“Hackney, Its Ups and Downs”
PGCE Alternative Course Report by Susanna Ferrar, 1983-4, London Institute of Education.
Introduction
When I sat down to write this report, at first I couldn’t think what its purpose could be. I wrote the following as part of my process of working it out:
I don’t know what it should be – can’t recall an instruction/indication as to its purpose – would like it to be a pamphlet for myself, to read when teaching gets me down and re-fire me with enthusiasm for Hackney kids in general and mathematics in particular…
This is reasonable – for me because it’ll be useful in my future career
- for the Institute because it gives them some indication of the kind of teacher I’ll be and also encourages me to have a future career.
No other party is involved….
There are various strands that could be drawn out of the report: my belief, for example, that children want to learn, that we can teach them if they trust us and that they will trust us if we trust ourselves and listen to and respect them.
I have spent only a tiny fraction of my life at the Institute, and feel that the lessons of all the other years are also valid to me as a teacher.
For me, teaching is a way of being with children which is continuous with the way I’m discovering how to be all the time. My own learning is a process which I hope will continue throughout my life.
I have tried to focus on Hackney, and my institutionalized educational experiences here, which are inextricably bound up with all the social and political issues of the borough. My son and his friends at William Patten have learnt some bitter and unhappy lessons over the deportation of the Hasbudak family, for instance, not the worst of which was the Home Office’s refusal to reply to the children’s letters¹.
I believe we learn more from example than any other way. I would like children to be able to grow into happy, responsible, peace-loving people, so that is what I must grow towards myself. With subject-teaching, this means I must maintain my own skill and enjoyment, so that mathematics stays alive to me, and I have a chance of communicating its vitality to my pupils.
The application of such ideas in the classroom can be achieved only through practice. My personal practices of t’ai chi chuan and improvised music have been very helpful to me in finding ways of listening to a class; of pausing substantially enough to draw things together and change direction, if necessary. A lot of the time I forget to do it and get sucked into the mish-mash, but more and more I am developing the ability to stand back just long enough to let things settle, and then start again. I’m aware of a risk that this could turn into dissociation from my pupils, so I try not to break my awareness of them at all.
What is important to me is the flow of communication between people. This is often achieved only through hard work. Confucius’ words apply in schools as much as anywhere:
Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings.
Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again.
Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words,
There the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence.
But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts,
They shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.
And when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts,
Their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids².
Education is a personal transaction, which relies on the build-up of inner understanding to imbue our subject-matter with its mysterious appeal.
Notes
1. The Hasbudaks were sent back to Turkey despite the two children having been born here and being well-established and popular at William Patten School. It was a big campaign, as detailed in ‘That Really Happened to Me’ by Zeynep Hasbudak and her teacher Brian Simons.
2. I Ching p.59
Hackney, Its Ups and Downs
I’ve lived in Hackney since October 1977, and feel as if the experience should illuminate my view of Hackney Downs School. I’m not at all sure it helps though. After all, I live in a nice little end-of-terrace Victorian house in trendy Stoke Newington. I’m not black, over 60, a single parent, disabled or even ‘working-class’. My only claim to oppression and deprivation arises from my being a woman, and as I don’t have small children who tie me to the house or a husband who beats me, I can usually turn even that to my advantage.
We lived in a squat in Stepney when we first came to London, along with several other people who had been in York. It was a very pleasant squat and I was blissfully happy. I was working as an accountant for Times Newspapers Ltd. and J was beginning to nudge his way into the housing business. My son D, who was 4½, had been at nursery in York, but we couldn’t find one in London, so he went to stay with J’s parents in Bath until we found a house. Miraculously the whole process took less than 2 months. There was still nowhere for D, however, so he traveled with me on the 73 ’bus to and from the Gray’s Inn Road, where I left him in the nursery at Kingsway Princeton College. We used to have lunch together sometimes. The nursery cost £13.50 a week, I think. After Christmas he had to start school, so we found a childminder, who met him from school and kept him till one of us picked him up. I wasn’t at all happy with the arrangement, though. I didn’t like the woman very much. I was sure he was just plonked in front of the telly and stuffed with biscuits. He wasn’t happy either, and because it was so late by the time he was collected, he didn’t have much chance to let us know about his school life. Little things were disturbing too, like his starting to ask if he could go to the toilet, when for well over a year he’d been happy just to trot off when he had to. I stopped work in March ’78 (the job was a total drag anyway) when D’s Easter holidays loomed, with no satisfactory options for him apart from one of us being at home. I wanted another baby, and J was enjoying his work, so it was obvious that it would be me who stayed home.
About this time I came across ES, a colleague of D’s childminder. At a Silver Jubilee street party in ’77 it had occurred to her that community events in Stoke Newington were a bit thin on the ground, and she had started campaigning for the old fire station in Leswin Rd. to be used as a community centre. By the time I met her the constitution was beginning to emerge. There was a main Stoke Newington Community Association committee and a nursery committee. I devoted quite a lot of time to both. There was a lot to be done, and we were all complete novices when it came to dealing with the council. I spent a year as treasurer, which was a nightmare. It was very discouraging uphill work, but I like to think that I helped hold it together through those bad times, and contributed to the thriving community centre that now exists, though I stopped being involved with it about a year before it opened, in July ’82.
The other Hackney project I became involved in was the Hackney Country Centre. At its start the HCC committee asked SNCA for a representative, and I went along. HCC was a completely different kettle of fish, having arisen out of Hackney College, and having as its leading lights several very competent administrators. Our meetings were centred on large bottles of wine, conviviality being easy, based on the middle-classness we all shared. This was very alienating for the ‘ordinary’ Hackney folk who occasionally came along, but it ensured a quick and efficient setting-up of a very valuable resource. The last piece of work I did for the committee was producing a pamphlet. I’d been doing leaflets for a while, and had produced a programme for some concerts I’d organized for ‘Women Live’ in May ’82, so felt confident with ‘Media Resources’, and was pleased with the result.
I entered into aspects of Hackney life through these two committees which I would not have come across otherwise. The chief problem still seems to me to centre on education and competence. I am very unclear about the relationship of these two to race and class. There seem to be a lot of pressures to keep such powerful tools in the hands of the ‘ruling-classes’, but it’s hard sometimes to believe that that means me, especially when 3EK bring me to the brink of tears! I think it isn’t just grasping avarice on ‘our’ part that seems to concentrate power and resources among the middle classes. I’m conscious of my own fears and jealousies, and the sense that I’m a fool to think myself powerful, when I have no real say – when I can’t stop cruise missiles or force more money to be diverted to education. I’d rather be a carefree bum than have to establish my credentials through years of institutionalized learning. Why bother with all that work and worry just to saddle myself with illusory privileges about which I’ll find it hard not to feel guilty? Most of the boys at Hackney Downs wouldn’t want to be on committees, and are quite capable of finding their own satisfactions without any of the ‘hang-ups’ that inevitably arise out of stopping to think. They seem to me to be entirely justified in resisting the imposition of education. Paradoxically, this does not mean there’s no point being a teacher. The important thing about education is that it is available for those who, taking their chances, wish to avail themselves of it.
