New Zealand Post Primary Teachers' Association / Te Wehengarua (PPTA) President Robin Duff reflects on the recent funeral of a wonderful teacher and contemplates the developing audit mentality within education. An audit cannot tell the whole story of a teacher's impact on student lives.
The power of teaching is more than 'data'
A sad event: a funeral for a man who had devoted his life to education – as a teacher, an education unionist and later as a researcher. Towards the end of the service, a man stepped forward and asked to speak. He described his experience in returning to school as a second year fifth former after failing all his school certificate subjects. He was not expecting to be there long.
Teachers change lives
In his first English class, the teacher asked the students to write an essay. The following day, without naming names but looking directly at him, the teacher read out his essay and said it was the best essay he had ever read. He described that experience as being life changing for him because he went from being a near-certain school drop-out to passing all his subjects. It was his teacher he credited with his subsequent career success.
Sometimes it takes courage to say thank you
Some years later he saw his old teacher in an airport lounge. He considered approaching him and expressing thanks for those actions that opened the door to self belief. As often happens, he talked himself out of it. Another time there was a second occasion when he found himself in an airport lounge with his old mentor close by and was again unable to summon up the courage to introduce himself.
So now, he explained, he was at the funeral to say what he had lacked the courage to say on the two previous occasions. Then, addressing the coffin, he expressed his thanks for the start that teacher had given him and his deep regret that he had not been able to find the way to say those things before death intervened.
Teachers are often unaware of the impact they have on individual students
We all took different messages from the story. For me, it was the reminder of how influential we teachers are in adolescents’ lives and yet how often we remain unaware of the impact our actions have on individual students.
Data measurement of 'outputs' will never truly show that impact
Our failures we know well and there are always plenty of people more than happy to point them out to us should we have missed any. Success, though, is more elusive. Despite the educational philistines who would have us believe that it is a simple matter of quantifying the inputs, accounting for the outputs, subtracting one from the other, then calling the product education; the reality is far more complex, dynamic and multifaceted.
The deeply satisfying moments are the reward that keep teachers teaching
Secondary teachers interact with hundreds of students in the course of their careers and only rarely do they receive the feedback and appreciation they deserve. That is why it can come as a surprise for beginning teachers, schooled as they are on the Hollywood image of teachers regularly performing educational miracles, to discover that so much of the job is routine drudgery. The moments of reward, appreciation and intense satisfaction are few and far between. Audits are more common than plaudits. But it’s those moments of gratitude that keep us going.
Education is about touching and changing lives, it is not 'data'
All of us who heard the story could not help but admire the young man for his determination to give voice to the appreciation he so strongly felt. It was a reminder that understanding the power of teaching demands more that the reductionist performance data that now stands as a proxy for education.
Beyond schools, his story spoke to the importance of honestly acknowledging those who have helped us on our way because, as Shakespeare observed in Julius Caesar, “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
Download the December 2011 issue of the PPTA News
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/hide comment form
