Musings – Page 4 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

A time and a place

The appropriate use of humour has been on my mind this week, as I find myself back in the chilly UK. My week in the sunshine was definitely worth the journey, which was remarkably tolerable, certainly by comparison with other experiences I have had in the past. Nothing alarming happened on the flight, although my husband remarked that he would be keeping himself well strapped into his emergency exit seat, given recent events.

Our week in a hotel on the outskirts of Marrakesh was a new experience for me, as I have never before travelled to a country where the dominant religion is Islam. Hearing the early call to prayer was an amazing experience, as were the sights and sounds of the historic city and the souks. Most incredible of all, however, was the hot air balloon ride my husband talked me into.

I noticed the option on our hotel’s list of activities and remarked that I could certainly see the appeal but was not sure whether or not I felt able to go ahead with what seemed like such a risky activity. Standing in a basket, thousands of feet up into the air, dangling from a sack full of hot air has always seemed to me to be a somewhat insane proposition, but my husband gawped at me in disbelief. “But you’ve been up in a light aircraft with me!” he spluttered. (My husband gained his pilot’s licence many years before we met). Long story short, he enlightened me as to the fact that – statistically – light aircraft are infinitely more dangerous than hot air balloons (a fact he didn’t pass on to me before I gave the light aircraft a go). My husband reads air accident reports as a hobby (everybody needs one), and explained that balloon accidents tend to be what amounts to no more than a bumpy landing, leaving someone with a broken wrist or collar bone – they don’t tend to result in fatalities. So, armed with my husband’s superior knowledge of all things air crash-related, I agreed. We booked ourself onto the flight.

The flight was at dawn, which meant we saw the sun rise over the Atlas mountains, a simply incredible sight. The flight itself was absolutely wonderful, with no sense of motion apparent – as you move with the wind, you can’t feel the wind as you move, making the process remarkably tranquil. The silence is also striking, when you’re used to the engine noise of any other means of flight. Not only did I enjoy the experience, I would do it again in a heartbeat. As it turned out, I was not in the least bit afraid once we got there, and the French pilot dispelled any last-minute nerves with a tension-breaking bit of humour. Once we were a few feet off the ground, he turned to us and said, “First time in a balloon?” We nodded vigorously. “Me too!” he said, as he gave the burners a blast.

This kind of humour is right up my street and is without question the best way to win me over in pretty much any situation. The last time I thought about this in any depth was when I first went to a local osteopath. I have always been nervous of osteopathy, as I have scoliosis of the spine and my vertebrae don’t really behave like everybody else’s. As a result, I have awful visions of someone trying to crack my spine in a way it just won’t work and somehow breaking it, leaving me paralysed or worse. I always arrive in any clinic with a list of don’ts and caveats as long as my arm, and most osteopaths nod sagely and do exactly as they’re told.

Ian, however, is different.

“Look,” I said to him, in our first appointment. “You need to understand that my spine is quite rigid in places and won’t bend in the way you might expect. I’m most anxious not to get injured so it’s really important that you don’t do anything beyond what I’m confortable with.”

“No problem,” said Ian. “But what you need to understand is that if I break your neck …”

I started to babble. “Oh gosh, no, I totally realise that your career is in the balance and that as a professional you will take the ultimate care. I wasn’t suggesting that you would be anything other than hyper-cautious, I do realise that, it’s just I’m …”

“No no” he interrupted. “If I break your neck, then I’m left with a body to dispose of. And it’s not as easy as you might think. Especially if I’ve got a lot of appointments.”

I stared at him for a moment, then reacted in the only way appropriate. I laughed my head off. What an absolute legend. While this kind of humour might not be for everyone, it absolutely works for me in moments of tension. When I was 16, my orthodontist reflected on our 12-year journey of hideous braces and major surgery. My teeth were not perfectly straight, but they were roughly in line and infinitely better than when we started. What he wanted to do was to reflect on our excellent progress and a job well done. What he actually said was, “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”. Just as well for him that I found it hilarious.

Humour is my go-to response in most tense situations and has helped me to deal with innumerable challenges in my life. I am not alone in this. I know one couple who have visited North Korea as tourists (it is possible, believe it or not) and recall one of them saying that the main problem she had was not laughing in moments when ultimate seriousness was demanded – when, for example, witnessing the 24-hour wailing that goes on in the room where the bodies of deceased illustrious leaders lie in state. The performative grief was so ludicrous that she was completely gripped by the urge to laugh, especially since they had just done the tour of the government building which included a map of the world without the USA on it, plus an Apple Macbook Pro sat on the desk underneath it. I totally understand this urge towards inappropriate laughter. I am the sort of person that has to be careful not to laugh at funerals – that feeling of tense, wild hysteria often overtakes me at the most inppropriate of moments.