In June ’78, J and I had got married. D was allowed time off school to stay with his granny while we went on our honeymoon (by motorbike to the TT races!). However, by September, I felt really as if I was stuck “with my arms in his sink”. On impulse one day I rang up L.S.E. and asked about doing Social Anthropology there. I’d met someone who’d enjoyed the course enormously, and as it had never occurred to me that a degree course could be interesting and enjoyable, I was intrigued. I was accepted, and started the following month. The only other times in my life that I’d deliberately sought instruction had been when I nagged and nagged for piano lessons, and was allowed them, and when my Classics teacher agreed to give me Greek lessons in the lunch hour, which arrangement was scotched by the headmistress, who told me off for taking advantage of Miss Anderson’s good nature. I don’t remember my own will being involved at all during the rest of my school career. Some things were fun, others not so much so, but I don’t think it occurred to me that I might have any choice about it.
“November 6. School was O.K. I s’pose. Orchestra was lousy. I rather enjoyed writing codswallop in Use of English.” (from my diary for 1968, age 16)¹
The only time I remember playing truant was when I was very upset about my mother, who was dying of cancer. My diary records other instances, like “couldn’t be bothered with school, so stayed home”, but the following extract is about the memorable one, also 1968.
“October 8. My eyes are sore – I’ll write sometime later about today.
October 9. Yesterday morning is confused ’cept I remember standing outside the door & debating whether to bang it or scream. I banged it & Dad zoomed past me down the stairs & let my bike tyres down. I walked to school & left my bag & violin in the cloakroom. I went out again & took a train to London Bridge. Looked into Southwark Cathedral. I was wet by then. The window to the 12 martyrs, incl. Robert Ferrar Bp. of St. David’s, was bombed int’ war. I tried to ’phone Bernard, but he’d gone to Cams. After that I walked across London Bridge & through the city. Went to the loo (3d.) in Cannon Street. Holburn Viaduct was on the way to St. Paul’s. I went into the cathedral & sat down until the end of the service & then wandered & prayed. As I walked out I met a clergyman. I asked him why he was a Christian. He didn’t know. I don’t either. He’s Patrick Tuft & lives in Amen Court. I had coffee wi’ him & left about 1. Went to L.S.E. to find B. Met DH on the way. I was VERY wet by then. I found L.S.E. then I found Commonwealth Hall, Cartwright Gardens. B inhabits 2.25, but he wasn’t in, so I came more or less straight home. I’d bought a big roll for lunch. I got back to school (from Waterloo) at about 4. Went to see Miss A. She lent me a hanky. Talked to J & S & M & walked home with S. Tea. Told the family I’d played truant. Didn’t matter. S arrived about 6.00 & we caught the 7.13 to Waterloo & went to the Festival Hall for a beautiful concert. Dad drove us home from Blackheath Sta. Bed.
Today I was good & on time for school. Tired…Orchestra & dramatics…..home…….letters…John Peel. At one I shall turn off & sleep.”
Patrick Tuft & I also played piano duets. He told me later that his mother had died of cancer when he was a sixth-former, too.
I wish I could believe that Hackney Downs’ truants were having similarly constructive experiences. Transport to and from Hackney is so bad and so expensive that I doubt they leave the borough. Why am I so unwilling to credit them with the imagination and resourcefulness I had? Do I really believe their lives to be less purposeful than an earthworm’s?
“As far down the scale of life as the worms and even perhaps the amœba, we meet a general alertness of animals, not directed towards any specific satisfaction but merely exploring what is there; an urge to achieve intellectual control over the situations confronting it.” (Polanyi ‘Personal Knowledge’ p.132)²
My L.S.E. course gave me some insight into the complexity and variation of human life, but I still find it very hard to think ‘politically’. I feel very naïve in this respect, and cannot take an argument through to a sensible conclusion. When my tutor at L.S.E. gave back my essays, he frequently also gave me the next thought – the step I’d failed to take, which made it all fall into place. I still feel politically ignorant, and intend to read more – in particular Bourdieu’s ‘Outline of a Theory of Practice’. I hope my personal cosmology will continue to shift and grow. I heard Dave Swarbrick (the fiddler) sing a song the other night:
“Come on, my Rosie…the more I learn, the less I seem to know….so come on, my Rosie…my Rosie, rosin the bow.”
Not until the end is it revealed that he’s invoking his muse to help with this problem of learning and knowledge – the rosy rosin which will enable him to play his violin.
L.S.E. provided no answers, but opened up new vistas for enquiry, and new methods of thought. I was in therapy there, attempting to break the pattern of depression that had dogged me since my mother’s death. I also started playing improvised music, and occasionally deputized for a friend as a violin tutor in a school in Camden. It was a very busy time, and I emerged eventually feeling I’d coped quite well. I wanted to do research in psycholinguistics at Guy’s School of Human Communications Studies, and I also applied to do a PGCE. However, I couldn’t hold the Institute place until I was certain of finance for my M.Phil.. I let it go, hoping funds would arrive:
“Dear Trustees”, I wrote,
“I have just completed a degree in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, in which I obtained a 2.1 (upper second). I am hoping that your charity will be able to help me continue my studies in the next two academic years.
I am particularly interested in the communicative difficulties of immigrant children in school, and the way in which pupil/teacher relationships are affected by different cultural features. I would like to investigate the effect of these interpersonal factors on the learning process; whether they vary with the subject involved, for example, what the cognitive implications are and what light can be shed on the relationship between thought and language.
I have studied mathematics also at university level, and worked as an accountant, amongst other things. I feel that, with the advice and assistance of Guy’s Hospital School of Human Communication Studies, where I plan to register for an M.Phil initially, I will be able to make a useful and significant contribution to this field.
I have been accepted at Guy’s…. but will not be able to take up my place unless I am funded from outside…”
It didn’t work. Maybe I’ll be able to take it up sometime as a teacher on secondment. Meanwhile, I had to find a job. I set off with a course-mate, H, to find one we could share. We contacted the Hackney job-share project, who helped us concoct this little piece of blurb for use on application forms:
“We would like to apply for this job together; to undertake it as two part-time workers instead of one full-time one.
Organizations employing job-sharers have found a number of mutual advantages in the operation of flexible work arrangements, including reduced turnover, increased efficiency because of such factors as continuity of cover and renewal of energy, availability of a wider range of skills and ‘spin-offs’ from outside interests, which job-sharers have time to take up.
In this job in particular, problems would be ‘mulled over’ in two minds at once, and two people would be keeping their ears to the ground and picking up on relevant information.”
