Calm and Serenity

Here's another quote from 'Primary Education' (HMSO 1959):

'There is, in good schools, enough leisureliness to prevent the children or teachers feeling hurried.  Children of five are still slow in doing quite simple things, such as washing and going to the WC, or putting away their materials and preparing to move from one place to another.  From a sense of there being time to do what has to be done, comes a feeling of calm and serenity.  Without serenity no environment can be satisfying to a child; nor should he be forced beyond a pace at which he can go without confusion.'

When I started teaching it was just about OK to say things like that.  Nowadays people look at you as if you are crazy.  Once I taught a boy, let's call him 'A'.  He moved to the school where I was teaching from another one nearby and I met his previous teacher.  'Poor Andrew,' she said.  'He's just not very bright, I'm afraid.'  On his first day he said: 'I don't have much luck, Mr May.  My dad left, and then we had to move house and come here.  Now my dog's died.'  Then he settled down to make a model with cardboard and a roll of sellotape.

Every day after that he came to school and spent most of his time making things with cardboard and paper and sellotape.  His reading and writing weren't so hot, but if you wanted a good model 'A' was your boy.  A dozen years later I was passing through the village, stopped at the Post Office and there was 'A's mother.  'Guess what,' she said.  'He's doing engineering at 'A' level.  And he still gets through a couple of rolls of sellotape every week.'

'A' needed space and time and serenity and calm.  I'm not sure he would get them today, because he would need to progress through his levels and sub-levels on a termly and half-termly basis.

The picture is from 'The Practical Infant Teacher' (1929)  It's an example of a sentence to be used in 'the sentence method' of teaching children to read.  I am fond of the sentence method.  It is closely related to the 'look and say' method, which is how I learned to read.   More of this another time!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Tin of Words

Image
The tin of words is a symbol of the innate conservatism of the infant teacher.  When I was training as a teacher I studied plenty of different methods of teaching reading, but no one told me that I would need to start collecting two-ounce tobacco tins.   I'm not suggesting that the 'inventor' of the Look and Say method, the late Fred Schonell , specified an old tobacco tin for the transportation of words to and from home, but when I started teaching they were to be found in most infant classrooms.  Children in the real world learnt to read using a reading scheme and a tin of words. The system worked like this:  using a graded scheme like Sheila McCullough's ' 1, 2, 3 and Away' featuring Roger Red-hat, Jennifer Yellow-hat et al teachers simply gave the children the new words from the next book to learn as flash cards at home.  Next day, all being well, the child returned to school, read the book to the teacher, and took the new one away with a few more word
Read more

Mike Ingham 1949 - 2009

Image
Mike died on 22 nd of February. For ten years between 1980 and 1990 I played with him in a band called The Moles , along with Derek Guy and Henry Holzer . It started out as a ceilidh band. We met on Friday evenings at Henry's house to rehearse and chat, and played gigs maybe once a month, but more frequently in the summertime.  In the early years I didn't have a car and Mike would pick me up every Friday in his Morris Traveller. Ellie and Emily always looked forward to his arrival and it usually took at least half an hour's conversation before we were ready to leave.  Mike was a terrific guitarist. He grew up listening to his dad playing all the standards on the guitar, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of those old songs. Sweet Lorraine was a favourite of his dad's. He was brilliant at working out the chords, too, and also at faking it when he wasn't too sure. We called that improvising until Mike came up with a better word - impoverishing!  Sitting on
Read more

Walter de la Mare 's Collected Stories for Children

Image
  In 1947 the Carnegie Medal was awarded to Walter de la Mare for his Collected Stories for Children. This marked the start of the second decade of the Carnegie and was the first winning book since 1940 to have nothing to do with the Second World War. It has nothing to do with the war because all the stories were written during the 1920s and 1930s and this is another of those awards which were made, not for the book itself, but in recognition of the author’s contribution to children’s literature. Walter de la Mare c.1924   However, even had Walter de la Mare composed all of these stories in wartime it is doubtful whether the war would have had any influence on their content. Current affairs do not find their way into de la Mare’s work. What interests him is the boundary between this world and the various alternate realities of his imagination. Or, to put it another way, de la Mare believes there is something more than this material world; something just glimpsed on the edges of our per
Read more