There’s a time and a place for everything, but some of us find release in the use of humour at what might seem like the most inappropriate of times. People in particularly stressful jobs probably best understand this kind of gallows humour and to some extent I think it’s cultural too. Wherever I am in the world, nothing makes me feel more at home than someone poking fun at what would otherwise be a tense or serious situation.

Photograph taken by my husband during our balloon flight

Are we there yet?

caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.

Those who race across the sea change their horizon, not their mind.
Horace

On the day this post is published I shall be in Morocco, hopefully in the sunshine. As I write, here in the UK, the sky is dark and rain is hammering at the windows, the miserable weather a perfect encapsulation of the reasons why my husband and I are choosing to travel abroad at this time of year. Yet, as the day of our departure approaches, I find a small portion of myself feeling like I don’t want to go.

This always happens to me. I am not a great traveller, indeed my feelings around the process of travel would be classed by many as a phobia or – at the very least – a strong, visceral aversion. Were I not married to someone who wishes to travel abroad then I suspect that I would have found an excuse never to do so by now. The enormous pressure of running school trips abroad is something I have written about before, and made up a small but significant part of what contributed to my decision to draw my teaching career to a close. Covid hasn’t helped me either, as I must confess I rather enjoyed having all pressure to travel removed from my shoulders and it’s been quite a personal challenge to get myself back into the swing of things now that restrictions have been lifted. I won’t bore you with the details as it would mean far too much over-sharing, but suffice to say I find travelling very challenging and will find every excuse under the sun to do less of it. I don’t like leaving the house, my friends, my family the cats. You name it, I’ll use it as a reason not to go.

Believe me, I am deeply aware that these are First World Problems of the most unsympathetic kind and demand no commiserations whatsoever. I am not moaning. I have no reason to. Nobody forces me to travel and there is a significant part of me that wishes to do so. Doing things outside one’s comfort zone is not only good for the soul, it is one of the many compromises that marriage demands of us – when you have a partner, you cannot simply do exactly what you want to do every minute of every day; you have to consider beloved’s needs and desires also. A bit of travel is part of the deal.

I mentioned my reticence about travelling to a friend the other day and she remarked that she would probably not travel abroad on a regular basis were it not for her partner’s desire to visit exotic places. She works in the business world and a good deal of travelling to multiple continents has been expected of her as a part of her career; this took much of the glamour out of the notion of travel, and has left her feeling somewhat unenamoured with its attractions. In our conversation, she pondered how many of us there might be who also feel this way, people who holiday abroad more because they think they should rather than because they truly want to. I have actually met an extraordinary number of people in my life who will guiltily admit to feeling somewhat ambivalent about travel, probably more than I have met who love it (although I’ve met plenty of those people also). Many people understand the anxieties that travel can cause and will admit that deep down they sometimes wonder whether the whole business is really worth it. So why do we do it?

I have never been convinced of the idea that travel broadens the mind, hence the line from Horace quoted at the top of this piece has always been a favourite for me. In my lifetime I have met some extraordinarily ignorant people who were well-travelled. I shall never forget an older man saying to me “I’ve smelt Calcutta” as an argument-clincher, proving without question his unshakeable belief that the English have done nothing but good for India over the years. Quite extraordinary. Likewise, my husband’s parents did far more travelling in their lives than I ever plan to do, yet my mother-in-law parroted the line “there’s no poverty in China” when telling me about their holiday there. To her credit, she did manage to grasp my point that maybe, just maybe, she had seen what the government-selected guide had wanted her to see and nothing more.

So it seems that visiting other countries does not necessarily educate or broaden the mind – we respond to travel as ourselves, see the world through our own tinted glasses, whether they be rose-coloured or otherwise. I like to think of myself as a reasonably broad-minded and liberal person and I don’t believe that any of this stems from the fact that I have travelled abroad on multiple occasions. My maternal grandmother was a pretty open-minded woman for any generation, never mind for someone who was born at the very beginning of the 20th century, and to my recollection she’d managed one trip to Malta in her lifetime – not exactly a challenging experience, culturally.