For college purposes, the following was added:
“In the present political climate, I feel it is very bad that people who have full-time jobs are working so hard and wearing themselves out. Also, it does not help our students, who are often at college because of unemployment, to be reminded constantly of the present sink-or-swim attitude of our society.”
We had some interviews, but no success. H moved away, and I took on two (for a short while three) part-time jobs, one of which was my first teaching post. It wasn’t until my second year of teaching that I became involved in the Visiting Teachers campaign. V.T.’s are hourly-paid teachers who cannot, at present, teach for more than 12 hours per week. They do have a raw deal, being paid about half as much per hour as people with full-time jobs or Assistant Lectureships, which are part-time, but paid pro-rata, with proportional sick-leave and holidays, and proper periods of notice (1 hour for V.T.s!). Apparently, A.L.s used to be quite easy to come by, but now they are not being set up at all. The present system, where it is a humiliation to be unemployed, a rip-off to work part-time and soul-destroying to work full-time, is no good at all. It militates against women, who often (still) feel tied to school hours and domestic duties, and against those men who wish to develop ‘womanly’ skills, or even just become less career-orientated. It splits off the unemployed from those with jobs and makes it very hard for people to give time to hobbies and self-development. All these effects are divisive for society and stultifying for the individual, and so BAD, as far as I’m concerned. As regards teaching, I feel that I need the variety of life that I have at present, with time to spend in my home, with my friends, doing t’ai chi and playing music, in order to have something of life to offer to the children, the enrichment of whom is my responsibility.
During my second block T.P. NM offered me two-fifths of his job. We worked it out like this:
“JOB SHARE
NM & Sue Ferrar -
Scale 2 Mathematics & Computing.
Reason for job-share N would like the time for private study while Sue feels that it would enable her to be more receptive to her child’s needs. The school would benefit because the job-sharers would put in more time and effort than they would strictly have to, and be fresher and less worn-out than full-timers.
Timetabling Implications
N 0.6 Sue 0.4
4th yr Computer Studies 4 periods 3rd yr Maths. 5 periods
5th yr Computer Studies 4 periods Another group Maths. 5 periods
5th yr Maths 5 periods Computer Supervision 1 period
Computer Supervision 4 periods 17 periods 11periods
Total teaching time 28 periods. The teaching time would have to be arranged so that N taught 3 mornings and 3 afternoons and Sue taught the other 2 mornings and 2 afternoons.
What would happen if one partner left?
- If Sue left N would try to find another job-sharer, failing which he would either work part-time or return to full-time employment.
- If N left Sue would either find a job-sharer or continue on a part-time contract.
Scale Post N would retain his Scale 2 post as he would continue with his responsibilities for Computer Studies & the Computer room.
Probationary period Sue would hope to complete her probationary period after 2 years of job-sharing.”
It would’ve been ideal for me, but has fallen foul of the red tape unfortunately. The head of Maths., the school head and the Maths. Inspector had all agreed to it however, which gave me a terrific boost. A lot of the time I felt I was floundering at Hackney Downs, and it was wonderful to have such a concrete vote of confidence.
When H moved, I shelved my first bid for job-sharing and started working for the London Musicians’ Collective in Camden and for the pensioners’ charity ‘Task Force’ in Hackney. Part of my job at Task Force was to collect girls from Haggerston school and take them to the pensioners whose windows they cleaned. I enjoyed my contact with them, though I found their compulsive smoking-as-rebellion rather unpleasant. Some of the pensioners had wonderful stories to tell, and the girls seemed to appreciate their own gain as volunteers. I also learnt to use a cine-projector, as I worked on the pensioners’ film circuit.
I started teaching too; numeracy to Business Studies students at one of Hackney College’s centres, and at Hackney A. E. I.. Some of the Business Studies students worked quite hard. They were all quite highly motivated, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Here are the reports I left for their tutors at the end of the year:
“M works hard, but has rather a tenuous grasp of the subject. She is happier to beat off on all sorts of false trails than to ask for help, or think about a problem clearly, from first principles. She also tends to try to remember how to deal with, say, percentages, but would be better off trying to understand what they mean, and taking it from there.
G could do Maths. easily if she stopped thinking it was difficult. On occasions she has been pleasantly surprised to have arrived at an answer, but seems to feel that if she could think of it, it must be trivial or wrong.
B has a good grasp of number, and enjoys this sort of work. It is only through carelessness that he fails to achieve 100%.
E’s addiction to romantic fiction stands in the way of achievement. She thinks clearly and concisely and could do very well if she could bear to live in the real world.” (She never returned the copy of ‘Wuthering Heights’ I lent her!)
“MV is bright and enthusiastic, and these qualities carry her over the difficulties she experiences with this subject.
B has difficulty concentrating, and prefers to get the answer from a neighbour than think it out herself. She is capable of working on her own, though, and would do well without distractions.
D is neat and thorough and often comes up with an original approach to a problem. His lack of confidence is no real handicap as he isolates himself with a problem and solves it in his own way.
D understands the subject well, and has attended regularly. He does have a bit of difficulty concentrating, and is easily waylaid, but, when he is in the mood for learning, can make good progress.
K was too far ahead of the class to benefit much from the lessons, and, because she knew all the answers, and called them out, was not very helpful either. If she had attended more regularly it would have been possible to work ahead on her own.”
They were an interesting class, but I didn’t much enjoy being at that particular Centre. I arrived, taught and left, never even having occasion to find out where the toilets were! I didn’t like my ‘boss’, who was a desperately neurotic woman. She left at the end of that year, because of ill-health. She complained to me that I was too lax with the students – that they were impossible to manage after I’d had them. It seemed to me ridiculous to treat a class of volunteer adults as if they were naughty children. Now I feel it’s not really on to treat even naughty children as naughty children. I don’t feel as if I learnt much from B-----. She seemed to me not to understand anything. I think she read Mills & Boone. In any case, I felt less sisterly feeling for her than for almost any other woman I’ve met.
The following year I was given 12 hrs. per week at another Hackney College branch, where the main course was the City & Guilds ‘Community Care’. I was purring all summer at the prospect of team-teaching with people I already knew from the Darsham Committee (Hackney Country Centre), and by and large I wasn’t disappointed. When the music teacher left, at Christmas, I took on most of the music too.
I had four groups who were mine for maths. (we usually didn’t actually call it ‘Numeracy’), and one double period each week with YOPs trainees. The latter was generally a waste of time for all concerned. The young people on the scheme were mostly pretty sour. They wanted jobs and, as far as they were concerned, they had jobs – for three days a week. Being sent to college was an insult and pointless for most of them. Those who had some interest in learning and ‘bettering themselves’ had very strange ideas about what education was (by that I mean simply that their ideas didn’t tally with my own). We, the YOPs tutors, had endless agonized meetings about what to do with them and decided that it would be best to take them out and show them things they wouldn’t otherwise see.
