I’m Back at School, and I’m Here to Learn. But, is it that Simple?
I’m sitting in class watching the chaos unfold. There are the few quiet students listening intently to the teacher’s every word, but more are determined to play around, talk to their neighbour (or the person on the other side of the room) and throw insults at the teacher. The teacher is struggling to maintain control over the class, let alone educate. When the teacher finally gets a moment to teach someone something, it feels irrelevant to the modern world, which we hope these kids will thrive in. My first insight here is that there is little engagement in the classroom with somewhat uninteresting subject matter, but why is that? That’s the question I want to look at.
I’m Australian, and the UK’s education system seems a million miles away from what I grew up with. I’m still wrapping my head around the curriculum, the emphasis on exams and the lack of discussion and creativity in class. Of course there is little I can do about the curriculum at this stage, but what else can I do to help?
Over the last couple of months I have had the chance to get a glimpse into a school where over 80% of pupils are eligible for free school meals and over 80% of pupils don’t speak English as their first language. It’s therefore probably fair to say that a majority of the students at this school are disadvantaged in comparison to the average UK student. For the sake of comparison, in 2016, 13.2% of UK state funded secondary school students were eligible to claim free school meals.
So, what does this mean for their learning? Well, research shows that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to hear about “learning about learning”, or meta-cognition at home. In almost every class I help with I am bombarded by questions like “Why do I need to learn trigonometry?” and “Why are we learning about fertilisers?”, and of course I am under no illusion that this isn’t going on throughout the UK. But the questions here seem genuine, not like the nagging of a teenager who is eager to socialise and leave the school gates. When I have given them my time and explained that the content may never be used again, but that they are learning how to solve a problem, or analyse an argument they seem grateful. So, would helping these students learn about learning, help them learn? Or is it the one-to-one attention with an adult that has the time to help by listening that they are grateful for? Or is it both?
Last week I was chatting with a girl from Year 13. She wanted my help with a cover letter for a summer internship she was applying for. We started talking about all the opportunities she had listed on her CV. She told me, many of the opportunities were focused on meeting someone inspirational, and someone she could look to as a mentor. However, they were never inspirational for herself. They were people that she experienced as feeling superior to her. People that would never listen to her, only speak down to her. People that had come from such a different world that she could never relate to it, and they could not relate to hers. She finally told me, they were fed with a silver spoon and they’ve done well for themselves, but I’ve been fed with a plastic spoon and I will get there too.
As she told me about her experiences of others feeling superior to her she revealed something. It wasn’t just the lecturers at Cambridge or the managers at Barclays she was speaking about, it was the teachers at her school too. She told me she thought they felt they were superior to her, or at least that’s how she felt. Imagine going through your whole school life feeling like all the adults around you, that you were supposed to look up to, looked down on you and couldn’t relate to you. I’m grateful I was able to meet someone so determined and motivated regardless of all the hardships she faced. But, my fear is that not all these students will be able to hold on to such a positive mindset throughout their schooling years.
So, in my short time left at the school what can I do to make a real impact on their lives? It feels like an impossible feat to do anything impactful given the complexity of the issues, but armed with my insights and support from the school, I am hoping I will leave at least a small group of students something valuable.
