This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.
Michael Commane
After many years away from teaching I’m back in the classroom and dare I say, enjoying it, though it is still early days.
Last year a school was looking for a German teacher. I’m filling the breach.
On day one I made the decision I should have the sense and wisdom to learn from all my previous errors. I believe I’ve learned bits and pieces in the intervening years in the different jobs I have done.
It’s ‘other-worldly’ now to believe that there was corporal punishment in our schools up to the 1980s.
Let no one in Ireland ever tell you they were the good old days; for many it was a reign of terror. What happened the great Christian idealism of the founding women and men? Even how we were addressed, we were always called by our surnames, how degrading; at least so it was where I went to school.
My current experience is limited to where I am now teaching. I’ve been impressed with the respect students have for one another and especially how they behave themselves with fellow students, who have special needs.
It’s a multicultural school and I have not noticed a whiff of racism, indeed it is quite remarkable and of course that’s how it should be. One evening cycling home from school I saw a poster on a bridge saying: ‘Ireland is for the Irish’. It was raining but it so infuriated me that I got off my bicycle and peeled it off the bridge, and I did a good job of it too.
Maybe I’m living in cloud cuckoo land but I have noticed no issues around mobile phones, I’ve never seen one in the classroom. But of course I know they are glued to their phones and devices outside class hours. I’ve noticed that they have little awareness of the world around them. Better said, if it’s not a thread on their phones they are oblivious to it. Are they more submissive than previous generations?
Maybe so and my suspicion is that the phones are killing all our brains.
Since coming back to the classroom two questions have been engaging me; is it healthy for Ireland to have two parallel education systems; fee paying schools and non-fee paying schools? Surely it is another ingredient in creating a two tier society.
And, how exactly does a Catholic ethos-run school differ from a multi or non-denominational school?
The school where I’m now teaching is multi-denominational and honestly, I see no difference between here and in the Catholic schools where I taught.
True, there are no Christian symbols, but Religious Education is taught as a subject.
If the Catholic ethos is all that it is made out to be, how come so many of its students have in adulthood waved good bye to it? Just a question I often ask myself these days.
Wise words from WB Yeats: ‘Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.’ But it seems he may have taken it from Greek philosopher Socrates (469 – 399BC/BCE). See, even then traces of primitive A1.
AI offers great advantages but truth must always win out. Teachers especially have an important and challenging job.
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