We took them to the Jean Tingueley exhibition at the Tate, which enthralled one boy and, I believe, intrigued even those who professed to be bored and sloped off to the coffee bar. Most of them ‘bit’ on the Auschwitz exhibition, in the crypt of St. George-in-the-East Church3, on the Highway where Wat Tyler marched into town. Unfortunately, as Numeracy tutor, I wasn’t in on the follow-up discussions. (Team-teaching was meant to happen, but is still a pipe-dream throughout the college.) There was an excellent study pack, showing how similar certain East End attitudes to Bengalis are to those which prevailed in Germany before WW2 and led to the holocaust, such attitudes presenting themselves against an eerily familiar background of unemployment and inflation. None of us had realized before how few of us would have been safe from the Nazis. The arbitrary evil of it did, I believe, move the most insular of the trainees.
The administration of the YOPs course was a mystery to me. I didn’t know who was supposed to be there most of the time. Sometimes 5 new people would turn up. Sometimes I’d be left with work to hand back to others who’d gone. The only constants were the resentment about being there at all, the highly developed disruption and avoidance skills and the huge differences in levels of ability and interest. By comparison 2.1, the worst of my college groups, was a pleasure to teach.
I had two 2nd year groups; 2.1, who were noisy, bumptious and bright, with one or two swots, and 2.3, who were charming, though a bit nervy and rather slow. There were about 15 girls in 2.1 and 6 in 2.3. One day I hadn’t had time to get to the staffroom before 2.3’s lesson, so I had my violin with me. They begged me to play and eventually I did, on condition that they worked. It wasn’t much like Rome burning, but a cosy glow came from them and they did some good work. I was anxious about what ‘the boss’ would say. I didn’t feel that pro-music arguments about cows’ greater milk-yields and shoppers’ fuller trolleys would cut much ice. Later I took 2.3 for music, but it never again entranced them as much. Conversely, their mathematical problems became extraordinarily pressing in music lessons!
The other group I had for both maths. and music was JH1 – a large and wonderful collection of hard-working girls. The realisation that we could switch the timetabling of maths. and music to suit ourselves was a valuable one for them, and the negotiations around our various requirements provided a useful lesson too.
I also took B1 for maths. (a small group of slightly older students, mostly single mothers), double-staffed on some other people’s maths. classes and had 2.2 and M1 for music.
The maths. was easy to teach; there were visual aids and a ‘core’ of worksheets for general consumption, and specific exams. for which to prepare. My introduction to music teaching, however, was as abrupt as my launch into numeracy had been the previous year, with less relevant experience to support me.
I did once try to help a schoolmate learn to read music, and I’d tutored the violin a bit, but nothing in my past gave me a clear way in to the task I had undertaken. Thinking now about my musical turning points, it’s clear I was wrong in my basic assumptions. My most important musical awakening happened at a workshop in Leeds in 1971, run by Trevor Wishart. I was working on a summer play-scheme for ‘Interplay’ (an offshoot of Ed Berman’s ‘Interaction’), where the workers were used to playing ‘heavy’ games. Trevor Wishart came over from York for a day. He sent us off to find anything that could make a noise. I brought water back, in a bowl, with a sponge and a cup. We all closed our eyes and entered the magical world of sound. It really was that simple. What I’d forgotten, in thinking I could bring that experience to the Hackney College girls, were my years and years of violin lessons, church choirs, string orchestras, school orchestras, school choirs, madrigal groups, piano lessons, bamboo pipe lessons (making and playing), carol singing, not to mention the rich background (from various sources) of early jazz, later jazz, Bob Dylan, Beatles, Grateful Dead, Folk clubs, Brahms, Dvořák, Vaughan Williams etc., and, of course, the ‘O’ level, when Bartòk had been carefully introduced. I’d even come across – and fallen in love with – such wayward moderns as Mahler, Stockhausen and Schoenberg. I’ll never forget the excitement I felt on first hearing ‘Pierrot Lunaire’. It all paled into insignificance, however, beside the freshness of the sound-world I found myself in at that workshop. Blake wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”.4 One of my ‘doors’ had been cleansed, but I didn’t realise the extent to which years of hinge-oiling and sweeping of sills had contributed to making the operation possible. I was expecting doors to open in Hackney College ears that had been silted up through years of pap and mindless racket. It’s no use playing Bach to someone who can’t handle Byrd, or saying “start from silence and respond to what you hear” to someone who thinks she makes no noise when she moves her chair. Like Caesar, I was looking in the clouds, ‘scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend.’5.
It would’ve been impossible, even if I’d realised all this at the time, to wind back my students’ lives, take them to Robert Mayer concerts, keep their minds and ears open and bring them along the paths I’d been along, but what happened in the end was beginning to approach that, given the limitations of time and resources. Some learnt a few guitar chords, some picked up a bit of recorder-technique. Others learnt to play Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Variations’ and ‘Silent Night’ on the beautiful wooden xylophones which seem to abound in ILEA music rooms, and to sing a few songs together. They were pleased. I came to realise yet again the isolation of elite education, and resolved to be satisfied with my pupils’ achievements in their terms.
That’s fine for me as ‘teacher’, but as ‘musician’ it’s quite a source of frustration. There are several strands to the dilemma. As someone who has a ‘gift’, whether by nature or nurture, I owe it to people to play music for them. People need music – it helps them feel better. It also feels necessary not just to churn out soothing pulp, but to stimulate and awaken parts other music cannot reach. It seems to me that this happens – that people gain maximum pleasure and excitement from my playing – when I play my music; when I’m as true to my own artistic aspirations as possible. But there is an odd equation here, which I noticed too when I was involved in fringe theatre early in the ‘70s: minimal audiences experience maximum enjoyment per person/ the bigger the audience, the less each member of it appreciates the performance. This proposition is not really intended to be examined seriously – there are too many counter-examples, but there is something to think about, to do with the demands a particular piece of work makes on its audience and the rule that the more you give to anything, the more will come back to you. My thoughts about this are rather un-scientific and vague. There were 5 people in the audience at one recent gig, four of whom were friends of the band. I’d seen the other one somewhere else, so I started talking to him. Astonishingly, he turned out to be pure punter – not a musician, not a critic – in experimental fields such creatures are rare.
It took my long-suffering husband a few years to begin to appreciate free improvisation, and he had a vested interest in finding out what it was about. When I met him, his taste ran mostly to the blues and the Eagles, though he also had all Beethoven’s symphonies in a box. From this basis it’s quite a clear path to free improvisation, via Ben Webster, the Grateful Dead, Mahler & co.. It’s not hard to enrich the listening life of someone one lives with. The Hackney College girls reluctantly took the small step from Marvin Gaye to Anne Peebles, but Bob Dylan remained beyond the pale. The Beatles were sneered at, and what I did was just ‘that hippy stuff’. I did persuade them to listen to ‘Porgy & Bess’, mostly because they knew ‘Summertime’ and were interested to hear it in its original form, complete with bizarre harmonies and orchestration. If I’d had more time with them, I think I could’ve expanded their musical appreciation even more. The music teacher at Hackney Downs is dealing with his pupils in a similar way, and I was very glad to have the chance of doing some work in his department.
