John Langley: Robbing teachers of enthusiasm, vitality

John Langley

The feeding frenzy surrounding David Benson-Pope raises a question that goes well beyond him or what he might or might not have done. It cuts to the essence of some of the most important and effective features of teachers and teaching.

A separate but important question is deciding a fair level of accountability for past transgressions, and if we should be judging past actions against the standards of today.

So what are some of the essential features of outstanding teachers? All of us remember those we had at school. We might be fortunate enough to remember several.

It is they who gave our time at school a sparkle; who inspired us to see learning as more than some mundane exercise that we needed to tolerate in our formative years.

And it is they who have enabled many of us to follow the pathways in life that we subsequently have.

The teachers who did these things were, and are not, grey, uninteresting automatons who simply deliver a curriculum in a competent technical fashion. They did much more.

They gave of themselves when they taught. They made connections with those they taught. They were enthusiastic. Often, they had a sense of humour that gave their classes a vitality others didn't have.

Yes, they were technically competent, but for the outstanding and memorable teachers technical competence was their starting point, not their finishing one.

Some of those teachers probably were extreme or even eccentric in the way they approached things.

They would grab every opportunity to motivate the interest of the learners even if it meant departing from the curriculum or not meeting some learning outcome or other.

Exactly the same would be true of today's outstanding teachers, despite numerous attempts to bury them in compliance requirements and straitjacket them in thousands of pages of curriculum documents.

What is different to today is that 20 years ago many teachers pushed the boundaries and did things that by today's somewhat sanitised standards would be frowned upon.

Sometimes items were tossed around rooms, and unusual teaching aids were used (I remember one who would carry a cricket bat around and practise various strokes as he was walking up and down the aisle between desks).

Jokes and stories that could not be used today were told to illustrate various points; physical contact such as an arm around the shoulders was seen as a positive thing; and disciplinary methods were very different.

At this point some clarification is needed. It has never been acceptable to bully and intimidate children and young people.

Nor has it ever been acceptable to be reckless in the face of children and young people, nor to humiliate them. That goes without saying.

Some years ago caning was acceptable and commonplace, caning to excess was not. Twenty years ago what was acceptable and commonplace is no longer. For some things, such as caning, that is a good thing. For other things it is not.

The danger is that we will mistake these unacceptable things for the genuine vitality and creativity that some fine teachers demonstrate.

The line can be fine but it is almost always marked by the motivation and extent of the teacher's action.

When done in anger, things such as whacking someone on the head with a tennis ball could be assault.

When done in good humour, it will usually be seen by pupils for what it is - something that makes classrooms more lively and interesting.

In Western societies we run the risk of sanitising our teachers to the point where they will be afraid to be different, afraid to make the connections they must make with our young if they are to win the fight for hearts and minds, afraid to be themselves and become nothing more than conduits for knowledge.

That would be, and is quickly becoming, a tragedy of major proportions.

From a teaching point of view it is neither desirable nor reassuring for those educating our young to be mindless technicians whose main focus is, in Professor Ivan Snook's words, "joyless compliance".

They need to be vibrant and colourful characters who are remembered not only for what they teach but also for the kind of people they are.

I have no idea whether David Benson-Pope is guilty of stepping over acceptable lines as a teacher. I wasn't there.

What I would urge, however, is that his actions, or those of any other teacher, are judged within the context of the time and circumstances in which they occurred, and that they are not assessed solely against a set of clinical and prescriptive rules which would leave us with a teaching profession shrouded by a long, grey cloud.

As a society we also need to think carefully about who gets held accountable, for what and when? There are some things, such as serious crimes against people, that time does not absolve.

There are other actions, things that any of us could have done in our past, that are simply mistakes we make as part of being human.

Am I soon to expect a letter accusing me of verbal intimidation of a student because I might have yelled at him or her 15 years ago - something I probably did on occasions.

If I am to expect such a thing, and reprisal against me for doing so, 95 per cent of the teachers in this country would probably not be able to sleep easily in their beds, not to mention those in other professions as well.

The poet W.H. Auden once said: "Judge your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart." What we need to be clearer about is what is truly crooked and what is not.

Unless we do so, we are dooming a great number of children to many boring and uninspiring years in our schools. That must be avoided at all costs.

* Dr John Langley is dean of education at Auckland University.