"The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do."
John Holt (1923-1985)
It was a pleasant surprise to stumble upon this familiar name during my online meanderings a couple of weeks ago. I discovered Holt's books in my local branch of the W.H. Smith's newsagent's/bookshop when I was in my early teens (there was a brief period of my life when, for some reason I now forget, I was going home from school by bus every day; but, facing a wait of nearly an hour, I consumed entire books while browsing the shelves in Smith's). His How Children Fail and How Children Learn left a particularly deep impression, and may well have had a decisive influence on my becoming a schoolteacher after university.
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From the Wikipedia article:
He held that the primary reason children did not learn in schools was fear: fear of getting the wrong answers, fear of being ridiculed by the teacher and classmates, fear of not being good enough. He maintained that this was made worse by children being forced to study things that they were not necessarily interested in.
Indeed. When I taught English and journalism for a few years, I always argued such with colleagues, specifically regarding writing and reading. Unfortunately, by the time my students showed up in my classroom, they'd already had the pleasure of language drilled out of them; I tried to be gentle and generous, and hope that I managed to restore it to them.
(I've been waiting for years for the doorbell to ring, and when I open it there's a camera crew wanting to interview me not about my own writing but about a former student who just took a Pulitzer and attributed his/her success to me. Waiting. And waiting. And waiting...)
It is vain to crave validation in the acknowledgement of others, or in their achievements, my friend. With teaching, I think, you have to relish the experience at the time, the excitement of forming a connection with developing minds. You can't expect anything more from it. It is enough to know the feeling of having dropped a pebble in the pond. You never know where the ripples are going to end (and you may not want to, would prefer to remain in ignorance of the occasional destructive tsunami you may have contributed to starting: Mao and Hitler were probably galvanized by inspiring high school teachers at some point...).
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