But let us not forget how lucky we are, how amazing the modern world is. Should we choose to make it so, the world is our oyster and this can be nothing but good. We take it for granted that we can find ourselves in another continent, another climate and another time zone in less than the time it would take us to drive from London to Glasgow. Travel abroad has become more and more affordable over the last few decades and is an expectation shared by far more people than our grandparents’ generation could have conceived of. When I was a very young student I lodged with a couple who had met during the 1960s, working as cabin crew for BOAC. They used to talk about how the fact that they were visiting different countries all over the world became a barrier between them and their families, who were not wealthy and had never experienced such things. It seems extraordinary now, but for their generation the explosion in exotic travel for all was only just beginning.

Now get this. Thanks to Stanford University, it is possible to find out how long your journey would have taken you in Roman times. Their interactive map of the Roman empire, through which you can find out the best and fastest methods via which you could have reached your intended destination as an intrepid Roman, is enormous fun. My trip to Mauretania, as the Romans called it, would have taken around 30 days, which puts my reluctance to endure a three-hour flight somewhat in perspective! Travel in the ancient world was difficult, expensive and phenomenally dangerous. You certainly didn’t attempt it in the winter, so making the trip at this time of year would have been considered absolute madness. I have genuinely found it helpful to remind myself of this; it has pushed any last-minute nerves and internal whingeing to the side as my brain adjusts its understanding to the realisation of how incredibly, wondrously lucky we all are to have the opportunities that we do.

So, as you read this, think of me now, the anxieties of the challenging journey over, enjoying just one of the innumerable privileges afforded to me as a result of being born in the developed world in the late 20th century. Just writing this has helped me to put things in perspective and I honestly find myself more ready for this trip than I otherwise might have been. The pen (or the laptop) is mightier than the sword when it comes to winning hearts and minds, and it looks like that goes for one’s own heart and mind also. So let’s open the suitcases and dust off my travel pass. I’m ready for boarding.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

Terms of Endearment

There was an interesting discussion on Threads last week, which is not something I thought I’d write in a hurry. While the platform formerly known as Twitter is always a raging hotbed of edu-controversies, Threads has remained to date extremely civilised, largely because nobody is saying anything on there most of the time. Last week, however, an Assistant Principal whom I follow on both platforms made the following remark: “Talking to a friend about this the other day and didn’t realise there were such polarised views about this. Are pet names ok in school? As in, is it ok to saying ‘what’s happened, my lovely/darlin/poppet?’ to a pupil?”

The responses were diverse and sometimes extreme, with one teacher even suggesting that pet names “made their skin crawl” and claiming “it’s inappropriate and creepy. I’d be horrified if someone in a position of power used such a term to me so kids deserve the same respect.” Hmmmm, I thought. Are pet names really such a problem?

A more nuanced view followed: “I find it grates a bit for me when I hear it so I’m not keen but that doesn’t mean I think it’s a major issue. I do think it’s one of those things where the appropriateness probably depends on the member of staff/the pupil/ the context and those things aren’t always easy to judge.”

Always up for a debate, I waded in and pointed out (alongside others) that regional variations are without a doubt something to be considered before we form the view of “definitely unacceptable”. Pet names – and indeed, particular examples of pet names – are used far more in certain regions of the UK than in others. Personally, I cling to the idea that teachers, while they should always be professional, should also be themselves. If terms of endearment are part of a teacher’s vernacular then I would think it only natural for them to use them in certain contexts, wherever they live now. Students need to learn about such things after all; regional variations in vocabulary, accent and phraseology are a part of our diversity.

One of the many elephants in the room best to address head-on is what I say to a child in my position as a middle-aged woman is perhaps not what I would choose to say were I a man or perhaps even a younger woman. Once you’re in the same bracket as “mum” or (hideous to admit but increasingly undeniable) “nan” for the majority of students, most of your words are automatically assigned a kind of maternal, non-threatening tone. Something I have thought about considerably in recent years is that if I am going to use endearments then these should be shared out equally to the boys as well as the girls. It was pointed out to me a few years ago, to my considerable shock, how differently adults tend to speak to boys compared to girls and it is something I have worked on ever since. Both boys and girls seem to me to actually rather like terms of endearment, when used in the right context and in the right way.

Context is everything. Terms of endearment can of course be used to patronise and silence individuals, particularly women, and I am certainly not going to make a case for them being appropriate in all fields. It would not, for example, be appropriate for a male Member of Parliament to tell a female member to “call down, love”, although the tone of certain cabinet ministers has indeed got dangerously close to this threshold a number of times. In teaching, however, I do not believe that assuming a parental tone with children is inappropriate. In addition, my desire to remain sensitive to regional variations is more important to me than preaching any kind of universal language. Despite being a passionate feminist, I have never thought it appropriate or indeed desirable to kick off at every London cabbie that calls me “love” or every Geordie that calls me “pet” as – to be frank – I would argue that doing so would demonstrate more ignorance on my part than the use of such terms is claimed to indicate on theirs. We live in a rich and diverse society, where language means different things to different people, and we should all be thoughtful and grown up enough to deal with this without getting an attack of the vapours every time we venture outside our own close-knit social milieu.