I was offered a full-time maths. job at Hackney College, but would’ve had to study for an education qualification on day-release, and so came to the Institute instead.
It may seem arrogant to say so, but I don’t feel I really needed the course. Paradoxically, I have gained enormously from doing it. I have learnt, yet again, that I must be myself, and more so. I have clarified my aims: the quest for those ‘moments of truth’ which can fit into any theoretical framework and for comfort and pleasure in each moment as I live it. Ideally I’d like my pupils to feel validated by their learning experiences without having to go through what I’ve been through. “That’s all very well,” said a Scots friend once, “everyone knows all you have to do is be happy now, but HOW?!” Again I’m in danger of scorning that old ladder. Can it be true that we can only reach the ‘astra’ through the ‘ardua’? I hope not.
What I’m afraid of doing – what I am sure many teachers do – is trying to mould kids against their own grain, so that they can’t be happy, and even grow to feel they shouldn’t be happy.
I’m not being very modern and intellectual about this, though that fear is my education talking, not myself.
(“Charlie Brown! Stand up for your right to be wishy-washy!”)6
So – I was a hippy & now I’ve cut off my hair –
I don’t care….
Daily I expect the mountains to fall on me
Let it be
I’ve got my own world to live through….
(sorry, Jimi)7 …. And the mix of the Institute and Hackney Downs makes quite a tricky world. I’m procrastinating…
There’s something about it which troubles and hurts me so much that I don’t want to write about it. I feel as if I’ve missed some vital piece of information about how the world runs. I’ll blame my deep and dreamy Piscean nature and relate three small instances where my other-worldliness has been no help:
- At primary school; there’s a class vote on capital punishment. I’ve never heard of such a thing, but suppose capital = people’s savings, so capital punishment = taking away offenders’ cash. I put up my hand in favour and am probably branded for life.
- Ditto; we are asked to write a story ending with the phrase ‘it was a red herring’. Mine, about a funny smell on a boat, shows plainly that I have no idea of the usual sense of the phrase.
- Ridley Road market, 1980-ish; I ask for half-a-pound of beets. The stall-holder scornfully informs me they don’t use half pounds. “Great big girl like you!” he says, with a slightly doubtful half-grin.
At the Institute, and at school, I have the same feeling that there’s something I’m supposed to know, but don’t. Paranoia? Horrid anyway. I join a psychotherapeutic group where they’re all even less socially-competent than me. It’s good though, to be somewhere where it’s O.K. to burst into tears. In most of the seminars I just shut off that side of it. Occasionally I fall asleep. I had the same trouble at school:
“October 15. School is not nice. I wish I could cry there, but I just yawn. It’s horrible.” (diary ’68)1
I’m probably just trapped by my early experience into associating learning with adolescent feelings of turmoil and rebellion.
Every now and then I can’t quieten my inner agitation – am not sure if I’ve been swearing or shouting when (and if) I speak – and only just manage not to run out screaming. The day when I allow myself to relax my grip a bit and ask what hegemony means, a couple of the others say they didn’t know either – they’re glad I asked because they didn’t want to. Could they tell how near hysteria I was? It felt like a punishment for being late.
It’s agony having someone – however kind and understanding – tell you something you don’t want to know (even if, broadly speaking, you do want to know it). It’s bound to be like the Ancient Mariner.8 By this time in my life, I’ve learnt to suspend the agony and follow it through for the sake of the ‘glittering prizes’. I don’t think it’s good for my health, though.
To balance this terrifying picture, I must also say that I have never before felt that I was being educated. I dare say it happened before, without my being aware of it, but I was amazed and very moved to know that I, with my particular interests and concerns, was being held in a teacher’s mind. I don’t know why I should find it so surprising; it’s what I try to do with my students. It almost feels too intimate though, like something one should pretend not to know about; like one’s impulses towards incest or murder. In all human relationships there is the potential for sex and/or violence. I think both of these came at me a lot from Hackney Downs, mainly in the form of sexual insult, and I found it very difficult to deal with.
The worst thing that happened to me there was a sort of running joke with 3EK that got totally out of hand. When I started at the Institute, going to Hackney Downs on Tuesdays, I was using a very strong-smelling ointment which was beginning to deal with the stretch marks I’d had since carrying D. 1ED and 4BF gave no indication they’d noticed it. One boy in 2CW still calls me ‘lavender lady’, in the nicest possible way, but 3EK reacted with offence, reaching the point where the ‘joke’ dominated them completely. I stopped using the ointment almost immediately, but every boy, nearly, in 3EK, felt he had to leap up and rush to the other side of the room when I approached him. At the end of the Spring term I told RK, their form-teacher and head of maths., about it. I said I felt my being with them was probably a waste of time, as well as being pretty upsetting for me. We decided, though, to see how the last 4 Tuesdays went in the Summer term. The first one was hell! I was putting my bike away in the morning when one of 3EK spotted me and remarked loudly, “Cor, the stink!”. The lesson was awful. I was so nervous and unhappy that I probably did smell bad. By then M had taken over as their form-teacher, and I’d told him about my problem with them. I don’t know what he’d said to them, but the second week was extraordinarily nice. We’d also had a session at the Institute, with Chris Seering, on problems in the classroom, and I’d given it all an airing there. Chris said I should round up the ringleaders and tell them in no uncertain terms that there was to be no more of their silly behavior. If they asked what behavior I meant, I should say, “You know perfectly well what I mean, and it’s going to stop.” Maybe that would have worked, if I’d been faced with teaching them for much longer. As it was, I didn’t want to do that. Partly I didn’t feel up to it, partly I felt it wasn’t worth it so near the end, but my main reason for not wanting to wield authority was that it was their classroom, their joke and their work, and that ultimately, if they were to take any responsibility for any of that, it had to come from them. I sadly accepted their decision not to accept me as a teacher. Maybe they realised that I was trying to respect them as learners. The second week I did an investigation with 4 of them, about numbers that were the sum of consecutive integers (3=1+2, 9=2+3+4, 47=23+24 etc.) and got some very pleasing results, both mathematically and in terms of such remarks as “It’s good when it’s like this, miss”. Towards the end of the lesson J, who’d had a couple of lights come on in his mind, said, “What soap do you use miss?”. This was an old one, so I said, “What’s soap?” and after a bit more banter his classmates told him to drop it, and he did. I was particularly interested in J, whose brother M, another favourite, was in my first year group. They were both nice impish little boys, with enough nous to do their work, and enough sense of humour to enjoy getting me to worry that they weren’t doing it. They came from a large family, with not a lot of money. Once 1ED were discussing how much they should bring in for their Christmas party. M said that some people had lots of brothers and sisters and were on Social Security, so couldn’t afford very much. This was taken on by the class, who agreed to ‘sub’ such people. Another time 1ED were discussing homework, and boys’ domestic responsibilities came up. M said he helped his mum look after the baby, and that J cleaned the hall and stairs every day before school.
