Notes on a First Teaching Practice

David Lambourn

"What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a. beginning.
The end is where we start from....

The whole stanza of Little Gidding is eloquent for me as I attempt to fix for a while the fleeting
half-seen, half-heard and sometimes barely felt sensations of my recent experience at Whitworth.
Words at once eloquent and challenging both in content and style.

I remember my constant awareness of time, both kairos and chronos. Being in time; on time, out of
time, right time; wrong time; break time; coffee time; lunch time; gaining time, saving time; losing
time, time off; time out, time and time and time again. Each evening as I drove westwards back
along the motorway I was compelled to watch the sun sink and in every moment it mocked my
inability to use its day to the full. Each teaching-period was summoned by bells, sentenced
without trial, ripped off, and dumped in a litter-bin. A word launched at the class would arrive in
one three-hundredth of a second - years too late. Other words leapt bravely off the tongue only
to be daunted by the length of the journey and fell to the floor, to a bubble-gum grave. The Red
Queen cried 'Faster' and looking around I saw that I was in the same place as before. 'If you want
to get anywhere else you must run twice as fast as that.'

If time was the problem, speed was not the answer. For I also remember that I felt like this mainly
when the content of the work was not chosen by the group with whom I was working. When they
were free to choose the content I felt myself to be one of their assets, and not a leading
distraction. But if I chose to regard myself as one of their assets it meant being available to them:
it meant behaving in ways which may be described variously as open, exposed, receptive,
sensitive, empathetic, and many of the other clichés which I recall from a decade or so ago.
Words which rest not so comfortably on the page as they did in a more altruistic period. But that's
as maybe, but this time they had to be accompanied by another, and that was agility. And the
conversation would only be a few exchanges old before another concept would be wriggling
uncomfortably, demanding a kind of painful consciousness - that of integrity. Three lines later in
the same stanza, describe quite well for me the demand that that kind of teaching made:-
Quick now, here, now always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything).

In situations where the content had not been chosen by members of the group I sometimes felt
that the pupils were there for my benefit. Perhaps, in a real sense since I was on teaching practice,
they were there for my benefit - and benefit I did. But suppose that they had felt that?

It was well into the practice before I began to realise, and consider, how much my approach to
the young people (and perhaps the staff ?) was conditioned by my youth club experience. By and
large, the club members were in the club because they wanted to be there - furthermore they
were not there to learn, far less to be instructed. Only slowly did they come to understand that I
understood my role very largely in educational terms; and also began to welcome the kind of
learning that went on, seemingly without their consciousness of it. I think that it was for reasons
like this that I was glad to be given carte blanche with two of the older groups, for where the
material was 'given' I unashamedly sold it to the class in terms of relevance to their own situation.

I should perhaps elaborate a little more on the 'sold'. Although at this distance I find it difficult to
produce evidence, I nevertheless remember feeling that I 'sold' much in ways about which I
subsequently felt guilty. It was as though I were a missionary armed also with baubles, praying
that I would be recalled before the supply of baubles ran out. By being only four weeks long the
practice was unreal in this respect. In the circumstances, I judged it nicely. But what if I had not?
Could I keep up a supply of baubles? Could the baubles themselves be made in some way
educational? Perhaps this question lies at the heart of the growth of the Curriculum
Development method? Perhaps just a way of trying to run twice as fast - perhaps valuable with
younger people, say nine years to thirteen, when that kind of game is still a legitimate and
welcome method of learning - but not so welcome when the prospect is trying to keep face
around the shrinking opportunities of a Careers Office.

As I read this I find the language, style and images all betray feelings which are both deeper and
more confused than I would readily wish to admit: an observation which might itself inform the
next item in my notes which, in my shorthand, I have called exhaustion. Before the teaching
practice I had expected to do a little work each evening, there would be a little preparation for
the following day, just prepare a little material, to be kept in reserve, a kind of first-aid box in case
the lessons did not go as expected, and so on. In the event I did none. Not a book was opened.
Not a word was written. I sat down and did nothing. I was simply, no not simply, rather strangely,
exhausted. Within two or three days I was quite self-consciously spending my evenings in my own
re-creation. And so it remained to the end of the practice. I am not clear even now as to how I
would set about a rationale of that decision, but I came to think quite clearly that the best
preparation that I could make for the next day was to make sure that I was at my best as a
person. So, preparation became not so much the wrapping up of the next parcel to hand out but
rather something more akin to the preening of a large bird after a storm - but even that may be
misunderstood because popularly, and wrongly, preening is understood in terms of appearance
and narcissism rather than of pre-flight maintenance.

