This Is This

So on Monday I spoke at my son’s school. Well, spoke doesn’t cover it; I gave a talk, answered questions, helped in the teaching. And hand on heart, I have seldom spent a better day’s valuable vacation time off work.

After work I spoke to my friend Wendy who knows about such things and we reckoned that if I started training now, I could possibly become a teacher by the age of 36 with a big drop in salary and I was seriously mulling it over.

Because to see a room full of six year olds downhearted at my feet because they didn’t want to go out and play at break time, and then see two of them quietly, literally punch the air next to their sides and whisper “yes!” when the teacher said “but Mr. Jones will still be here when you get back to talk to you some more” - that’s the stuff.

I went in to talk to them about Remembrance Sunday and the First World War and I took in pictures of my grandfather (my son’s great grandfather, pictured here and here) and his medals and maps which gave it more of a connection with real life.

I had a great history teacher when I was twelve. The first time we sat in his class, Mr. Miller said something I’ll never forget which fired my imagination up so much that before he had even taught us a thing, I felt that none of his lessons could have started soon enough.

“There books are there and they have names and numbers and you can help yourself and learn them, but it won’t help you at all in the real world. Dates can’t help you be a historian. I want you to know about people and to look at how they lived and what they did. You need to put yourself in their shoes and use your imagination. You’ll need to step outside of your own worlds and back into theirs and above all use your imagination. In this class, you’re going to be all kinds of things. You’re going to be explorers, you’re going to be spacemen, soldiers, acrobats, builders, archaeologists, kings and queens - everything.”

And right away we were hanging on every word in the books and abseiling down to the next paragraphs.

Of course, Mr. Miller did all this without medals and maps, but unless I misread the situation, one Monday, some twenty two years later, I came full circle to know how he felt.

Naturally, there was always the fear that I would say something stupid to embarrass my kid, like blurt out something silly or say bow and arrow instead of machine gun and then only realise my mistake when they did their drawings afterwards.

Or end the talk with “And if you want more information about this and other topics, you can always log on to www.thisisthis.org.”

But no event with me is ever left unstupid, so when I accidentally called my son by his nickname, I recoiled as a handful of kids looked and him and repeated it immediately in an sharp inquisitive tone.

“Nickname?” (omitted by me here for confidentiality)

He said, “Yeah,” And went on and asked me his question.

After the talk, as the kids walked out for lunch, I sidled up to him and said: “How’d I do?”

He stared at the ground and beamed and said: “Great.”

“Look, sorry about the nickname thing.”

“That’s OK. It’s my nickname. I don’t mind.”

He walked off to lunch with his friends, and pride filled the growing space between us.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 8:30 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.