The third Tuesday morning was not so good, though it was O.K.. My main problem was with M, whose work I wanted to see. The mistake I’d made with him predated the worst of the smell-joke, and I don’t blame him at all for refusing to accept me. I had a list of names and had written reminders by it, like ‘small, with earring’. By M’s name I’d put ‘moustache’. In one early lesson someone had grabbed this list and read parts of it out loud. I knew M was upset by that reference to the delicate and premature growth on his upper lip, but couldn’t find a way to make the situation better.
Now I have finished my last lesson with 3EK I am as bemused as ever. SA, who has been one of the ringleaders in avoiding me and being rude, sat down with me and worked, asking questions and thinking about what he was doing. I helped JR a bit and he asked me to get him the next test book. R always makes the boys get things for themselves, but, after I’d refused, I thought of J making that perilous journey across the classroom and how likely it was that his concentration would be broken by it, so I fetched the test book and put it down beside him. He didn’t say anything and neither did I, but he finished his last test as the pips went, and was able to hand in his book.
R dislikes 3EK intensely, and knows that he shouldn’t be teaching them. I can’t back him up against them, so feel awkward and embarrassed when he’s angry or desperate with them. He might have been able to find a solution if he hadn’t had me there, because presumably I inhibited him too, though not to the extent that he inhibited me. At odd times when I’ve been getting on all right with some of the boys, I’ve looked up to see R glowering in the corner. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but his unhappiness about them makes it very hard for me to enjoy myself there, for fear he’ll feel I’m showing him up. He probably feels he’s not giving me a good example of confident, relaxed teaching, but I’m very grateful that he could share with me a class that he experiences as a failure. I think if I’d been younger, or a man, it might’ve been easier for me to tackle the problems without trying to consider R’s feelings, and maybe there’d have been some helpful sort of ‘success’. As it was, even if I could’ve won 3EK over, it wouldn’t have felt right for me to ‘succeed’ where he didn’t.
The Institute too was male-dominated, in marked contrast to my experience over the previous 5 years. My classmates at L.S.E. were mostly women, and the position of women in each society we looked at was considered in some depth. My students at Hackney College were almost exclusively female, as were my colleagues. In addition I spent a lot of time with other women in discussion groups, health classes and musical gatherings. My emergence into the big wide bi-sexual world was a bit sudden!
Dr. Vaughan, in his lectures on the creative process, insists on a ‘sexual element’ in creativity. In his last session he considered the example of the 12th-century renaissance, Chartres cathedral being the classic embodiment of the creative spirit that was abroad in society at that time. He was outlining the characteristics of a creative society in analogy with those of personal creativity. There was a list:
- Stage of awakening (exemplified in c12th by cultural exchanges and openings between Christendom and the Muslim world).
- Characteristic of openness.
- ″ rebellion.
- Important sexual component.
- Element of mysticism.
- ″ chance.
My history is very weak, so I accepted much of what was said without question. When we reached 4 though, and Dr. Vaughan started talking about Eleanor of Aquitaine (who ‘could not be dominated’), and the ideas of courtly love which flourished around her court, I began to feel uneasy. He was identifying men’s image of women with women themselves, equating ‘women’ with ‘sex’. It was impossible to put my finger on what was wrong in what he was saying, though later I worked it out to a certain extent. Dr. Vaughan said that women were like society’s Jungian ‘shadow’, and had to be accepted before society could be creative. He seemed to have missed the actual existence of women as part of society whatever their status. He admitted assuming that I held what he considered to be the prevailing feminist views – that men and women are psychologically the same, any differences other than gross physical ones arising from social conditioning. I felt that my sense of insult was justified in the light of this admission, especially as I was sure he didn’t make that assumption about the male students’ views. Most of my experience at the Institute, I hasten to add, has been free of this entrenched assumption of universal maleness.
Beyond this personal quibble, I accept the thesis of sexuality being a factor in creative relationships. Indeed I cannot imagine how it could be otherwise. I don’t yet know how to deal with it though, in a teaching situation. [2011, this bit re-written for public consumption: It’s perhaps unfortunate that when a man came to teach at my school, previously an exclusively female preserve (except for the Chemistry master, who was very old, and the caretaker who, though frighteningly reminiscent of Mellors9, was remote enough not to count), various taboos fell by the wayside. There’s no doubt his input was educationally creative, but one’s faith in the power of taboo is disrupted when it is overturned.] Maybe that was part of his aim, as a teacher. He was the only member of staff who insisted on our using his first name.
“December 5….I went to the staff-room after I’d been to see Mrs. Bliss, to speak to Miss Weston. I knocked & heard Paddy yell,”Come in”. I didn’t though, & he came to the door & said he’d forgotten he wasn’t allowed to say that, tho’ he didn’t see why I shouldn’t!” (1968 diary)
I had a disconcerting experience in the computer-room at Hackney Downs with a boy of about 15 who was sitting beside me while we played ‘Taxi’ (a SMILE programme of no great significance, unless the boy had been reading MacNeice10), and kept stroking my leg. It took me a while to realize he was doing it deliberately, not just fidgeting, and then I thought, “What’s it matter if that’s what he needs to be able to think about the game?”. Anyway, I found it quite flattering and amusing. I still don’t know what I should have done, or indeed if there are criteria other than my own behaviour by which I can regulate my life; I rather doubt it somehow.
Oddly enough, I have only just begun to feel personally the impact of the degraded position of women in our society. Of course, intellectually, I’d long been aware of my second-class citizenship, but recently I’ve come to experience it as an insult and be angry about it.
Our society has ways of dealing with an angry woman. One way is through ‘niceness’ and flattery – the sop of being accepted into academic institutions, being told she is clever – not like most of her feather-brained sex. I’ve been a dupe to this one for many years. Another is the crude threat of physical violence, which arose in the psychotherapeutic group when they realized I’d been to Greenham. I hadn’t met that raw ‘I’m stronger than you are and I want to be bad and you can’t stop me’ attitude since I left home. The tyranny of it struck harder at my sense of injustice than it had in what I can see with hindsight as its manifestation in my father and brother. It frightened me. The revelation from this group that some men saw me as a feminist and a threat, when I was just being myself and meaning no harm, set a hoard of issues buzzing in my mind.