As many people pointed out in the discussion, tone is crucially important. A term of endearment is, in my opinion, a nice thing. If endearments are a part of one particular teacher’s vernacular then I think that’s fine, so long as those endearments are used consistently with lots of different students and are not used to patronise, denigrate or control others. In my 21 years of teaching, I have never heard this to be the case. Teenagers, it seems to me, often stop being spoken to in such a way as they age, and it is actually something of a shame; adults tend to assume they don’t like affectionate terms (probably because so many teenagers do spend a lot of their time bristling and shrugging them off) but actually they crave our attention and our affection more than we know.

My view would be that if endearments come naturally to someone, I would not discourage them actively from using them in schools, so long as they are used fairly and genuinely. While professionalism and boundaries are crucially important, we should not be losing our individuality or indeed our humanity in the name of this.

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles?

So much has been written about the Parthenon sculptures currently housed at the British Museum that it is hard to know where to begin. I shall therefore begin with a mention of them that you will probably not have heard of. These are the opening lines to the academic volume that had the most influence on my own studies as a Classicist and even shaped the approach of my PhD:

“Some years ago I was in the British Museum looking at the Parthenon sculptures when a young man came up to me and said with a worried air, “I know it’s an awful thing to confess, but this Greek stuff doesn’t move me one bit.” I said that was very interesting: could he define at all the reasons for his lack of response? He reflected for a minute or two. Then he said, “Well, it’s all so terribly rational, if you know what I mean.” I thought I did know. The young man was only saying what had been said more articulately by Roger Fry and others. To a generation whose sensibilities have been trained on African and Aztec art, and on the work of such men as Modigliani and Henry Moore, the art of the Greeks, and Greek culture in general, is apt to appear lacking in the awareness of mystery and in the ablity to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience.”
E.R Dodds, “The Greeks and the Irrational“, 1951

Dodds had a profound influence on me and on my studies, an influence that began when I was just 17 and continued into my field of research. He was a fascinating character in his own right, a close friend of W.H Auden and a Classicist so famous that his influence on the field is difficult to overestimate. That he should make the opening lines of his most famous and influential work a reference to a young student giving a one-star review of the Parthenon sculptures is both extraodinary and hilarious for those of us with an interest in such things.

Those who persist in calling these exhibits “the Elgin marbles” and who seem to believe that calling them “the Parthenon sculptures” is part of a modern Leftist Woke Agenda would do well to note that here was Dodds, a Good Old Fashioned Classicist (and indeed now long-dead white man), referring to the exhibit as “the Parthenon sculptures” back in 1951. I had not even noticed this until I came to look at the passage again this week, and it struck me as interesting. The Parthenon sculptures appear with constant regularity in the British press, as the Greek Prime Minister’s campaign to reclaim them for Athens intensifies and again recently with our own Prime Minister’s refusal to meet with him garnering criticism from all sides. The debate surrounding the British Museum’s ownership of the marbles rumbles on, with support from the general public intensifying for their return to Greece.

In academic circles, the debate has raged since the arrival of the marbles in London back in the early 19th century. For some, Lord Elgin was an imperialist vandal, who acquired the items by certainly immoral and possibly illegal means from an occupying force and then sold them to settle his personal debts. For others he was a pioneer, who intervened to prevent the further deterioration of the scuptures under the watch of a disinterested and recognised ruling power, with their permission, and who preserved them – for the good of generations to come – at enormous personal cost.

Annoyingly, there is an element of truth on both sides. Like most political hot potatoes, the situation is complicated and in terms of what Elgin did (or rather the people he employed did) I am personally conflicted. We now know that his actions did irrevocable damage to the Parthenon and that subsequent efforts to clean and repair the sculptures caused damage to the sections he excised from the building. On the other hand, it is also true to say that the Parthenon as Elgin found it was in a far worse state than is generally imagined by those in passionate support of the Greeks’ claim to them. During the 19th century, the Parthenon was not as it stands today, following a campaign of reconstruction by the Greek Archaeological Service. The Parthenon that Elgin found was in a real state following its conversion into a church and later into a mosque under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Prior to that it had been used as a munitions store, and a great deal of it was destroyed in an explosion; much of the marble was chopped up and removed. All of this, I’m afraid, is par for the course in all cultures – large structures rise and fall at the mercy of competing forces and become fodder for new building programmes or symbols to be reshaped or destroyed. It is only with hindsight that we find this process appalling – at the time, the materials are fair game for redistribution.

