Post for my son, who has just turned 20

I first wrote this post back in 2007 when my boy was nine-and-half-years-old. It was the first time that we shared a weekend on our own. As the same boy, adolescent until a few minutes ago, becomes a young man, I have decided to re-post it. Here's to a happy and fruitful adult life!

The coach finally got underway a quarter of an hour later than planned. The sun, streaming through the windshield, bifurcated the vehicle in two. I remained in the section kissed by it. I read my book whilst my son talked to his friend J. My son. It was the first time that father and son would be on a holiday together, albeit weekend-long. To me it felt like a rite of passage, like a secret fraternity in which we both suddenly found ourselves. Father and son. The phrase, cliché-tainted, had never occurred to me before. After all, we've always been a compact family together and I try to not make distinctions between my son and my daughter, age gap and gender notwithstanding. As the coach smoothed down the A406 eastbound, I suddenly thought of Steve Biddulp's book 'Raising Boys'. 'Sport offers a boy a chance to get closer to his father, and to other boys and men, through a common interest they might otherwise lack'. Well, this was our chance. Woodcraft Folk had arranged a whole weekend full of activities at Shadwell. These included kayaking and canoeing. I was looking forward to seeing my son interacting in a different medium almost on his own.

We arrived at the centre just after eight in the morning and immediately we were shown our sleeping quarters. These consisted of nothing more than a long room where we placed our sleepings bags and mats. Boys and men would sleep in this room, whilst women and girls would take over another room opposite to ours. The excitement coursing through our bodies was palpable to all present there. Games were produced, pizzas were cooked and the joie de vivre did not leave us until the small hours when I finally realised that I had to pump both my son and mine sleeping mattress and steer him to bed. The latter was difficult to achieve as he was high on energy but once he collapsed in the bed brought to life by me, somewhat deficiently, Orpheus took over and fed him the beautiful dreams we all want our offspring to have. I watched him in silence as his tiny curls moved hither and thither and suddenly it dawned on me that I was the happiest father in the world. I was witnessing innocence asleep. I kissed him on his forehead and sneaked into my own sleeping bag on my also very deficient and below-par mattress.

The morning found me in high spirits. In the absence of curtains in our room, we were all woken up by a sun curious to know how our night had been. My son was already playing cards with his friend J on his bed and upon seeing me awake he jumped onto my mattress and gave me a huge hug. After my morning workout we both helped make breakfast for everyone in the centre. Later it was time to get in the water and I could not wait to see him donning his wetsuit and manoeuvring his kayak. After an introductory session from his tutor, who turned out to be a very no-nonsense kind of fellow, all the children went into the water. Bar a few mishaps at the beginning, he got the hang of it pretty soon. At some point they formed a circle and watching him so full of mirth I was compelled to ask myself: 'How am I turning out as a father?' And more pressing, how am I turning out as a father to a boy? Questions that could look lofty and pretentious for some take on a special meaning when you are born in a different country and the colour of your skin seems to be an excuse for abuse rather than mere pigmentation. As my son spun around on his kayak and joked endlessly (without falling in the water once) I wondered what my expectations were when I was his age. True, we look at our childhood through the eyes of nostalgia and melancholy most of the time. Sometimes with rage, sometimes with candour. But we always look back. What we don't do, what we can never do, is look at the present as we're living it. On the one hand we lack the capacity to apply many of the concepts we'll develop in later years to our infantile understanding of the world. On the other hand, even if we were to question the functionality of our surroundings, we would need a catharsis-like reaction to effect change. My father never played with me, there was never a throw-around with a baseball, or a kick-about with a football. It was piano from the age of five, school homework to be completed by the end of the day and a strict system at home in order to attain academic achievement. In a way my son's own short life so far has mirrored mine, piano from an early age, good reading skills and an avid reader, good sportsman, talkative, confident, shy at times. During that weekend at the Shadwell Centre, two of the three girls there took to playing with his curls and sought him out more often than his mate J. Everyone was amazed at his bilingual abilities. I could see myself in that nine-year-old. Even down to his overbearing Dad. Am I? Yes, it pains me to admit, but yes. I am. But the main reason is that I love him, I love him to bits and when the time came to jump into the water and get soaked, he wouldn't do it at first (who knows, stage-fright maybe?), until I re-assured him that it would be OK, that he could, that he would love it. And he did. He just did. And I was laughing. And so was he.

On the way back we occupied the same seats, with the sun playing shadow play. Its illuminated backdrop was the perfect setting for us opaque moving images. My son was reading a book in Spanish before turning to his mate J to pick up the thread of the conversation they'd left unfinished back at the centre. I listened in whilst pretending to read (I swear I can do both) and the innocent tone of it brought back memories of chats under mango trees in my uncles' and aunties' when I was a teeny weenie prepubescent boy. It brought back the smell of September mornings in Cuba as summer still lingered behind for a little sleep-in but autumn was already announcing its grand entrance. There were not coming-of-age ceremonies over that weekend at Shadwell, no titanic feats to accomplish, but on that late summer afternoon and on the two days that preceded it, my son and I grew to the same height together, hand in hand, together.

© 2007

Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

Another week and another example of the sport I have come to call teacher-bashing. Teaching and non-teaching staff alike are the contemporary equivalent of a punch bag. Feeling frustrated? Blame teachers. Bang! Right hand hook. Your flat got broken into and your telly stolen? Education nowadays is the pits! Uppercut. The future looks grim because there are no job prospects for the next generation? Take it out on support staff? Come to think of it, what’s that. support staff? What do they do all day? And why do we need so many learning support assistants, teaching assistants, learning mentors and parent support advisors? Back in my day, it was just Mr or Mrs Smith with cane in hand. Argh! This country’s going to the dogs. Left hand jab. Hit the floor. Are you happy now? Is this country really going to the dogs because of teachers and support staff?

No, it isn’t. And as chance would have it I happen to belong to what they call support staff in a school. So, let me stand up for my colleagues, whether members of the teaching personnel or part of the work force that deals with vulnerable children and/or parents.

The latest lashing to leave an unwanted welt on the already swollen and bruised body of the teaching profession was given by none other than Sir Michael Wilshaw, Ofsted chief inspector. He reckons that pupils in comprehensive schools are not being challenged enough. For those who, like me, still struggle to understand the British education system, a comprehensive is a non-selective secondary school that provides an entitlement curriculum. It offers a wider range of subjects including vocational ones. The figure quoted by Michael Wilshaw this week in an interview on Radio 4 was 65%. That is approximately the percentage of pupils who fall way below the target they were set when they began their Year 7. To clarify matters more, a student labelled as “most able”, the category to which Mr Wilshaw referred, is the one who achieves a level 5 or above for both reading and maths in his/her Sats test at eleven years old. That is where the problem lies, in my opinion.

If I were to use my experience of education in Cuba when I was growing up, my conclusion would be that exams in primary school serve no purpose and cause unwanted – and unforeseen at the time of planning such exams – problems. And I write as someone who sat exams from Year 1 (or 1^st Grade as others might know it) all the way through to Year 12 in college (or high school). Of course, I also had tests in university. Sometimes, when I look back on my student days all I remember is half-term tests and final exams.


Great formation, but is it good education?

Fast-forward to the present and every time my fifteen-year-old son has an exam now, he goes into panic mode. He knows the drill: you can go out with your mates for a couple of hours only after you revise. You have to be home by such and such time and continue to revise. And tomorrow, Sunday? Oh, well, you know the answer to that one. However, when his assessments consist of coursework which he has to complete managing his own time, coming up with his own resources and set as homework to be handed in in a week or two, he is more relaxed, motivated, and puts in the hours. This week, the Secretary of State for Education, another Michael, but Gove in this case, also made an announcement. He wants to overhaul the whole GCSE system, get rid of coursework and bring in the much-hated final test at the end of Year 10 (GCSE year).

Don’t they ever learn? Politicians, I mean? Especially those, like Mr Gove, with no classroom experience whatsoever? The current GCSE uses methods which, although still flawed, give a more realistic picture of where the student sits in the academic spectrum. Bringing back the traditional exam where students will sit silently in three or four rows and sweat it out for a couple of hours will backfire. For starters, that was the type of test I had to sit when I was younger and I always used to hit the books a couple of days before. So, no deep thinking and reasoning there. Secondly, it will affect the learning experience in the classroom (and there was silly me thinking that Mr Gove wanted to improve teaching, not ruin it), because teachers will be teaching with one thought in mind: out of these thirty souls, I need to have at least a good 70 or 75% passing rate. Because who would, in her/his right mind would like to offend Sir Michael (Wilshaw) with his 65%? And whilst we are on this 65% figure, would it also be possible to find out how many students who move up to secondary school without the required Level 4 go on to achieve good GCSE grades, please? Because that would be a good indicator of how good these students' teachers have been in working closely with them in order to bring them up to scratch. But then that wouldn't make good headlines. "Teachers in the UK are doing a good job! They are raising standards!" No, it's not a good headline. The other unwanted consequence of the 65% quote is that it cause a schism to appear between primary and secondary schools where the latter blame the former for not giving pupils the necessary academic foundation they will need later on. Primaries could well retort that in the case of "most able" children who then fail to get good GCSEs it's secondaries' fault for not working hard enough with students who already have had a good headstart. It would be like a never-ending cycle in which no one wins and the only loser is the students. Our children. Your children. Tomorrow's adults.

Is that the type of education we want? I work with professionals who love teaching and working with children. They motivate them, guide them, and mentor them. Yes, you get the occasional bad apple in the bag that spoils the reputation of the others. But isn’t that the same with almost any other profession? I have never met a parent in my line of work who hasn’t wanted her/his child to do well. Never. Maybe they don’t know how to go about it, or perhaps they had a traumatic experience in school. Yet, parents ALWAYS want their children to do well.

If I have an advice for Gove and co. is: find out what it is that makes some people go into education. Is it the money? Is it the holidays? It could be for some, I am not saying it is not. But the majority of education professionals I have met in my life (and I have met more than Gove surely has. I WAS ONCE A PROPER TEACHER!) seriously believe that they have the capacity to teach the next generation. They trust their abilities and life experience to educate children regardless of background, race or nationality or anything else. They are not perfect; they are human and make mistakes as a result. But I don’t think I am alone in thinking that they would welcome more praise than condemnation, especially from those who should be supportive. If, however, Gove and Wilshaw can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the excellent teaching that exists in this country, then, maybe a reworking of Pink Floyd’s famous Another Brick on the Wall will have to do the trick: We don’t need no confrontation/We don’t need no Gove control/Your dark sarcasm is not wanted/Michaels, leave teachers alone/Hey! Michaels, leave teachers alone/Otherwise we will put you both up against the wall/ Otherwise we will put you both up against the wall. Sometimes punch bags need to talk back, don’t you think?

© 2013

Image taken from thetimes.co.uk

Next Post: “Food, Music, Food, Music, Food, Music... Ad Infinitum”, to be published on Wednesday 19^th June at 11:59 (GMT)