I've been dreaming a lot lately about teaching. I don't know why, because It's more than ten years since I was last in a classroom, and the children I dreamed about last night were in a class way back in the 1980s. I taught in primary schools for about 30 years in the end, despite the fact that I never enjoyed school myself as a child. And, probably because I didn't enjoy school, I've spent most of the rest of my life teaching myself to do various things.
When I started making jewellery, a friend showed me how to solder silver, and after that I was on my own. I bought a book the friend recommended, Metalwork and Enamelling by Herbert Maryon, and that book became my bible. I taught myself to make chains and rings, to set stones and forge shapes and eventually made a precarious kind of living from doing it. I can see now that I would probably have been a far better silversmith if I'd signed up for a course and learned in a more systematic way. Who knows? I might have become rich and successful and never become a teacher or a writer.
I taught myself to play the guitar and the banjo, too. That was the way most people did it with those instruments back then. It was kind of a rebellion against the kind of music you were taught at school and against the way most people learnt to play the piano. I still kind of hate the idea that schools today often teach rock music. Half the fun was doing something teachers hated. So, as with the jewellery making, a friend showed me how to play a chord on the guitar (A minor, probably) and then we'd just strum the chords and make stuff up. I've had the odd lesson along the way since then, but if I want to learn new stuff I mainly learn it from books or people I'm playing with or, these days, from YouTube.
What else have I taught myself to do? Well, there's plumbing, car maintenance, carpentry, house painting, gardening, bicycle maintenance and, oh yes, writing books for children. Of course, my education extended beyond school. I spent three years studying English Literature, which may or may not have helped with the children's writing. I used to say that spending years reading long and often difficult novels gave me a taste for fast-paced thrillers and children's books, but the truth is that I went to university to get away from home and studying was a very minor part of my time there.
After university I spent a couple of years travelling around the UK on a bicycle, and then working on farms before I decided to do a PGCE in primary education. Back then the PGCE included courses in the sociology, psychology and history of education. Among other things, we were expected to read Rousseau, Freud and Ivan Illich. Illich's book, Deschooling Society, was published in 1971 and was highly critical of institutionalised state education. It wasn't just critical, though. Illich proposed solutions. He suggested that networks might be developed whereby individuals might use the telephone to find teachers, and that they'd be able to seek out teachers who could teach them just what they needed to know, and with whom they were in sympathy. In those days, before the Internet existed, Ivan Illich was imagining YouTube.
I thought Illich was right about the pernicious effects of state education but, at the same time, it seemed as if English primary education at least was doing a decent job. My friend, Derek, who was a GP, told me he'd become a GP because general practice was said to be 'the last refuge of the English eccentric.' I felt a bit that way about the world of primary education. I even thought we'd be able to survive the National Curriculum when it arrived in the late 1980s, but I was wrong. Luckily, YouTube and the Internet arrived just at the right time, especially for confirmed self-educators like me.
Now, before I proceed to give instances of the wonders of online education I'd better tell you what my local bike shop owner said about YouTube. 'It's been great for business,' he told me. 'People watch a video and think, I can do that. So they take the thing to bits and then can't get it back together again. That's when they come to me' What this tells you is that it's essential, if you're going to teach yourself to do something, whether with the help of the Internet or with the help of books, that you learn to follow instructions carefully. Actually, that's true of any situation where someone's trying to teach you something. But, having said that, I use YouTube to do all kinds of jobs on my bike, to learn new things on the guitar, to solve plumbing problems, to fix a variety of different broken household items, to sew neat seams, to grow new crops on the allotment, to cook . . .
Nowadays I could even use YouTube to find valuable advice on how to write books for children. I just checked and there's plenty there. But I never asked anyone's advice about writing children's books. It was another one of those things that I taught myself to do. The only writing experience I had was writing essays at school and university, and keeping a sporadic diary. As was thinking about this I remembered that when I was at university I used to ignore the essay titles I was given and make up my own. Unfortunately, this gave me some problems when I came to do my Finals, but it does indicate that I was always determined to do things my own way.
I figured that I'd read a lot of children's books and I knew what I liked, so therefore I should be able to write one myself. It was a slow process. Maybe here too I could have cut some corners, and saved a lot of paper, by doing some kind of a course, but I don't think so. I think the years of writing and throwing away were a crucial part of the learning process. And I also know that in everything I do I'm an improvising, trial-and-error kind of a person. (I don't like the modern version - trial-and-experience. The errors are essential.) My approach wouldn't work for everyone, but it worked for me. I might have gone on a course and not got on with the teacher, after all. It might have been like my swimming lessons.
When I was 40 I decided I ought to learn to swim, so I signed up for adult classes at the local pool. The instructor walked up and down the side of the pool calling out things like 'two widths of front crawl leg kick.' Then, while we did it, he called out, 'Well done, well done!' There was nothing more to his teaching than that. The experience peaked when he decided one week that we should all get in the deep end and tread water. I said I hadn't done that before, but he ignored me. He looked on, calling out, 'Well done! Well done!' as I slowly sank.
After that I bought a book of swim tickets, found a time when there weren't many people in the pool, and taught myself to swim.
There are good teachers in the world, of course. I was taught to drive by Lawrence 'Max' Bygraves, my next-door-neighbour's cousin. He had long, straggly hair and glasses, drove school buses morning and evening, and spent the days teaching people like me to drive. He was very calm, very patient, and very surprised when I passed my test first time.
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