I have recently started teaching. Teaching ICT (that’s information and communication technology, in case you are not up on the latest academic acronyms) to 13 and 14 year olds.
Now, I have been teaching ICT to teaching staff since September. Teaching teachers is an interesting experience. They are all there because they are genuinely interested in what I have to tell them, and they have all requested this training, so they want to be there. This is a good start, and a huge advantage over teaching school pupils. However, teachers are notoriously bad pupils. They will sit there and giggle, chat, pass notes, poke each other, distract each other and generally do whatever they can to disrupt the lesson. I’m not sure that they do this on purpose, or whether it is simply an in-built response, a result of the conditioning they receive from spending their hours and days in classrooms surrounded by students who do exactly the same things.
I will give you an example of this that I was told about by one of the teaching staff. The school I work at is a boarding school, and during the summer months, they tend to hold a lot of barbecues, in order to keep the kids from being bored and causing havoc. Now, the powers that be in the school decided, in the spirit of health and safety madness, that all the staff who cook these barbecues needed to attend a barbecue safety lecture. I kid you not. So, the first session arrived, the teachers attended and havoc ensued. To start off with the instructor mentioned the word ‘baps’. Always funny, and even more so apparently if you are a teacher. When they then got onto the subject of using a temperature probe, I gather it all went downhill quite rapidly. Probes and baps – it is like a teacher’s idea of innuendo bingo heaven.
So, with this in mind, you will see what I am up against when I am delivering teaching sessions to the staff at work. They chat, they don’t listen, I then have to repeat myself and they claim that they didn’t hear, when I know darn well that they were really checking their emails, and not paying attention!
So, when faced with a classroom on 13 – 14 year olds, I actually don’t feel too bad. They do all the things that the teaching staff do. They chat, they giggle, they don’t pay attention, they check their emails when they should be working. However, the good thing with them is that I can tell them off, send them to the head of department for punishment, or put them into detention. Oh, the power. Generally, this doesn’t tend to work too well with the teaching staff though…
