Finding the Fun

Over the last year or so you may have watched a Katelyn Ohashi gymnastic floor display but if not, you should watch one. Do it now. Click the link. They are great! They are great for a number of reasons. Clearly when you watch one, you can see the incredible skills involved and the strength she must have to pull off some of those moves but my favourite bit is the sheer joy on her face. Not only does she radiate joy but those watching her do so as well. Everybody is enthralled with what’s going on and when she gets the perfect score, the place erupts. It’s very cheesy American but so what? It’s great!

When you are watching Katelyn you start thinking about why she isn’t representing the USA at the Olympics or at the World Championships because of how good she is. Thankfully the BBC has provided us with the answer in this excellent little report that’s all about her. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/av/gymnastics/49856691

What we discover is that she fell out of love with gymnastics. At twelve years of age! She was rising up through the ranks and then it all got too much. What she needed to do was rediscover her love for gymnastics, so she went off to college, found validation in stuff other than gymnastics and then got back into it on her own terms. It’s a fascinating story and one we can learn a lot from.

If I think about my career, which I would assume mirror others, you start in the classroom and then slowly progress upwards. You have to do this in many respects to get more money and you have to show leadership if you want to move onto the Upper Pay scales. I went through a standard path by becoming Head of Subject, then Head of Faculty, whilst dipping my toes into other areas such as Head of Student Voice, Senior Tutor in the Sixth Form and Head of House. As you progress, you want to try a bit of everything to see whether you want to go down a pastoral route or a curriculum route. I always had a vision of being an Assistant Head and then a Deputy and I was lucky enough to be given a secondment onto the Senior Leadership Team at my school. However, the more I moved up, the more I felt removed from what I originally got into teaching for and that was being in the classroom, trying to get my students to love my subject as much as I did. As you move up, you find yourself in more meetings, with more paperwork, with less time to prepare for your bread and butter, which then makes you feel guilty about not delivering the quality the students deserve. You suddenly realise, a bit like Katelyn, that you stopped enjoying what you do. You’ve lost the fun.

So what did I do? Well…I didn’t leave teaching (which I think some would do) but went back down the ranks to unshackle me from all of the stuff that was boring the death out of me and just focused on the classroom. My pay went down but I didn’t mind because I was much happier and that happiness filters through to the students. Just like those watching Katelyn, your joy becomes their joy and that lends itself to a much better learning environment.

I’m obviously lucky that I could take the hit on pay and I know that it’s much harder for young teachers coming through today with the state of the housing market, along with student debt and the way teacher pay stagnated for a number of years. The point I’m trying to make though is that we need to find ways of keeping the joy in teachers’ lives because if we don’t, then the recruitment crisis will get worse. Sometimes we might want to reflect, like Katelyn did, why we are miserable in our job and take bold steps to deal with it.

I think there is a culture in teaching whereby if you want to stay in the classroom, then you are not seen as being ambitious and then not respected as much but we have to remember the humble classroom teacher is the bedrock of a school. I have had colleagues ask me why being a really good classroom teacher is not good enough reason to get a pay rise. They feel they have to do something that they know they won’t enjoy or won’t be good at in order to go up the pay scale. That sounds like a very perverse situation to be in and is surely not good for the individual or for the school.

The AST role was designed to keep those great teachers in the classroom through higher pay but they were expected to share their experience in other classes and in other schools, taking them OUT of the classroom. Obviously we just need to have higher pay for teachers that means classroom teachers don’t feel the need to move up the greasy pole. Clearly there are lots of teachers who want to have more responsibility and they should be rewarded for that but I see a lot of misery from those in higher positions because they are not prioritising what they genuinely got into teaching for – the love of their subject and the joy of passing it on.

Maybe the fun can be found in extra funding for schools!