How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?
I think that over my life I have said ‘yes’ to opportunity on a number of occasions when ‘no’ would have been the easier answer. It started very early on in my working life. After just over 6 months I realised that my first job at Lloyds Insurance didn’t suit me at all so I went to the RAF Careers office and spent two hours one lunchtime doing the tests. 6 months later I was going to RAF Swinderby to start basic training. When I was invalided out due to the ankle injury picked up in basic training I took the first opportunity I saw to get myself completely away from the UK and my problems and spent a summer over in America. After that I worked in the civil service for nearly two years before a phone call at work asked me if I wanted to take a place at Staffordshire Polytechnic the following week!! I gave myself a whole 10 seconds before saying yes, a decision that wasn’t very popular with my fiancée! We’re still together 38 years later so you could say she ended up accepting it! My decision to take a PGCE in Economics and Business Studies and start my teaching career was another quick pivot which required a quick decision to move and led to 4 very happy years at Kidderminster. I left there to move to Japan, and from there things just snowballed!!
Have all these decisions worked? No! However I suppose even the ones that didn’t led me to something that did. From 1988, certainly after I made my decision to go to Stoke for my degree, my decisions were made with Janet who gave me the courage to take them even when I was really reluctant to do so. Interestingly when I started to write this I thought I might end up by saying that I needed to say ‘yes’ more often but looking back I said it far more than I thought I had.
What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?
I have always wanted to be able to play a musical instrument. As someone whose entire life has revolved around music, to be able to reproduce the sound of a guitar, drums or saxophone is the dream. Sadly, my brain won’t play ball as my dyspraxia makes it impossible to develop the coordination to seamlessly and naturally move my hands with the speed and accuracy required. One year in my 20s I remember learning guitar at an adult education class and I was the only person who made no discernible progress in 10 weeks. I couldn’t change the hand position for chord changes so I was unable to play the simplest song all the way through. Each verse was taking about 3 times as long for me as it was for everyone else. At the end of the term I gave up to save myself further embarrassment and never picked up another instrument.
My youngest daughter played clarinet for 4 years and she made huge strides as she inherited my wife’s coordination. My youngest son was similarly able to play the guitar at a reasonable level, but he never really carried it on. I really enjoyed hearing both of them make progress and I was pleased that I had been able to give them the interest in music that encouraged them to do so.
I would now have the time to develop my playing abilities but as they are non existent there seems to be little point. As a teacher I know when someone is a lost cause, and believe me lost causes are vanishingly rare, and I am one such lost cause when it comes to musical instruments!
What is your favorite type of weather?
Various types of weather can elicit emotional responses. Mist and fog can be atmospheric and make you think of ghosts or dark deeds. Sun can be very pleasant as long as it’s not too hot. Rain can be refreshing in the summer and disheartening in the winter. However, there is only one kind of weather that is magical and that, of course, is snow.
The picture above shows my 9 year old daughter taking her toboggan home after a day where we entered into the joys of snow as never before. In 2010 we had well over a foot of snow in South East England, something that has never been repeated in the 15 years since. School was cancelled across the county and the day stretched before us full of possibilities. After breakfast we went into the back garden and built a snowman, which ended up staying there for over a week, with both my daughters joining in the fun. We had a snowball fight which was great and we had races in the snow which was about 18 inches deep which were very tiring. After that we went inside for some hot chocolate and decided how we were going to spend the afternoon. The previous day, my wife, who works at the local hospital in an admin role, walked in and walked back in the days before working from home was widely possible. When she walked back she was dragging a toboggan behind her, much to my daughter’s delight! That was what would provide the entertainment for the afternoon. We walked to the local park and I spent the whole afternoon watching the children toboggan down the slope and never tiring of it. Although the park was crowded there was an air of friendliness and happiness that never exists in any other weather. As a community we were brought together in each other’s company and we knew it was something special, unique and magical. When walking home I saw the scene above and thought it might make a good picture. I was absolutely overjoyed when I saw it because it was pretty much perfect and the lighting made it magical as it reflected off the snow. You can’t see my daughter’s face but you know it has a look of wonder at the magical scene. It’s my favourite picture of all the thousands I have taken and would never have been possible in any other weather conditions.
If I have one wish it is that I could experience a huge amount of snow one more time in my life.
Who was your most influential teacher? Why?
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.
What do you wish you could do more every day?
Appreciation is something I have been working on for the last few months in particular. That’s not to say that I have never worked on it before but I always gave up at the first hurdle. As soon as something went wrong I fixated on that rather than the things that went right. A year ago today I went into work on my birthday and told my line manager that I was resigning. It’s one of the more unusual ways to celebrate your 60th birthday! Today as I turn 61 I am a much more contented and positive person. I am still a work in progress but I appreciate far more of the simple everyday things in my life than I used to. As my landmark birthday was focused on the momentous decision to finish full time work I am having a day out with the whole family today, the first time we have all been together in one place for well over two years! If that’s not something to appreciate I don’t know what is. 🎂🎂🎂🎂
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 