From what I have read about Elgin I suspect that he was a genuine philanthropist, who believed his actions to be noble. His original plan was to take casts and drawings of the sculptures, to form a display of replicas for his own home. It seems to me that he became genuinely persuaded of the need to remove them and did indeed press ahead with the project at a simply staggering personal cost to himself. His desire for the originals was not, in fact, to adorn his own home but to fund a private museum for their display. The British government at the time were resolutely uninterested in them, for they were not the political football that they have become today, so Elgin did what wealthy men do – he threw his money at the problem. Ultimately, however, he ran out of money and had to sell them. He turned down more lucrative offers from various sources, including some chap you may have heard of called Napoleon, in favour of the British Museum, to which he sold the sculptures for half of what it had cost him to acquire them. It seems to me that his desire for the Parthenon sculptures to be displayed was both genuine and profound. This is not to condone his actions but to understand them.

For me, the issue is not so much what Elgin did but what we should all do now. I am not going to review all the arguments as they have been explored in detail by many writers more competent and knowledgeable than I. Google is your friend. Numerous broadsheet articles have set out the case both for and against and indeed the Wikipedia entry on this issue gives a comprehensive and reasonably well-balanced summary of the issues and spells out the case for return. For balance, this piece by Dorothy King, while 20 years old, gives some fascinating pushback on some of the more extreme claims by the return camp and has a particularly amusing take on why Byron – who wrote scathingly of Elgin’s vandalism at the time – might have held this view.

I will confess to always having had a selfish desire to retain the sculptures in London because – like Dodds was doing in 1951 – I rather like popping in to see them. While rail fares have gone up considerably, they remain competitive in lieu of a flight to Athens. On balance, however, I am forced to admit that the British Museum does not deserve them nor do them justice. If one compares the Acropolis Museum, which the Athenians have built to house their existing sculptures and in the hope of housing the returned ones, their situation in a somewhat dingy London display hall with no natural light seems something of an international embarassment. The airy Acropolis Museum, bathed in Athenian light, a huge glazed structure lying beneath the glorious sight of the Parthenon itself, is an entirely more appropriate home for them, and it would be an enormous pleasure to see them housed alongside their surviving counterparts.

While the Greek Prime Minister’s analogy of Elgin’s actions being akin to slicing the Mona Lisa in half is perhaps a little extreme, it is surely undeniable that to see the sculptures reunited in the Greek sunshine would be a joy for all who care about them.

Maybe even Dodds’ young student would finally be impressed.

The key to motivation?

What is the secret to self-motivation? As a teacher who specialised for 21 years in secondary education, it would be very easy for me to point at today’s teenagers and remark upon their lack of personal motivation, but was I really any different? Am I really so different now? Many parents bemoan their child’s lack of self-motivation when it comes to study and I feel their pain, I really do. When what seems like a relatively small amount of extra effort on a child’s part would make such a difference to their outcomes, it can be really difficult to comprehend why they simply won’t do it.

Since hitting a rather alarming round number in years, I have found myself becoming more concerned with what longterm life-limiting problems I might be storing up for myself (assuming I am privileged enough to make it into later life, of course). Watching my parents age has been an education and in the last few months I have done what I always do when something is on my mind: I have done some reading about it. To date, I have always told myself that cardiovascular fitness is the only thing that really matters for longterm health and that so long as I’m walking briskly on a regular basis then all will be well; since looking at the facts, I have had to admit to myself that my beliefs on this are simply wrong. All the information we have shows an undeniable correlation between muscle strength and the ability to maintain independent living, so my hitherto scathing attitude towards anything even remotely gym-related requires some serious review. I have read about the importance of building muscle strength in relation to one’s ability to move freely and independently as one ages, as well as how it intertwines with building up one’s balance to prevent the risk of falls.

Right, I thought. Resistance training, here I come. But the gym is way too scary, so I watched a few YouTube videos from the comfort of my chair and tried a few exercises … and it’s just so hard! You’re using muscles you never knew you had, you’ve no idea whether you’re doing it right or not, your thighs start to tremble and you end up retreating to the sofa, while the cat looks at you as if you’ve just humiliated yourself in the worst way possible. As one friend put it, “the trouble with exercise is, you might feel great once it’s over, but I also feel pretty great on the sofa watching Netflix, so feeling great isn’t quite the pull-factor that everyone says it is.” This is perhaps the downside of currently feeling in relatively good health. Believe me, in theory, I’m motivated: I am worried about my longterm health and I want to fix that by taking action. But how does one take that desire and channel it into real action, when those actions are so alien, so difficult and so uncomfortable, and the theoretical longterm benefits feel such a long distance away? For perhaps the first time in years, I’m gaining an insight into how my students may feel about their learning.