Another trick of ‘society’ is to alienate people’s own feelings. It is tempting to disallow my experience as arising from something that is wrong with me. It’s hard to track down who or what it is that is oppressing me. It might be easier to give up. Ultimately though, I can trust nothing but my own sense of truth. I was glad to read Polanyi, who backed up this awareness:
“The assumption that the truth we seek to discover exists by itself, hidden to us only by our misguided approach to it, represents correctly the feeling of an investigator pursuing a discovery which keeps eluding him….According to the logic of commitment, truth is something that can be thought of only by believing it.”(‘Personal Knowledge’ p.305)
and “…though every person may believe something different to be true, there is only one truth.”(ibid p.315)
The logical extension of this is that it is pointless to treat anything as other than what it appears to be. The only useful exercise is to cultivate our perception, so that things appear more fully to us. Now that my time there is over, I can trace a lot of my feelings of degradation and insult to Hackney Downs. 3EK’s joke was a sexist insult, which I hadn’t the experience to handle. When I was a teenager, my friends were so immersed in Donne, Shakespeare, Chaucer even, that the positive Elizabethan images of women prevailed. Later I was a pre-Raphaelite beauty and a hippy queen. Then I was a mother, sharing the pedestal with Mary and co.. Well – is it all just gross egotism? Am I addicted to being a star? – to being adored?
Being aware of the sociology of Hackney, conscious of the ramifications of class/race/sexual politics, our job becomes to see clearly that the child is doing his best to make sense of his universe. I am part of his experiment, and can offer him truth only by being true to myself. It’s no good ‘seeing through him’ to the deprived child needing attention. I have to be there as an attention-giver, seeing and reacting to him directly.
In the end I can only solve this by dredging up love and compassion for those children (men too!) who want to give love and can only offer insult. It is an article of faith with me (and so almost constantly in doubt) that people are for loving, that that is what everyone wants and needs. In a society where women’s love is regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold, though, it’s very hard for me to keep my self-esteem when I offer something real from myself, and it is not valued.
Teachers of both sexes probably experience this; ‘pearls before swine’. I’m sure the hardest part of teaching will be to go on giving. I was glad to see it in our Education course book11:
“Some say: you can forget all these hints if you can learn to love all your pupils, including the most troublesome.”
I find myself loving the most troublesome most. In a way it’s unavoidable if one adopts this philosophy, because the most troublesome has to be the one who demands most attention, and this can only be given as love. How to stop this response being encouraging to ‘trouble’?
The shortness of T.P. and my lack of autonomy meant that my relationships with the children were full of anxiety. Occasionally I had to remember to take something in for a particular boy – playing-cards for JR, ‘How the Camel got its Hump’12 and a backgammon set for MC (2CW), log. Tables for DA – or respond to a request for help with some particular problem, like teaching JC (4BF) how to do long division when there wasn’t a calculator available. These were the situations in which learning was made possible; when the child had the feeling of being remembered or thought about or helped AT THE RIGHT TIME. With the cards and the camel the boys asked me if I’d remembered. D had asked about the logs. as a natural progression from indices, but when I took them in for him I was on my own in the classroom and couldn’t explain them properly, so that flopped, and was frustrating. The urge to teach a willing pupil is very strong, but the moment must be caught. Constraints on learning come from all directions. The moment is often snatched away. When I wanted to learn Greek, it wasn’t possible. I’ve never again felt like learning Greek, and I don’t suppose D will want another bash at logs. either.
‘The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold….’ (MacNeice)13
I don’t need Greek and he doesn’t need logs.. The realisation is as valuable as the knowledge would have been.
More questions arose when another boy said, “My dad thinks we shouldn’t have people like you as teachers.”. A mental image of the classic opponent of artsy-fartsy-middle-class-bra-burning-trendy-do-gooder-snob-trades-unionist-unmarried-mother-dope-fiend-woman-driver-slut-ban-the-bomb-er-student-hippy-yippy-weirdo-freak sprang into my mind. What defence do I have against Alf Garnett?14 What can he do if he doesn’t want me teaching his child? I am being given power in that situation, but the possibilities are very limited. I’m still just a pawn in their game. The forces of political power, prestige, education – the selection and validation of an élite, versus tradition, instinctive life, popular myth – self-validation of the majority; I may feel as if I am in the middle of a class-struggle (not just a classroom), but I cannot opt out of my own shell. Both sides must see me as ‘other’. The children know I didn’t grow up in Hackney, having to cope with street violence and racist attitudes. The staff (ILEA, the school, the Institute) pay lip-service to notions of socialism, feminism, anti-racism in order to allow themselves to hang on to those positions they have attained by virtue of being mainly white, mainly middle-class and mainly male.
The position of teachers is potentially very creative, but creativity can be dangerous. I can’t tell whether society at large understands what teachers hope for and disapproves, or doesn’t understand and so can’t be supportive. At the same time, teachers could be seen as respected, ideal products of society. We couldn’t continue without society’s sanction, yet we are actually a peripheral force that should bring about change, so must, in general, expect vilification, scapegoating and low pay.
I have been experiencing this year at a pretty deep level. The academic, political, analytical aspects have been there too, and will surface in due course, but I have been listening to it all chiefly with an inner ear. For this reason I propose to finish with four dredgings from my subconscious. The first is a story, written for Dr. Vaughan, using unconscious elaboration of an idea suggested by a picture of Turner’s. It evokes for me quite clearly the trepidation I felt about entering this course of training, and also depicts the dream of innocence that I am fearful of disturbing:
“It’s hard to describe the meeting of boy and sea-monster. It’s strange that there should be a picture of it, because it wasn’t really relevant to either of them. For the sea-monster, the boy was as insignificant as a poppy that sways in a field when an express-train passes. For the boy, the creature – I shall call him Eldo – was so strange as to be almost completely meaningless. Two poems occur to me – ‘The Fall of Icarus’, though not actually the poem, more the painting itself and the line from another poem about the ‘children who didn’t specially want it to happen’ and (I know that was two, but they’re welded in my mind)15 Robert Graves’ ‘Welsh Incident’. If you don’t know the poems this shortcut to telling you about Eldo’s task won’t work, though.
Eldo lived a long way off, at the bottom of the sea, but he was pledged to answer certain urgent calls from the wizards of Mount Helg. They were very wise wizards, and did not summon him unnecessarily. Yet, although he knew this, and did not mind, he had to surrender part of his will in obeying them. When their call came, his obedience was automatic, as if he had been hypnotized. He had agreed to go through the training that had taken away some part of his will, because he saw that if he was called, he had to answer instantly. It would be no good to finish the paragraph or the pile of muffins. When the wizards called him, he had to go. Of course, he had trusted them absolutely not to summon him unless it was really necessary, and his trust had never been betrayed. He did wonder sometimes, though, what would happen if the wizards turned bad. He did not know whether he would have the power to reclaim his pledge and use his strength against them, for the good. Whenever he thought about it, he felt that he’d just have to hope for the best, because he couldn’t ever know the answer. When he became really worried was when he doubted his own ability to judge whether the wizards’ decisions were good or bad. Sometimes he was afraid he was so completely in thrall to them that they could tell him what to believe (like Winston Smith at last saying ‘three’)16. Maybe they had already gone bad, and he had lost his ability to see that the tasks they set him were not right.
