The Impact of Teaching

It is impossible to pick one teacher from your lifetime that was the most influential. I think that if you do, you are almost certainly picking your favourite teacher, and that is often a very different thing. It is relatively easy to be a popular teacher but far more difficult to be a truly influential teacher. Also, we are often guilty of making it all about the positive influence only.

When I look back at the unpleasant, bullying teachers at the Maths school where I had my awful secondary school experience they ended up being very influential as I remembered the misery they put me through and resolved to be a completely opposite teacher to them. They came from a different age so to some extent they only reflected teacher training at the time which seems to have been ruling through fear. There were a few decent human beings on the other side of the teacher’s desk but they appeared to be few and far between! That said, I know how I was in my last couple of years of teaching and I was as short tempered as they were and could be prone to letting loose my negative thoughts. It gave me an insight into some of the pressure that teachers are under when they feel like their classes are getting away from them. The difference was that where we were terrified into submission in the 1970s, my classes, especially in the last few years, just looked at me with undisguised contempt whether I was being nice or hard line. I may have been an influence on some students but the balance between those who were receptive and those who were genuinely antagonistic had pretty much tipped by the time I left. To be honest even my few successes were not enough to keep me going given the waves of dislike from ever more entitled students who had neither the interest nor the concentration span to listen.

Teaching is an increasingly difficult career as we try to compete with the short term gratification of modern life which children and young adults expect after their formative years being a succession of dopamine hits engineered by immoral tech giants whose only care is for profit and who don’t give a damn about the damage to society. Sadly we in teaching now have to gamify lessons, teach in short bursts and watch as disinterested students either cheat or produce the bare minimum to pass. The days of influential teaching are at an end I’m afraid. From now on keeping a lid on things and trying to get a small amount of original thought from our students is the best we can hope for.