Teach First: war later
Teachers, how do they do it? You think it’s a creamy career, well-paid with great holidays? It is so much more as I discovered at 08.50 one morning this week at Parliament Hill School, a comprehensive in north London.
Religious Education was my subject. The object was to publicise the Teach First scheme that lures new graduates straight into the classroom before they launch on some other career. 53 per cent get hooked and stay longer in the profession.
God vs the Big Bang was today’s subject. Thank God for Google! I discovered the universe is 13.75 billion years old. First task: clean the white board… what a grimey mess… what was wrong with the old blackboard and chalk?
Twenty-three sixteen year old girls in class… expectant if slightly “early-in-the-day” looks on their faces. But so attentive, interested, and engaged… wonderfully multicultural spread. We talked, we illustrated, we explained, and my Googled info and a page of Genesis kept me a step ahead, the ‘real teachers’ plus a crew of Teach First operatives looking on. It was tough, demanding and not untiring. Indeed the first forty minutes went like a train. Then I hit the buffers..I had run out of material.
Teachers, I have to ask again, how do they do it?! I fell back on what the girls really wanted to talk about – a life in the media…we ran out of time.
09.50 I walked out, done, but not dusted – oh for the old blackboard… but my white board drawing of the Big Bang, must remain an educational classic!
So to the work face. An intriguing day of Libya, billionaire property dealers arrested, and more.
On the bike and dash to the New London Theatre in Drury Lane for War Horse – had some American friends in town who’d asked what they should see – we had decided Morpurgo’s epic was it. I’d seen it before… but taking up a third of the way through, I was swept up in the horse strewn battlefield of the First World War as if I hadn’t. So brilliant – the puppeteers inside the horses, the fabulous frameworks of the horses, and the breath-taking performances of the humans. The shock of the tank and the knowledge that my own Grandpa had been an officer there too – believing in the age of horse, long after the tank had come to bear.
Afterwards we pondered on the packed theatre (700 souls) nine performances a week, six venues across the world – a million people a year absorbing, crying their way through one of the greatest antiwar dramas ever conjured.
And those horses – made by a small black African studio in South Africa. How the world turns – now, how old is Earth girls?