Reflections at (not) the end of year

T S Eliot on education, and a message from the archives...

As all teachers know: the year ends in July, not December.

Our time for reflection is a summer activity. More sun-lounger with an ice-cream, than sofa with the Quality Streets.

That being said, I have been thrown into reflective mode this holiday season thanks to a brilliant biography of a former teacher at my school. Michael Roberts (1902-48) was a true polymath - employed as a Maths and Physics teacher, he was a Chemistry graduate who went on to publish compilations of modern poetry, helping to launch the work of W H Auden, Stephen Spender and others. There aren't many biographies of teachers, so to read just how much Roberts packed into a such a short life was truly inspiring.

The magic begins in the foreword, which is written by T S Eliot - stumbling on this, in a dusty archive copy, felt quite emotional. Imagine this kind of artefact being written for a teacher today - what would be the equivalent?: Attenborough lamenting a retirement in the Biology department? Bill Gates penning a piece for Computing? Krugman for Economics? - it is difficult to match (suggestions in the comments, please).

In the expertly crafted Foreword by Eliot, we get a feel for the perception of teachers in the 1930s. Those in the profession might find some resonances in the 2020s:

“He had been a schoolmaster, and a very good one; perhaps too good a schoolmaster for his own good. This most exacting and exhausting of professions leaves little time and energy over, for those who have the ability to teach, and whose conscience demands of them, for their pupils, the best they have to give”.

Eliot saw that Roberts would “…serve too faithfully the machine of administrative work, with all its petty and exasperating detail”.

And perhaps most cutting:

“He would have been distinguished among educators, as the head of a great school; and those who appreciated his mind and sensibility would have deplored the waste”.

Despite the warnings of his literary friends, Roberts dedicated his working life to education, eventually running a teacher training institute. His leisure time was dedicated to writing his own poetry and running mountaineering expeditions. In later chapters, we hear of the ambitious school mountaineering expeditions from his former students. For these students, it is the discursive tangents in lessons and the life-skills learned on mountainsides that have left the deepest marks.

I finished the book around the same time as a colleague retired after 30 years in our school. His retirement speech touched on many of the themes of which Roberts would be familiar, delivered from a crowded staff-room, of which Roberts would have been just as familiar. The twin themes of life-long learning and creating opportunities for children outside the classroom shone through - from a colleague who certainly fell on the right side of the adage, “there is a big difference between 30 years of experience, and 1 year of experience repeated 30 times.”

Some food for thought over the left-over turkey this New Year season - what would your students say about you, and who would write the book?

To leave the final word with the most distinguished of writers: