“Miss.”
The first time I heard it, I assumed it was meant for someone else.
“Miss.”
Then louder.
“MISS!”
The voices came from another table in the dining hall. Arms waving. A few Year 2 children half-standing on the benches, determined to catch my eye.
“What are you doing, Miss?”
For a moment, I wasn’t sure what they meant.
I looked down at my tray.
“I’m having my lunch.”
There was a pause.
The question wasn’t mischievous. If anything, it sounded sincere. They seemed genuinely puzzled that I was sitting there, eating the same school dinner from the same plastic tray as themselves.
I’d simply found an empty space and sat down.
Not many teachers eat with their pupils, but the reaction was overt. The senior midday supervisor looked less than convinced. After that, the children stopped asking questions. They didn’t need to. Something had shifted. I was still their ‘sub’, their supply teacher for the day. But I had become, in some small way, another person as well.
Let’s talk about education
For the past fifteen years I’ve mostly been in schools without teaching in them. My role consisted of coaching headteachers, executive heads and senior leaders by training staff and developing teaching as an adviser and professional coach. My work had taken me into headteachers’ offices rather than the classroom. I listen. Long conversations about staffing, safeguarding, inspections, budgets, behaviour and attendance. Conversations that are rarely repeated outside the room in which they happen.
As an observer, you notice the systemic patterns and support overwhelmed headteachers with their heavy load. And it is a heavier load than ever.
So, returning to the frontline, responsible once again for a class of thirty children, felt strangely familiar. The register. The rhythm of the day. Whiteboards. Exercise books. But with a few more props to manage with water bottles now almost as large as the children carrying them. Much had changed, of course; the last time I was in charge of a full class was 15 years ago. The range of ability in a single classroom was far greater than I remembered.
Curious pupils
What surprised me wasn’t the teaching. It was the continual asking. The continual hands in the air.
“Is this right?”
“What do I do next?”
“Can I use this pen?”
“My pencil’s broken.”
“I haven’t got a whiteboard rubber.”
Many of the children already knew the answer before they asked. Or could quite easily solve it themselves.
But they weren’t looking for information. They were narrating their lives out loud.
I found myself wondering when that habit begins.
Listening to school leaders over the years, I’d heard countless discussions about Improvement. Attendance. Outcomes. Behaviour. Recruitment. Budgets. Redundancies. Necessary conversations, all of them. Yet back in the classroom, another focus was necessary.
Children are growing up in a world where almost everything is shared, commented on and responded to immediately. The classroom asks something rather different of them: to listen, to wait, to think before speaking and, sometimes, simply to be quiet. Those things may now need teaching rather than assuming.
Attention has its own geography.
Some children seem to attract attention without trying. Others become remarkably skilled at managing without it. Some were sucking all the air of possible attention.
By mid-morning I changed the rules.
“No hands up.”
A few arms, already halfway into the air, slowly lowered.
“When I ask a question, everyone thinks. Sometimes you’ll talk to the person next to you. Sometimes I’ll choose someone at random. Everyone thinks.”
The room hesitated.
The pauses after each question became longer. Longer than felt comfortable. Children glanced instinctively towards the usual volunteers before realising they would have to stay with their own thoughts for a little while. Conversations became quieter, answers fragmented and difficult to hear or even understand. More tentative. Ideas seemed to arrive from different places in the room.
From different voices.
A teacher’s perspective
Teachers always carry children home with them. Not literally, of course, but in name. The child who made us laugh. The child who challenged us. The child we worry about.
Those names are easy to remember because they ask to be remembered.
Today, it was the quieter children who stayed with me instead.
The one still assembling an answer while somebody else was already speaking.
The girl who needed another five or even ten seconds.
The boy who had worked out that there was little point putting a hand up because the friend he knew and sat beside almost certainly would.
I realised how easily those small adjustments become habits.
Teaching is partly about deciding where to look. And that is a path much harder to tread than ever before. Not because some children deserve more attention than others, but because attention has a habit of travelling the same well-worn paths unless we interrupt it.
I still think about that lunchtime.
The children who called across the dining hall had no difficulty making themselves heard. They wanted to know why their teacher was sitting beside them, eating the same lunch from the same tray.
But I find myself thinking more often about the children who would never have called out at all. The ones who wait. The ones whose names are less likely to come home with us at the end of the day.
Every classroom has children like that.
Who, despite everything we know about schools, are we still failing to notice?
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