Fortunately, I have another friend on hand, who is going to help. This friend is properly into fitness in a way that none of my other friends have ever been. She has hired a personal trainer to guide her through strength training in recent months and (even more scarily) she’s got all the kit – her house is full of alarming equipment. On Monday, I went round to her house wearing some secondhand pumps and my Primark leggings and was introduced to squats, lunges, push-ups and weight training. Suffice to say, while my friend sauntered about, demonstrating seemingly impossible moves without so much as breaking a sweat, I was a quivering wreck within minutes. When attempting the final push-up I collapsed onto the mat, unable to perform the downward pass. “Good,” she said, laughing. “That’s when you know you’ve done about the right number.”

All of this has reminded me just how impossibly hard it is to motivate yourself to do something that you find really difficult. You can give yourself as many pep talks as you like, it’s never likely to be enough. I need my friend to teach me how to do the moves correctly in an environment in which I’m comfortable (she understands that I’m somewhat dubious about a trip to the gym). I need her to tell me whether I’m getting it right, both to prevent injury and to ensure that the exercise is working as it’s meant to. I also need her to push me into doing it another few times when previously I had given up because it was getting so difficult – while we’re not quite talking “no pain, no gain”, it is true that when it comes to strength training, you should be pushing yourself to the point when it feels like you can’t do it any more. All of this is simply too difficult and too frightening to do on your own, when you have no experience with such things.

All of this started on Monday and the state I was in afterwards illustrates just how much work I have yet to do on myself. On Tuesday I was in agony with what I am reliably informed is called “DOMS” – Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness; on Wednesday I was basically crippled and had to take the stairs while using the bannisters like a pair crutches. Today is slightly better – I can do the stairs, although not without yelping with every single step. In terms of motivational pep talks I have mentally pointed out to myself that this is in fact a little bit of a taster as to what life will be like in 30 years’ time if I don’t keep this up.

As I embark on my quest to gain muscle strength this has been a sobering reminder that motivating oneself is not at all easy. It has illustrated to me how near impossible it is without the training, guidance and support of somebody else, which forms a significant part of what I do as a tutor. I have always believed that motivation comes from success, not the other way around – motivation is simply too hard without some kind of inkling and insight into what gains it might bring you. In order to motivate someone to do something difficult or painful, whether they’re 15 or 50, it’s simply not enough to tell them that they can do it; we need to show them that they can, and cheer from the sidelines as they do so.

Poking and fussing

Do you ever wonder whether we’ve somewhat lost our way when it comes to the purpose of education?

When I decided to become a teacher, it was made clear to me back in 1999 that my role would be complex. Given the trend back then for group work and making lessons fun, the role of the teacher had become somewhat synonymous with the purported aims of the BBC: to educate, inform and entertain, not necessarily in that order. Beyond that, it was also made clear to me in 1999 that I would have numerous responsibilities that blurred the line between education and social work, and none of them were unreasonable. Teachers – particularly primary school teachers – spend a huge amount of time with a large number of individual children every day; as a result, teachers are without question some of the best-placed adults to notice when there are concerns to be had, when a child’s demeanour changes or their health declines. I took my duty of care very seriously and regularly reported safeguarding concerns; the ability to raise such concerns anonymously, with more experienced experts who took me seriously and followed up on them, is something I miss greatly about being in a school.

The overwhelming majority of teachers take their safeguarding responsibilities extremely seriously. Nobody goes into teaching with the belief that they will be nothing but an academe, pouring knowledge into the minds of the young with no thought given to their health, their personality, their family situation or what might be going on inside their head. Teaching is a constant dialogue between adults and the young, and our empathy with and understanding of a wide variety of issues that may be holding a child back in their learning is crucial. But let us remind ourselves that what we are there to do is to impart learning. We are not there to solve all of society’s problems, from knife crime to nutrition.

In the last decade or so, and most particularly during and after the pandemic, schools have been expected to take up the slack for every single failing in society: for the failings of government, for the failings of under-funded health services, for the failings of over-stretched social services and sometimes – let’s not be afraid to say it – for the failings of parents. Parenthood is hard – incredibly hard – and not everybody is acing it; but teachers are not parents to the children in their care and they cannot – nor should they be asked to – replace that role.

