounded, I added they were usually on the weekends, which was true. I needn’t have worried; concern rather than suspicion was written on her face. She was like a tactful friend. Not wishing to put me on the spot, she asked if I’d like to go home and think a bit longer, but my decision was made.

I’d like to work here, I blurted out. She looked genuinely pleased and within minutes everything was signed and I was a member of staff.

Thinking back to this interview, I’m aware now, as I wasn’t then, that Brenda didn’t ask the right questions either. She had no idea what kind of a teacher I wanted to be or how I expected to relate to the children and parents. However, she got what she wanted: a living breathing teacher to fill a vacancy. I got what I wanted too: a well-paid, worthwhile, full-time job. I was a qualified teacher and now I had a post, with my own class, in a London primary school. I could hardly wait to get home and tell my admiring family.

July

I gladly accepted the option of working for the last two weeks of the summer term. It meant being paid for the whole summer and was a chance to get to know my class, who at that point were divided more or less evenly between the two younger infant classes, taught by Barbara and Judy. The former was a maths post-holder, trained as a junior teacher. After a few years with the juniors in Meadowview she had switched to infants which she found more fun than juniors.

I spent most of the first week with Judy. She was in her second year of teaching, having come to Meadowview straight from college. Judy and Barbara could hardly have been more unlike. Barbara was self-confident, outgoing and cheerful. She stood up straight, walked briskly, smiled brightly, dressed well and put up her long hair in an elegant French roll. She projected an air of knowing exactly what to do and how to do it. Judy, on the other hand, was quiet to the point of being inaudible. She wore black bicycle shorts, black baseball boots, a tee-shirt and had a mass of curly red hair that covered her face whenever she leaned forward. Her classroom was like no other. The noise level was down by your toes. Judy didn’t appear to be controlling the children; perhaps she was just lucky in having quiet ones.

Following usual infant school practice at the start of the day, children sat on the carpet in the book corner, an area surrounded by cupboards lined with wire book racks that formed a kind of holding pen with the teacher’s chair serving as the gate. Carpet time is part of the set routine of the classroom and can also be used at odd intervals during the day as a calming device. If things threaten to get out of hand, the teacher can call the class back to the carpet to reassert her authority and remind the children just how they are expected to behave in school.

While she took the register, Judy made no appeals for silence and issued no instructions to stop fidgeting. She didn’t need to; there was no noise and no fidgeting. She didn’t smile, or frown, or betray any emotion at all. She spoke in a low-pitched monotone. The register finished, she chose Kevin to count the boys. He stumbled around the carpet, weaving among closely-packed bodies, patting each boy on the head as he counted.

Ow! Miss! It was Peter. He stepped on my finger! Peter put his finger in his mouth and withdrew it quickly. The pain hadn’t subsided, but he needed his fist to punch Kevin on the leg. The finger went back in Peter’s mouth and the cheerful Kevin carried on regardless.

Well you should sit properly. Everybody else has their arms folded and their legs crossed. Judy’s voice was flat as she made this statement. It was a speech I had heard many times during the past year. Children don’t sit on the carpet any old way; they are told how to do it and it was quite true that every other child had got it right.

Kate counted the girls. The numbers were slotted into a wall chart displayed at the back of the carpet area, opposite Judy’s chair. Judy then pointed at the chart and I watched, intrigued, while the whole class, with no prompting, turned around and pointed with her. Teacher and children then chanted in sing-song voices, while their arms waved up and down in time: Today is Monday. There are five boys and fourteen girls. It was a well-rehearsed routine, which it dawned on me, was a reading exercise. Judy then gave the instructions for the morning and the class dispersed around the room.

Activities

The theory behind the classroom management which I had learned in college and which was practised in Meadowview was that children can be taught the whole curriculum through a single topic. If the topic is food, for example, in the maths area children will weigh food one day, calculate its cost the next and investigate the symmetry of fruit and vegetables on the following day. In the language corner, another group will write poems about the taste of lemons, preferably on yellow lemon-shaped paper. For reading there are recipes and stories about food. Technology includes cooking, so it’s easy to cover that one. For science, children could sprout beans, for art, draw pictures of the growing plants and for music, sing songs about beans. For history, the class might discuss why it is that they all know what mangoes are while most of their grandparents had never heard of them at their age. With any luck, some of the children’s grandparents will have been raised on mangoes, which leads very nicely to geography. With a bit of ingenuity, PE and RE lessons can also be flavoured with food. So there you have all ten subjects, taught through a single topic.

This approach can lead to some very interesting work, though obviously it could be difficult to generate sufficient activities to last a term or even a half term. It’s a system which is extremely demanding of teachers’ time and energy, not to mention their money. Many teachers never claim for the inevitable expenses. The fruit needs to be bought, the paper cut into interesting shapes and so forth. It’s also very difficult to avoid patchiness, especially in maths.

Judy had organised her class of twenty into four groups, but the topic, whatever it was, had faded away by then. On a typical morning one group would do handwriting practice, one maths, one alphabet work while the fourth would read with Judy. Of course the teacher can work with only one group at a time, so the activities planned for the other groups are supposed to be academically worthwhile yet simple enough for young children to do without help. It’s very difficult to produce dozens of activities that meet these criteria; it’s a question of how much the children will do without supervision. This depends on the pliability of the children and the degree of control exercised by the teacher. The ideal is for activities to be so interesting the children will want to do them; what often happens in practice is that discipline compensates for the lack of imagination. Where this doesn’t happen, children ignore the teacher’s proposals and create their own activities.

Judy asked me to supervise the maths group. She had provided lumps of plasticine of different sizes which children were to weigh with unifix cubes. They were then to make a flag for each lump of plasticine showing the number of cubes it had taken to balance it. Weighing can be exciting if you over-load the balance so the cubes spill on the floor. Sally squealed with delight when she discovered this and Judy responded with the most unexpected explosive telling-off I’d ever heard. So she did have a system for keeping the peace. Sally wilted and silence reigned for the rest of the week.

When everyone had done some weighing, I had a look at the other activities. In the handwriting group, Antoinette was practising lower case b’s on a right-hand page of a ruled exercise book. She had already covered the facing page with a’s. Both letters filled the space between the lines, so the net effect was that lower case b and a were the same height. I was reminded of an Australian teacher I’d met on a practice who, at the beginning of every day, would hastily add extra lines to the exercise books so that children could see how high to make the a’s and b’s and every other letter. It seems that everywhere on earth except in the UK primary children have triple-lined writing books.

Ten minutes later, Judy looked up from her reading group and intoned, It’s play time. Chairs scraped, pencils were dropped, children queued at the door. There was a minimum of jostling for first place and minimum of noise. Judy stood at the head of the queue and waited for silence. To lighten the atmosphere, Darren made the door contribute a painful squeak by swinging it to and fro. Judy told him to stop and he stopped. We escorted the class to the playground and went back towards the staffroom.

A cheerful woman was coming towards us. All right? she chirped.

I replied Hi! Judy didn’t say anything. I asked who she was.

Morag. She’s one of the helpers. She’s really good. You can give her anything and she’ll do a good job of it.

That sounds promising. Do I take it you can’t say the same for the others?

Right. Esther can’t do anything that involves reading or writing. Francesca’s the best, but you won’t see much of her. She’s in with Barbara most of the time. They’re sisters. It’s a shame Morag’s a junior helper. She’s never in the infant classrooms, but she’ll make books for you and do anything you want doing in the library.

So all those people smoking in the office, are they helpers? There always seemed to be lots of people in the office, but even more so during break, when the corridor near the entrance to the school filled up with smoke from the office on the one side and from the staff room on the other.

"Yes, and