It was when I realised I was bored during one of my own lessons that I knew something was wrong. Teaching is a lot of things, but boring it ain't. And if I was bored, how could I possibly be inspiring my class?
In my first few years as a teacher, the lack of boredom was the first thing I mentioned when people asked me about my chosen profession. "You never find yourself clock-watching, waiting for hometime," I would say, "every day just flies by". People would look at me with envy, thinking about all those times they had stared at the clock in their office setting, longing for 5pm. But now, after a few more years and a lot of reforms, my job no longer offers that same unpredictability.
Sure, the children still come out with unexpected responses; providing me with hilarious anecdotes and often making me smile. But the job itself now resembles that of a factory production worker. I clock in, deliver the lessons planned for me by some anonymous educationalist, read the stories chosen for me by some book marketing company, send the kids home and then mark the books using the marking and assessment code designed for me by some senior leader with no class of their own. Bit by bit, the autonomy of teachers is being chipped away at by people who don't trust us to be able to plan effectively for the children we teach.
Now I am certain that somewhere in Middle England somebody thinks carefully and attempts to plan creatively, trying to imagine their lessons being taught to children across the country. But by and large, the schemes that my school leaders bought into hoping to ease our workload by cutting down on the hours required to be spent planning have simply given us a different task. These days, the time I would have spent dreaming up imaginative, inclusive and stimulating lessons is instead spent trying to reformulate the standard lesson into something that is both achievable and challenging to my class of EAL learners with very little life experience beyond their housing estate. Rather than trying to squeeze the square peg of my class into that round hole ("we must teach aspirational lessons so as not to limit the children's learning opportunities") I have taken to dumbing down my lessons, cutting out any references to culture, history or geography that I think the children won't know, so that we can instead focus on what they desperately need; functional English and maths.
Similarly, a couple of years ago the head decided that we should adopt a school-wide marking policy, so that it would be clear to all who looked at the children's work just what feedback they were receiving. When my colleagues and I queried this, insisting that our marking should be done solely to help the children to improve, we were told that the kids were only one group out of several shareholders for whom we were marking. So now, rather than modifying my marking and the types of comments I make based on the learner, every child I teach must conform to the way of marking preferred by SLT.
This interfering, ahem, support even reaches as far as the reading books I use. After reading a book with my class that they had adored and which is wildly popular with children of their age across the country, I was told that I couldn't read the sequel with them because "the children need to be exposed to a variety of authors". I was then told which books had been ordered for my book corner. My handmade guided reading resources designed to fit around books by Roald Dahl and Astrid Lindgren sit, languishing at the back of my cupboard, replaced by neat little books of short stories, all created to be read in 20 minute slots. They even come with a Teacher's Guide, complete with the questions I should ask and the comments I should make as we read.
So this is how my vivid, varied days became monotone and dull. My exciting lessons full of enthusiastic learners have become formulaic sessions where I go through the motions, and the children, to their credit, continue to work hard to learn. It is a tribute to them that they still want to work hard in lessons, but it makes me sad to never hear them say "that was so much fun miss!" at the end of a session, the way they used to.
I love my class and I love helping children to achieve, but it increasingly feels that teaching is being made into a factory production line, where any old student wanting a summer job could rock up, read out the questions, follow the formula and then go home. What the current method seems to ignore, however, is that the children themselves need to experience the exciting feeling of truly tailored, creative lessons – designed by professionals who know them – in order to progress. Let's hope someone important realises this soon.
This week's Secret Teacher works in a primary school in London.
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