Questions
Ten days ago I resigned from my teaching job. I've been a teacher for most of my working life, apart from a long stint through the seventies and eighties at home bringing up four daughters.
I trained in the early seventies as a primary teacher, taught for a while in primary then at the end of the eighties I did a degree in history and started teaching at secondary. I have been actively involved in education for most of my life and I could say I've actually been at school for a lot of this time.
What is amazing to me is that I hated school, I have very little time for the conventions or the traditions of schooling. In fact at the age of five I apparently ran away from school, and in fact I do have a distant, faint, memory of this. I ran all the way home which was a long way for a five year old. All the way down Pine Ave in Upper Hutt to our house on the corner of Pine Ave and Victoria Street. I would love to be able to see this little girl running down the road, to ask her what happened that made her leave school. To talk to her and make her feel ok about what she was doing and to reassure her and help her. I wonder if she was crying or if the enormity of what she was doing wasn't really apparent to her. I think she was brave but I bet people at the time didn't let her know this. I suspect her mother would have been on her side and her father, if he'd been round that day, but I think they may have been swayed by the pressure of the nuns at the convent school to do the right thing and take her back to school.
I think back now and I can just see this girl, her hair was curly and she was sturdy and strong and self willed. She tried to go along with what happened at school but often seemed, even to herself, to be out of step, unsure of what she was supposed to do. No one offered explanations for why things happened and no one ever asked questions or encouraged children especially to question anything back then. The world was a mysterious place where children did what they were told; sometimes it was obvious why things were happening but much of what went on in the world of most kids during the fifties and sixties was completely unfathomable to kids like me.
The adult world back then was a dark and fearful place full of rules that kids were always breaking. Sayings, such as children should be seen and not heard were a real part of our childhood. Children didn't have voices or opinions. We were simply not allowed to question any adult and this doesn't mean that we weren't allowed to disagree with them it meant we were not supposed to ask questions. One of my overriding memories as a child was the fact that I was terrified of being spoken to in class because if I was asked a question I rarely knew the answer. The conumdrum for kids was that knowledge and information was guarded and held by the teachers and asking them to share or help us was out of the question. Finding stuff out always seemed to me to be a mystery, I just had to hope that I would get what was going on. I never really connected with the way we were taught, even as I got older. The basics were not a problem, I was always a reader and writer but much of the rest may as well have been in a foreign language, it didn't ever make sense to me. By the time I reached secondary school I still lived with the expectation that I wouldn't know most of what was going on and that I would fail. It's interesting that the memory I have of this older kid is much the same. She was still trying not to rock the boat but making waves anyway. It seems obvious now, most kids who didn't understand how to find things out must have caused waves. The system wasn't designed to be collaborative, to encourage talking or sharing of information. If you couldn't figure things out on your own you failed.
Questioning is something that needs practice, asking about something comes as part of being engaged in the topic and that engagement occurs when we're allowed to or encouraged to figure out what we don't know and what we want to find out. As we think about what we're learning we have questions and along with this comes the understanding that most things are questionable, that being able to question the world helps us learn, that it is our own curiosity that motivates us and that we need people around us who take part in the discourses that make up our lives, who ask questions and wonder about things. It is this curiosity that helps us to dig deeper and find out more.
Being able to ask questions, considering all propositions as part of a critical discourse that is ongoing and available to us as part of the way we learn and grow seems to me now to be a right.
Getting older and having been part of a profession where I have been able to teach and nurture and help young people to be excited and full of purpose about the world has been a great way to spend my time. Teaching, when it's good, and it is a lot of the time, enables you to spend time every day laughing, sharing stories and learning with people you enjoy being around.
Thinking about the memory of that girl now, I can reimagine her as if she is part of today's world, as if her questions and desire to be heard will help her be successful. I like the way she's figured out that questioning the world around her is very important. I think she might be ok round here. The world around here seems to have lots of people who do care, who do want to hear her and who will listen to her questions and help her answer them. I think the waves she and all the others like her created have become part of a huge sea and they've become the navigators, curious about what lies ahead.
