Diary of an Irish Teacher: Do we need to slow things down and stop the scramble in our schools?

"I feel there is a need for a greater understanding of the role of 'ordinary' people in shaping history for the better in everyday, 'ordinary' ways," says a colleague of Jennifer Horgan's

Jennifer Horgan. Pic: Larry Cummins

My mornings involve trawling through odd socks to find a pair. Or the closest thing to a pair.

Our odd socks are kept in what my children call a ‘sock mansion,’ an ever-growing plastic box on top of the freezer. Perfect pairs are up in their bedrooms of course, but by the time we’re making the final scramble out of the house, we’ve no time to get them.

So, odd socks it is.

Being a teacher in the current system feels similar, like a scramble. You’re sometimes too busy trying to cover the basics for exams to really prioritise the subject, the nature of learning. You simply don’t have time to go deeper or go higher.

Chats with colleagues can help pull you back. They quiet the noise a bit, help you sort your priorities mid-scramble. Conversations about teaching and learning permit you to zoom out. Afterall, education is important; scrambling really shouldn’t be an option.

Sadly, our time is scarce. When I worked abroad, we’d ‘good practice’ briefings – short powerful injections of pedagogy every Friday morning. It doesn’t work here. Staffing is too tight. Contact hours are greater. We’re in a rush to get where we need to go.

But these conversations still happen – albeit less formally, which also has its merits.

Like the other day, after school, when I sat down with a teacher to talk about his course, the exams, and his understanding of what good teaching or indeed meaningful learning looks like. I asked him if he’s happy with the structure of his subject at senior cycle. His subject is history. His name is Martin.

Martin moves around our school calmly; he enters the staffroom at his own pace. He’s never in a hurry. He does things in order of priority.

‘I think History could be taught in a richer and more meaningful way, certainly. If we could focus on the story element, and the multi-perspectivity of the story, then students would really connect, they’d join the dots, and the subject would become more meaningful as a result. Because History is an unfolding story. It’s a kaleidoscope. When you move it around, the pictures change.’

I ask him if he thinks skills are more important than knowledge, now that technology does a lot of the work for us in collecting and storing content.

He pauses. ‘Well, it’s both, isn’t it? It’s having skills and knowledge. We don’t need to choose between them. It’s not a binary. And what is wisdom? Well, maybe it’s a combination of these two. Wisdom is the ability to think about facts in an individual and meaningful way.’

Martin goes on to explain that the Resource Study Report in History is perhaps the most satisfying part of the curriculum for him. It’s worth only 20% of the overall grade.

‘You witness history becoming a meaningful subject for the students. They can make it personal. And once that happens, they strike gold. And they can keep digging. I feel there is a need for a greater understanding of the role of 'ordinary' people in shaping history for the better in everyday, 'ordinary' ways. This, I feel, might connect our students to their individual heritage, far more than is currently the case.’

Martin wishes there were more marks given to such project work, with fewer marks going for the final exam. It’s disappointing to discover that students are still memorising essays for the day, that they’re still missing out on developing wisdom as per Martin’s explanation of the word. Flashbacks of my own Leaving Cert in 1999 return, the five dog-eared, underlined essays I mentally ingested for the exam.

‘60% is given for three exam essay-type questions, which most students learn by rote, in the hope that what they have learned, or a variant thereof, will appear on the day of the exam,’ Martin informs me.

It strikes me as surface-level learning, like my morning dashes out of the house with my kids. There’s no deep planning involved, nothing close to wisdom. Like my odd socks, it doesn’t add up.

Since our chat, you’ll be relieved to know I’ve made some changes.

Last night I put our ‘sock mansion’ upstairs. I put a basket in the utility for even socks only; I’ll sort them straight from the wash. It’s a small change, granted, and one that my kids will moan about at first, but I’m hoping it will make things a bit easier, calmer.

I wonder if a slower, project-based approach in schools might have the same effect for our students. It’s certainly worth talking about.