Most of us will take an undignified tumble sooner or later in our school career. Probably sooner.
Think of the odds: all that classroom furniture to dodge around, all the balancing acts needed when transporting bags and books from one place to another, all those November corridors now a slithery sheen of trampled-in mud, dripping children and the scattered insides of half-eaten wraps.
I once slid, at some pace, several metres down a corridor on my stomach, after losing it on some Branston pickle. A classroom door acted as brake. No harm done. The phone posse scarcely batted an eyelid.
You never forget the first time
But it’s only when you have fallen into a ditch that you know that you have really arrived as a teacher. I’ve managed it twice so far.
You never forget the first time. It was a break duty, and I had started to climb down a bank to retrieve a young pupil’s stray football. Turned out that there wasn’t really a bank there at all, just a sheer drop. A host of nettles and brambles had fooled me into thinking that there was a surface underneath on which to make a descent. Schoolboy error. Down I flew into the stream below.
The second time was sheer bad luck. I had been persuaded to make up the staff quota on a school outdoor 20-mile walk in Wales. I took a wrong turn before we had even left the grounds of our youth hostel, and tumbled a few score metres into a small ravine.
I have no regrets at all, though. Quite the reverse. Children learn so much from seeing their teachers disappear over the edge. Just as failure must come before success, so must ditches come before mountains. It’s a powerful visual message for all who see us plummet.
And there was always time down there in the ditch for the up-ended teacher to enjoy a few deep, damp moments of quiet reflection on life’s ups and downs, ready then to re-emerge to greet the mocking masses eagerly gathered at the top.
Dead in a ditch
Ditches, however, have become much more dangerous of late. I certainly wouldn’t want to hang around in one now. Not because I’m worried that Boris “dead in a ditch” Johnson might yet choose to come thudding down on top of me if it all goes wrong for him next month. I’m far more likely to be crushed by the extraordinary craze in education for consigning things to said “ditch”.
No fewer than 18 educational items have been recommended for “ditching” in Tes online headlines in 18 months. Namely: attendance rewards (the latest, at the time of writing), differentiation, marking, homework, the three-part lesson, Ofsted, Ofsted grading, revision acronyms, education jargon, PowerPoints, stationery, holiday homework, SMART targets, golden time, whiteboards, boy-friendly approaches, “hero-headteachers” and uniform. The list doesn’t even include all the other items that educational voices have claimed should be “scrapped” or “axed”.
Perhaps it’s just me, but I worry about this (apparent) desire to hurl so much of what we do into that blessed ditch. How much of it springs from genuine research, and how much is pandering to popular sentiment? How much of it helps to highlight genuine teacher grievances, and how much merely serves to obscure those grievances?
At the current rate of fly-tipping, surely everything in teaching is eventually going to end up dead in the ditch? Including, perhaps, us.
Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire
