The magic of teaching…

In my bedroom as a teenager, alongside pictures of pop stars like Wendy James and Whitney Houston, I used to have a postcard of William Blake’s ‘Ancient of Days’ on my wall. I think I picked it up at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge on a school trip. I was slightly mesmerised by Blake’s artwork but that picture was the pick of the bunch.

I never thought too much about the meaning of the picture, I just liked it from a visual perspective and thought it was very dramatic. When I heard that the Tate Britain was putting on a William Blake exhibition, I was really excited because it gave me the opportunity to see a lot more of his work but also I could see ‘Ancient of Days’ in the flesh. It’s a brilliant exhibition and would encourage anyone to go and see it but it’s a bit of a tease as the ‘Ancient of Days’ is right at the end and to be honest, at one point, I thought I had missed it.  But there it was…just by the exit and it was magnificent.

And I finally found out what it was all about and was fascinated. According to the Tate, the picture was about scientists (like Newton) trying to measure everything (Urizen using his golden compass) in the world and Blake worried what that meant for creativity, imagination and emotion. You can read about it more here in this interesting blog post. It reminded me of a show I saw at the Soho Theatre – Rob Newman’s ‘The Brain Show’. If you read some interviews with Rob Newman, you can probably understand why. He is constantly thinking about the limitations of neuroscience to explain our actions and science generally to explain the world.

Rob Newman is not anti-science and I’m not anti-evidence when it comes to education but I do believe that some people have started to use the science of learning as a way of enforcing a view that there is only one way to teach. Obviously this is complete nonsense…as Blake and Newman point out, we are human, not robots, therefore to suggest that there is one way to engage someone doesn’t make sense. This relates a little bit to Dylan William’s comment about ‘everything works somewhere…’ and therefore it is important to think about context when discussing any educational intervention. As teachers we have to be continually questioning what is put in front of us and this blog by Gary Jones makes this point nicely. We should also question why they are putting this point of view in front of us, do they have something to sell? What are the biases concealed within their arguments? Have they ever tweeted (for example) evidence that counteracts their key raison d’être?

Also, I like to think there is a magical quality about being a teacher. When I think about my favourite teachers, there was something about them that could never be measured…they had a mystical quality about them and why would we want science to snuff that out?

So it’s interesting to think about ‘Ancient of Days’ being on my wall. Now that I fully understand it, I love it even more…maybe even more than my teenage love for Wendy James!