Another day I didn’t use algebra
Sometimes the school curriculum prepares us for life, other times it holds us back. Sometimes a schoolteacher holds a child’s precious moment in the palm of their hand, other times they just have to get on, to get the schoolwork done.
When I was a school teacher, one of the hardest questions I used to get asked was, ‘Sir, do we really need to know all this stuff?’ I decided early in my teaching career that if I didn’t sometimes show my real emotions, and say what I really thought, I was doing the pupils a disservice.
Food chains was an interesting topic. Grass goes at the bottom of the whiteboard, and just above it, rabbits, eating it. What eats rabbits? Well, not much here in Jersey but soon someone suggests foxes, and so up they go — eating rabbits. What eats foxes? Well, nothing any of us can think of, but someone says lions, and hey-ho, I can’t think where in the real world we are now, but yes, I’m sure a lion could eat a fox, so onto the board it goes. The kids are free-running now. They’ve got the concept and they’re off with it. ‘What eats lions?’ they call. I’m thinking of the dead lion on the front of an old Golden Syrup tin, surrounded by bees, with the motto, ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness,’ but I say, ‘No, we’re done here. You have the idea. Open your books at page 23.’
‘Flies,’ someone says. ‘No! Maggots,’ says another. ‘Well,’ I intervene, ‘When flies first hatch out, they are maggots.’ ‘My dog had maggots in her ear, sir,’ someone chimes in. ‘We took her to the vet and he said she could have died, if they’d got into her brain and eaten it.’
‘Look, I can put flies and maggots onto the board, but I’m not putting them at the top,’ I adjudicate. ‘Lions are top-level predators, but flies aren’t. They are decomposers, and they don’t really fit onto this diagram.’
‘Fungus!’ someone shouts. ‘Yes, there’s a whole world of things that eat dead things and help them decompose. I’ll put things like that to the side here, and you can see that really it’s a big circle, because all of these things help nourish the grass.
‘But we’re not meant to be doing circles today. What you need to remember for the exam is that lions, like buzzards, hawks, bears and eagles, are top-level predators. They’re at the top of the food chain.’
Sure enough, when the end-of-term exams come in, ‘Give an example of a top-level predator’ gets ‘Flies’ on more than one paper.
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 28 February 2019