I hesitate to make political predictions as I am notoriously bad at it and if the last few years have taught us anything it should be to prepare for surprise. That said, it seems likely that we will have a change of government at the next General Election, and it seems likely that the new ruling party will be Labour. This means that what the Labour party said about education at its recent conference becomes potentially more important and relevant than the Conversatives’ blustering about mobile phones (already banned in most decent schools) and maths up to the age of 18 (where they will find the teachers yet to be confirmed). But the Labour party’s pledge to bring in “supervised tooth brushing” for primary school children aged 3 to 5 caught my attention and got me wondering about what they think teachers are for. It also got me wondering whether any of them have ever set foot in a primary school, never mind stayed there for any length of time.

As one primary school teacher on the platform formerly known as Twitter pointed out, teachers have already experienced what it is like when they are asked to supervise hand-washing on a massive scale, when there was a big focus on this during the pandemic. “I remember getting the children to wash their hands at the sink during covid. It took an hour and they missed learning … My TA had to supervise them instead of support children. And that was a class of Y6 children. I can’t imagine how long it would take to shepherd 4 & 5 year olds through the process. This policy has not been suggested by anyone with experience of primary.” Her comments were in answer to someone who claimed that supervised tooth-brushing “would only take a few minutes”. Several primary school teachers responded, with comments like “30 very young children. Probably only one sink. Cleaning the cup after each child. Making sure each child has their toothbrush. At least 50% won’t like the toothpaste … I could go on and on.” My personal favourite was the one who pointed out the problems that would arise from all the spitting. Covid hygiene? Whatever. All in all, the discussion was (or should have been) an eye-opener for anyone who does not work with large groups of children on a daily basis, especially the little ones. You may (I hope) have supervised your own child’s toothbrushing at home. This is not the same as trying to do it with a class of 30.

The British Dental Association has stated that it is “encouraged” by Labour’s proposal, but I feel more than a little despair. As one teacher put it “it’s a sticking plaster for a gaping wound. Babies have teeth. We need NHS dentists, breastfeeding support groups at doctors surgeries, 0-4 family centres. Teachers have an educational role but they’re outsourcing it to us because they don’t want to fund the real support needed.” Absolutely. And it has to stop. Given the amount of time that every primary school teacher knows realistically that this tooth-brushing regime will take, what would people like those teachers to do less of to make it happen? Less supervised play? Fewer handwriting skills? Ditch basic numeracy? You choose.

For me, the suggestion sums up the tangible lack of respect that politicians have for the teaching profession. Teachers are treated as punching bags by all the major parties, belittled and taken for granted across the board. The profession is haemorraghing staff at an alarming rate and to this date not one single political party has taken any kind of frank look at this. Any pledge to “recruit more teachers” falls far short of what’s required, when we know that currently one third of teachers are quitting the profession within five years. It costs a lot of money to train a teacher, so a proper focus on how we retain them – not recruit them – would save the country a fortune.

Readers around my age may recognise the title of this post as a quotation from Pam Ayres’ I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth, a poem which pretty much every child my age was told to learn off by heart at some point during their time in primary school. “Poking and fussing” (or – more accurately – “pokin’ and fussin'”) is how tooth-brushing seemed to Ayres as a young child. For me, it’s a rather good description of the approach taken by politicians towards education.

Poplars tremble gradually to gold

There is an apocryphal saying that has been shared thousands of times on the internet. It is usually labelled “a Greek proverb” but sadly I cannot find any reliable reference to it that predates the 20th century. Nevertheless, it is a favourite saying of mine and whoever first expressed the sentiment was certainly insightful, even if he didn’t share his thoughts in the agora of 4th century Athens.

The saying is as follows:

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit.”
Source unknown

There is so much to like about this statement. First of all, I like the fact that it talks about the responsibilities of the oldest in society. It seems to me that we all spend quite a lot of time wagging fingers at the young, telling them that it’s their responsibility to sort out the problems of the future – we may have caused all the problems, mind you, but we won’t be around to face the consequences and they will. The quoted statement calls this attitude into question and suggests that we all bear a responsibility towards the future that will exist after we are gone. I’m not surprised that people assumed such sentiments came from ancient Athens, which was a patriarchal society in which aristocratic men enjoyed the benefits and bore the responsibilities of government; elderly men were afforded power and respect, and in return they were expected to leave behind a legacy for the good of the generations to come.