I am quite conscious that so far I have made little or no attempt to discuss the content of the
teaching other than who chose it, and for the most part I am content to leave it like that, but with
one exception. I felt myself to be pushed towards dealing not only with what is, but also with
what could be. At every moment, or so it seemed, some members of the group would be only to
ready to remind me by their behaviour that they saw me as an agent of social control. And that
this control was not only in terms of school behaviour but also in the realm of their wider values.
For the most part I was prepared to accept the first role which I could discharge in almost in
utilitarian fashion, but of the second I was much more suspicious. And it was at this level that I
felt most distant from the group. They were much more bound to conventions, whose power I
must have underestimated, than I had expected. I was prepared for much more random
responses to stimulus than I ever received. I believed that it would have been very difficult to get
them to play a version of 'my radical values are more radical than your radical values.' I refuse to
believe that their responses to word association were anything but stereotyped, chosen because
that was the right reply or was the reply that would best suit the social need of the moment. For
these and other reasons, I concluded that one of the main pressures on me ought to be to try to
provide a complex situation for them which would include some of the following features:-
a. Security enough to be able to take risks.
b. Stimulating enough to counter habit and convention.
c. Satisfying enough to promote further attempts.
d. Economic enough for them to appreciate each other as assets.
e. Concrete enough to enable them to ground the experience in the rest of the day.
I am only too well aware that this list says very little until worked out in the minute details, several
of the aspects are overlapping, and some are contradictory, but for the meantime they will serve
as cues for something to which I shall have to return later. I suppose that it would be possible to
describe these last few sentences as concerned to enable a kind of interactionist approach to
classroom learning.

I need hardly say that there were very few occasions when I was able to achieve a situation when
members of the group were consciously taking much notice of their colleagues contributions, but
there were many occasions when some of them would be caught up in a conversation with me. In
these conversations there sometimes occurred instances when either the class as a whole or
perhaps individuals would make a decision with which I could not agree. Only on rare occasions
did I say as much, but rather kept the movement going, trying all the while to get them to make
their own checks on their progress. It was at this time that I felt myself most stretched. The effort
of trying to follow their route, to try to anticipate next moves, to consider methods of getting
them to check their own new positions was very demanding and I felt then how much easier it
would be to be handing out parcels for their acceptance.

I suppose that it must now be becoming clear that I felt many of the pressures that must act on
teachers that lead them to become concrete in their attitudes and methods, to become legalists in
discipline, traditionalists in decisions and cyphers in relationships. These considerations in turn
lead me to try and develop an idea which at least feels to me to be new. The idea is briefly, that
work always tends to become 'mere' ritual. I realise that the words are emotive and that I shall
have to introduce a multitude of qualifications. Perhaps some examples may illustrate the idea.
The opportunity of welcoming the pupils first thing in the morning, of assuring them of their
value, of ascertaining that they are fit and well and that there are no pressing extra-mural
problems requiring urgent attention, that someone on the staff really does care about them as
people, becomes ‘mere’ registration - I do not need to describe the ritual acts. ‘First of all I
distribute the material, then I get them to discuss it for about fifteen minutes and then I get them
to write it up.’ The first requirement on the road to ritual is an established procedure. Established
procedure is to be valued highly because actions which are repeated are received by pupils as
non-threatening - it helps them to understand what is going on, nad besides, when they know
what is happening they tend to behave better. The second requirement is an ‘outward and visible
sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. And what better evidence than a summary in the initiate’s
own handwriting! And to ram the point home there is an exhibition of the holy relics in the form
of cups and shields once a year. Perhaps this seems a hard description, but it is what happened at
Whitetown School in a series of lessons entitled The Pop Scene. There were twenty or so questions
which the young people were required to discuss - the assumption being that young people had
no questions of their own? It happened in the fourth year Social Studies. I think that the overall
Staff/Student ratio was 1/18 and with some, if not most, classes staffed 1/28 ought to have made
it possible to have some small group work situations where the personal implications of some of
the studies could be attempted? I was often required to be a kind of policeman during these
rituals (perhaps I mean acolyte, carrying a candle on a highly decorated club), and it was not only
on these occasions that I wondered what I was doing choosing to be a full-time paid teacher. I
suppose everyone asks whether or not the kind of full time education we administer to the young
is the best way of helping them achieve their potential. But that is to make a fairly substantial
assumption. Perhaps education according to ‘age aptitude and ability’ is not being interpreted in
terms of the growth of the individual within his own situation but is rather interpreted in terms
of social control - Status Quo by any other name would smell…?

I would not want to end this rhetorical aide-memoire without making some mention of my
colleague on this enterprise. I had only known him for about three weeks when we learned that
we would be travelling to this school together. For many reasons, including ones of competition
within the course, religious attitudes of a kind which I think I understand but could not share,
sharp reminders of people, attitudes and situations which, for ease of feeling would prefer to
forget, I would not have chosen him as a colleague. Without wishing to go into any detail I know
that, in spite of unprepossessing beginnings, I was very pleased indeed to have been able to share
in the relationship which ensued. I was enabled to consider, even appraise, the experience of the
practice as it went along in ways which were very valuable to me, ways in which I hope that I
would be able to repeat in a full time situation. The benefits were very substantial, but mostly I
think because they enabled me to think around events which I might have otherwise preferred to
forget.

I was also glad that the practice occurred so early in the course as I feel that my present study is
now based on an experience of a teaching situation and of my experience of me in that situation
- which additional feature I think I might otherwise have ignored.

David.Lambourn@blueyonder.co.uk