I trained in the early seventies as a primary teacher, taught for a while in primary then at the end of the eighties I did a degree in history and started teaching at secondary. I have been actively involved in education for most of my life and I could say I've actually been at school for a lot of this time.
What is amazing to me is that I hated school, I have very little time for the conventions or the traditions of schooling. In fact at the age of five I apparently ran away from school, and in fact I do have a distant, faint, memory of this. I ran all the way home which was a long way for a five year old. All the way down Pine Ave in Upper Hutt to our house on the corner of Pine Ave and Victoria Street. I would love to be able to see this little girl running down the road, to ask her what happened that made her leave school. To talk to her and make her feel ok about what she was doing and to reassure her and help her. I wonder if she was crying or if the enormity of what she was doing wasn't really apparent to her. I think she was brave but I bet people at the time didn't let her know this. I suspect her mother would have been on her side and her father, if he'd been round that day, but I think they may have been swayed by the pressure of the nuns at the convent school to do the right thing and take her back to school.
I think back now and I can just see this girl, her hair was curly and she was sturdy and strong and self willed. She tried to go along with what happened at school but often seemed, even to herself, to be out of step, unsure of what she was supposed to do. No one offered explanations for why things happened and no one ever asked questions or encouraged children especially to question anything back then. The world was a mysterious place where children did what they were told; sometimes it was obvious why things were happening but much of what went on in the world of most kids during the fifties and sixties was completely unfathomable to kids like me.
The adult world back then was a dark and fearful place full of rules that kids were always breaking. Sayings, such as children should be seen and not heard were a real part of our childhood. Children didn't have voices or opinions. We were simply not allowed to question any adult and this doesn't mean that we weren't allowed to disagree with them it meant we were not supposed to ask questions. One of my overriding memories as a child was the fact that I was terrified of being spoken to in class because if I was asked a question I rarely knew the answer. The conumdrum for kids was that knowledge and information was guarded and held by the teachers and asking them to share or help us was out of the question. Finding stuff out always seemed to me to be a mystery, I just had to hope that I would get what was going on. I never really connected with the way we were taught, even as I got older. The basics were not a problem, I was always a reader and writer but much of the rest may as well have been in a foreign language, it didn't ever make sense to me. By the time I reached secondary school I still lived with the expectation that I wouldn't know most of what was going on and that I would fail. It's interesting that the memory I have of this older kid is much the same. She was still trying not to rock the boat but making waves anyway. It seems obvious now, most kids who didn't understand how to find things out must have caused waves. The system wasn't designed to be collaborative, to encourage talking or sharing of information. If you couldn't figure things out on your own you failed.
Questioning is something that needs practice, asking about something comes as part of being engaged in the topic and that engagement occurs when we're allowed to or encouraged to figure out what we don't know and what we want to find out. As we think about what we're learning we have questions and along with this comes the understanding that most things are questionable, that being able to question the world helps us learn, that it is our own curiosity that motivates us and that we need people around us who take part in the discourses that make up our lives, who ask questions and wonder about things. It is this curiosity that helps us to dig deeper and find out more.
Being able to ask questions, considering all propositions as part of a critical discourse that is ongoing and available to us as part of the way we learn and grow seems to me now to be a right.
Getting older and having been part of a profession where I have been able to teach and nurture and help young people to be excited and full of purpose about the world has been a great way to spend my time. Teaching, when it's good, and it is a lot of the time, enables you to spend time every day laughing, sharing stories and learning with people you enjoy being around.
Thinking about the memory of that girl now, I can reimagine her as if she is part of today's world, as if her questions and desire to be heard will help her be successful. I like the way she's figured out that questioning the world around her is very important. I think she might be ok round here. The world around here seems to have lots of people who do care, who do want to hear her and who will listen to her questions and help her answer them. I think the waves she and all the others like her created have become part of a huge sea and they've become the navigators, curious about what lies ahead.
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