In many ways, however, this statement is about the importance of trees. While it is using the tree as a metaphor for the future, to express the importance of the longterm legacy that every human is capable of leaving behind when they’re gone, it speaks to the visceral understanding that planting a tree is one of the best things that anybody can do in this world. Our love for trees and our trust in their enduring importance has recently been brought into sharp relief with the heinous felling of the beautiful tree at Sycamore Gap, a famous landmark so named after the tree that by chance grew in a sharp dip in the hillside next to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. The real horror of this inexplicable act of nihilism has left me and countless others quite bereft; even those of us down in the south know the sense of history and local pride that this awe-inspiring natural feature commanded. I simply cannot believe that somebody could bring themselves to do such a thing.

The Romans valued their trees, not just for ornamentation but also for their practical uses. Trees were planted along roads, around public buildings, and inside the garden rooms of the villas of the wealthy, creating an outside-in effect that still inspires architecture and city planning to this day. Preserved cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum evidence how the Romans made trees a part of their urban landscape; excavations reveal that these ancient cities were home to a wide variety of trees, strategically planted for shade and selected for both their aesthetics and their utility. The Romans clearly had an understanding of how they could use trees to improve urban environments, a concept that we are now returning to, with more and more research suggesting that trees can improve the air quality as well as reduce temperatures in modern cities.

I am privileged to live in “leafy Surrey” and it is perhaps poignant that I become most aware of the trees around me in autumn, as we watch the leaves die and start to fall. During October and November, walking along a pavement where I live becomes a joyous experience of swishing through the fallen leaves and crunching upon acorns and horse chestnuts. The title of this blog post is taken from a poem by Gillian Clarke entitled simply October. It explores imagery of death and dying, but highlights the beauty of the colours as leaves start to die and decay in autumn. There simply is not a more beautiful and poignant time of year and while it is always tinged with sadness as it foreshadows the depths of winter to come, I value the glory and the beauty of this time of year immensely.

Photo of the now-felled sycamore tree at Sycamore Gap
by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Ever-present history

Adrian Chiles had a bit of a rant in his column in the Guardian this month. Now, I should say from the outset that I sympathise with his obvious desperation; as someone who has to write a blog post every week, I have a small shred of insight into the pressure that paid columnists must be under to come up with something – anything – to write about every week in their column. I find it hard enough, and I don’t have to write to the standard that’s expected for the Guardian (no jokes, please). Years ago I had a paid gig writing for an online magazine once a fortnight, for which the standard of writing was pretty high: I couldn’t keep it up.

Poor Adrian was obviously having a particularly tough week when he decided to write a piece about television documentaries which use the present tense to describe historical events. Apparently, it “makes his blood boil.”

“If something happened centuries ago,” he says (said?), “let’s talk about it as if it happened centuries ago – not as if it was going on right now.” Chiles even quotes (quoted?) Dan Snow as someone who is (was?) apparently “miserable” as a result of the process, forced by his producers to speak in the present tense about historical events. I cannot begin to imagine their pain.

Sarcasm aside, it is interesting to me that Chiles – and, based on the comments I read online, perhaps others – claims to find the process of talking about past events using the present tense patronising; he seems to have decided that producers have come up with this device as a cynical or simplistic tool to bring events to life for a modern audience with a short attention span. Chiles not only believes that this unnecessary, but cites it as something which is likely to tip him over the edge.

Personally, I had not noticed that the use of the historic present in historical documentaries was on the increase, but if this is the case is then it is certainly not a modern phenomenon. It has always amused me how incensed English teachers become when a student’s work slides between the tenses. In English classes, students are trained that switching tense is an absolute no-no and will mean that their writing makes no sense. In the ancient world, by contrast, switching between tenses for effect was considered the height of excellent writing: Virgil was a genius at it.

A poet such as Virgil sometimes wrote whole passages in the present tense for effect; he would also write in the past tense and then jump into the present for a particularly striking moment, capitalising on the jarring effect to make a moment vivid. So a technique practised by men that were and are (past and present) considered to be some of the greatest literary artists that have ever lived now gets you marked down in GCSE creative writing and certainly gets you up the nose of Adrian Chiles.

In truth, I would not advise students to switch constantly betweeen tenses in the way that Virgil does; it is a not a technique commonly used in modern writing and can indeed lead to potential confusion unless used with caution. Apart from anything, just because a technique is used by a genius doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a great idea for us lesser mortals. But the use of the present tense to describe historical events is surely an effective way to bring them to life and I’m a little puzzled as to why anyone would find it so irritating. I guess it’s one of those things, like a dripping tap, that starts to wind a person up inexorably once they have noticed it. My advice for Chiles would be to try some deep-breathing exercises next time he watches anything on BBC Four.