Dullington Diddlington

Deans Blog

“‘That, Mr. Dullington, was in my 40 years experience of teaching Jurisprudence, the most inadequate, immaterial and…ah… insubstantial essay I have had to listen to, exploring as it did, such previously uncharted depths of legal irrelevance and…erm… vacuous pomposity!’
Silence as the antique grandfather clock ticked accusingly in the corner of my tutor’s dusty old room. ‘Oh…Well…Where exactly would you say I went wrong, Professor H---? I thought I had explained fully the legal implications of your unlikely scenario of a storm sweeping away a hunk of my land and adding it to my neighbour’s across the river…’
‘Mr. Diddlington, ‘rather well’ cannot be utilised to describe anything in that essay except, perhaps, your belated use of the…erm… final full stop. Your style is both obtuse and pretentious, your points are obfuscated and random, and your use of legal precedents is…ah… unprecedented.’*

Rumpelstilzkin’s rage
And so on. One pulls oneself together, shrugs off the temporary impasse and switches to ontological bio-metachemistry and gets a first ‘summa cum laude’ in the remaining two years. Or not. Actually this one felt humiliated and very depressed. One tries not to fall to the ground screaming and drumming one’s heels on the floor in a five year old’s hysterical passion of humiliation complete with protruding lower lip. In comparison, Rumpelstilzkin’s rage when the miller’s daughter, now promoted queen consort, refused to give him her first child despite showing her how to spin gold in commercially viable quantities, was sub beginner level.

For five days at a stretch
And on a smaller scale our students meet what they may see as obstacles, pitfalls, hurdles, dreaded events and personal humiliations quite often, as they try to be both what their friends expect and what also the adults in their lives expect without the instructions booklet. ‘Well, it was no different for us and did it do us any harm?’ Maybe. Only, we forget the details over the years or we now re-label all the anxiety as ‘challenge’ and assess our kids’ perseverance skills. But so few of we humans are all-rounders, and so few are they, able to produce our very best in an alien language in eight or nine dissimilar subjects in 50 minute time chunks one after the other for five days at a stretch. They have come from PE or Spanish or mathematics and after my 50 minutes will progress to I.T. or humanities or physics with little chance to adopt the correct mindset for the discipline and the idiosyncratic teacher in the five minute change over time.

Because kids learn.
But most of the time most of them manage this well. Because kids learn. It is what they are for. You cannot stop them. I, myself, tend to forget, caught up in the frenetic rhythm of a school day, that I teach only English and I think and teach in only English all day. I am marinated in my academic expectations and seasoned in the skills and knowledge involved in my next class. What I need to do regularly is to try imagining having to do this in my third language. I do not have a third language. I sometimes even now dream I am in Swiss Gymi and the bell has gone for a double advanced math class in Schriftdeutsch. Fortunately, up to now, I have woken up. What I need to do is to get out of the comfort of my classroom.

Soooooo dull
The classroom, though, is not a natural place to learn with passion. But we use it only for learning. For lively maturing students it can be sooooo dull despite our best efforts to showcase work and pin up posters. (If you look at the original illustrations, the girl Rumpel assists is spinning gold in an old classroom.) And that is why our new facility Mettman is so important. And all our Activity Days and the full Field Week programme and the plethora of sport and training weekends all through the year. And suspended days for the Group 4 Science project and MUN. And the Global Issues conference. And all the other conferences. Yes, they play havoc with the timetable and our schedules and comfortable routines and the life of those who plan and deliver. But thank goodness they do because we teachers need to get out of the classroom, too.

***

DoZ update. Can SUVs, generally recognised to be environmentally iffy, be taught by their owners not to park on the small grassy piece of natural environment to the right of the drive especially when there are plenty of their spaces on the parking lot. It is not a parking lot. This little strip of green is there for us all to enjoy unchurned up by monster tyres and unpolluted by drips of engine oil. Oh, and mini cabrios, you speak to your drivers, too.

*The initial conversation really happened. The full version is at nickydarlington.blogspot.com