I am a teacher.

It took me five years to train and qualify as a teacher. I worked as a TA and HLTA whilst accomplishing this. I brought up two boys who have now/nearly flown the nest. Whilst I was doing my training I so looked forward to the day when I was asked what I did for a living and could say that I was a teacher. Never did I guess it would be when I was buying a new bed in John Lewis with interest free credit – but that’s another story.

There have been many things written about teachers recently… The Guardian Secret Teacher section has recently been criticised for being negative and is now doing a u-turn!

As we approach the General Election, teacher politics are to the fore and online chats focus on what changes we would like to see and the role of OFSTED…… Important I know but tonight I have stopped to think about my role.

I AM a teacher – my job is to educate children, to follow the National Curriculum, to assess, measure and track progress, to justify myself and my methods through Performance Related Pay. Sometimes it is about them passing tests and Michael Rosen sums this up very well here.

But it’s more than that, and tonight I think about what that ‘more’ is:

It’s caring about all aspects of their lives – who they live with, how their families work.

It is listening to what they say and what they don’t say.

On a daily basis it is being aware of whether they have had breakfast and have they got enough lunch?

How do they learn, what things stop them learning? How can I make sure that they do learn and put strategies in place to help them catch up?

For me, it is about being a constant in what can be chaotic lives. Also, dare I say it, it is about loving them.

I know there is much more than this that I will probably edit it in at a later point in time.

Children whose families rely on food banks, children who are looked after, children who become young carers, children who need the security of school – many more ‘categories’ – these are the children who make up so many classes in our schools and need us to do so much more than just teaching them ‘stuff’ and then deciding whether they have learned it.

We seem to jump through the perceived OFSTED hoops.

Have we covered SMSC? Is our teaching of British Values explicit enough? Is our marking in depth enough with clearly identified ‘next steps’? Have we indicated where verbal feedback has been given using a code that Turing would have struggled with? Have we assessed and levelled ‘the pig that will not be fattened’ by doing this?

Tonight I am thinking particularly of the Haim Guinot quote that I have pinned up above my desk (by the way, there was a time when I discovered this and thought I was the first to have done so – duh! – so naive!).

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.” ― Haim G. Ginott, Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers

This is everything that I believe as a teacher – everything.

I have to be this to all the children in my primary classroom.

Once again I have spent some of my time on holiday thinking about my class, coming up with ideas for how to help them learn and how to make the learning enjoyable (not necessarily ‘fun’ – I cringe when I hear people say “I have planned a fun activity.”

I am a primary school teacher – I can be everything to a young child and I must be true to what I believe. I CAN make the whole thing work – the learning, the pastoral care, the jumping through hoops.