BFP-3
BFP-3
BFP-3
My latest column for our local newspaper, the Bury Free Press:
Many of us who are teachers chose our career because as children we were inspired by a great teacher.
For me, teaching was the last thing I wanted to do. Ever since I was eight I had harboured a genuine, if rather specialised, dream of becoming a ventriloquist – someone who could talk without moving his lips whilst perching a wooden dummy with a mechanical mouth on his knee.
Career opportunities for that were always going to be limited, so around fourteen I changed direction. Now I wanted to be a radio DJ. In fact – and this is a sentence you won’t often see in print – I wanted to be Noel Edmonds, who was then the zany breakfast presenter on Radio One.
But it was at this point, in the turbulent depths of my adolescence, that I was lucky enough to be taught by one Mr Samson. He was an English teacher. He was funny, strict, charismatic, clever, and in his deft hands Shakespeare came to life. The Noel Edmonds dream was banished and I was on a trajectory to become an English teacher, just like Mr Samson.
Even in this knowledge-rich world of ours today, in which a friend of mine has written a book called ‘Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google?’, great teachers make a difference. Search engines and social media sites can give us information and answer our questions. But being taught by a truly outstanding teacher does more: it can move and inspire us to greater aspirations.
That’s why I think that the Government should spend less time tinkering with the curriculum – with what is taught in schools. Curriculum change is always a distraction from the really important bit – how teachers teach. Because when we look back at the teacher who most affected us, it won’t be because of their carefully crafted lesson objectives or a meticulous markbook.
Instead these teachers could take their subject, however dull it might have appeared in textbooks, and they could make it relevant, compelling and endlessly fascinating. It’s what great teachers did - and what they still do.
In Bury St Edmunds we will be the last phase of Suffolk’s school reorganisation from three- to two-tier. Inevitably it will occasionally be turbulent and unnerving.
But all of us leading schools are determined that during the whole process, when it finally arrives, we will focus on the only thing that matters – the relationship between great teachers and their pupils, and high quality work in the classroom.
We believe we owe it to our young people and to their parents.
Geoff Barton
18 November 2012
Sunday, 18 November 2012