All of this often went through his mind, but usually he shrugged it off and busied himself with some comfortable past-time. There was plenty to do under the sea. Eldo was a well-respected citizen – if one can be a subaqueous ‘citizen’. He kept a good larder and a good hearth. Friends were always made welcome, and were often grateful for his gentle way of listening to problems and advising on them. His companions understood about his service to the wizards – the fact that he had been chosen was a mark of distinction. They were proud that one of their number had been so honoured. Eldo felt he should be glad of their esteem, and not mind that the tasks for which he had been singled out took him away from them, and gave him weighty thoughts which he could discuss with no-one. However, though he was loved and valued by his own folk, had resolved many of the things that had troubled him in his youth, and in general had a quiet mind, he did tend to feel rather sad in his heart of hearts, and to yearn for a long-gone innocence. When a call came, all his anxieties circled around in his mind until the incident was over. Luckily he was not summoned very often, but the picture shows him in the middle of one of his journeys to Mount Helg, when he was full of anticipation.
I haven’t left much time to tell you about the boy, but he was a perfectly ordinary boy. He would be quite surprised to be in a story because he didn’t really think about anything very much at all. He lived near the beach, and did a lot of swimming. He had some friends, but he was often alone. When Eldo zapped past him without blinking and carried on up the slopes of Mount Helg, the boy was just so amazed he could hardly believe his eyes. It was evening, and a wonderful coppery sunset bathed everything in golden light. The boy didn’t think it was corny, because he loved it, and swam in it.
He hadn’t quite finished his swim when Eldo churned up the water, so he shrugged and swam on for a while. He swam a bit faster and stronger than before, and went and sat on the wreck and thought about the sea-monster. Eldo hadn’t been summoned in the boy’s lifetime before, so the boy hadn’t heard anything about him. He decided to ask his mother about what he’d seen. Maybe he’d phrase it more like a question, in case she didn’t believe him. He wasn’t sure that he’d believe it himself if he hadn’t seen it. It took him some time to work all that out, but when he’d done so, he took himself off home really fast, and was glad to see his house – his family – the fire in the grate. He gave a big sigh of satisfaction and sat down to his supper.” (4.11.83)
The other three ‘dredgings’ are dreams:
Dream 1. I’m in a school corridor and have just come from a lesson where GW was saying something to a class with which I didn’t agree, and calling on me to back him up, which I did with a shamefaced nod. In the corridor I am very angry. I am hitting the walls with a long stick – a bit bigger than a metre rule – and spinning like a whirling dervish. I’m shouting “Why should I?” over and over: shouting after R and G as they glance back at me “You don’t need my support”. They are faintly amused at this display of temper. They also look very healthy. Waking up, I drum the sentence ‘We continue to preach the doctrine of male supremacy and adult unanimity.’ into my mind to remind me of the dream, and go back to sleep. In the morning I wake up screaming about something else, and in the newspaper is our second recent political trial – held ‘in camera’, because there must be secrets in order to protect power. The power that we have, as adults generally and as teachers in particular, is something we are most unwilling to share with the next generation. How can they ever learn what we aspire to teach them – to share, to appreciate, to give and receive pleasure in the multitudinous diversity of this amazing world – if we feed them continually the lie that all adults agree with each other – that we know all the answers and are right? (17.4.84)
Dream 2. The school is at sixes and sevens because new carpets are being laid in all the classrooms.
I wake to the grim reality of Hackney Downs – ugly, ugly rooms – everything cracked, scribbled on, splintered – broken chairs all over the place. These boys are our children. Why do they not get the best? The Town Hall has carpets, why not the schools? Curtains? Pictures? Flowers? The contrast with junior schools is immense. In every junior classroom there is a ‘home corner’. It is to be supposed we stop needing a home at the age of 11. All the trailing round they have to do in secondary schools too! It’s so depressing, I’m not at all sure I can bear it. I want the children I teach to have the educational advantages I had, without the pressure. I don’t know how this can be attained, but if I stop wanting the best for them, then I hope I’ll stop teaching. (sometime during T.P.)
Dream 3. A shambolic classroom – no work going on – no cohesion – not even organized, directed mayhem – just aimless chaos. I start singing – like a lullaby – and gradually order is established. The children’s own sense of responsibility to themselves is restored and they become willing and able to learn – alive and potentially critical though, not hammered into submission – active, alert, excited about their own developing potential. (early-ish in T.P.)
I remembered this last dream and one day tried it on 3EK, just gently humming under my breath. It seemed to me to work – like oil on troubled water – though they could only have heard me subliminally.
Lastly, a post-script; from an elderly neighbor, on being shown a tiny tree growing from a peach-stone I’d idly chucked into my front garden:
“Ooh, isn’t that lovely! It goes to show – you can study all you like, but it doesn’t do you any good!”
Bibliography
1. references
page
3 1. My diaries, which run from 1965-1971.
4 2. Michael Polanyi “Personal Knowledge”.
10 3. Auschwitz exhibition 24th Feb-30th.Mar.: E. London Auschwitz Committee.
11 4. William Blake “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” pl.14.
12 5. Wm. Shakespeare “Julius Caesar” II i 21…
13 6. Schultz “Peanuts” featuring Charlie Brown.
13 7. Jimi Hendrix “If the sun refuse to shine…”
14 8. S.T. Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.
18 9. D.H. Lawrence “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.
19 10. Louis MacNeice “Bagpipe Music”.
20 11. Education Course Book, p10.8 para.11.
21 12. Rudyard Kipling “Just So Stories”.
21 13. Louis MacNeice “The Sunlight on the Garden”.
21 14. tv character – originator of “Silly old moo!”.
22 15. W.H. Auden “Musée des Beaux Arts”.
23 16. Character from “1984” by George Orwell.
2. some other influences
Gregory Bateson: Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
Mind and Nature – a necessary unity.
C.G. Jung: Man and his Symbols.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Margaret Donaldson: Children’s minds.
ed. Vernon: Creativity
John Holt: Freedom and Beyond
How Children Fail
I Ching
Da Liu: T’ai Chi Chuan and I Ching
Nicholas Otty: Learner Teacher
Barnes, Britton, Rosen and the LATE: Language, the Learner & the School
Morrison/McIntyre: The Social Psychology of Teaching
Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game
Peter Laurie: Meet your friendly social system.
J.S.Bach: 3-part fugue in D minor, No 6 from bk 2 of “The well-tempered clavichord”.
Post-script
14th May 2009 another bit of paper that just turned up, undated, but from the Creativity class at the Institute. My name is at the top, then:
The man is ploughing the field watched by the woman whose field it is. The woman watching her has no children and feels isolated. She leaves without receiving acknowledgement, by word or glance, from either of them. When they were children, the woman with the book was close to the man ploughing, but he has “sold out” to the woman with the field, and, because the woman with the book has moved out of his realm, doesn’t communicate with her.
The bk. woman will leave.
