Pulling on the Shoots

It's a long old road from where Education first dropped me off to where I am now - beginning a second year as a university lecturer as well as my Post Graduate Certificate in Education. Soon, if all goes well, I'll be decked out in gown and mortar board and tottering down the Dome steps clutching a scroll, a Fellow of the University of Brighton.

But it wasn't always going to be like this, and it's an essential part of the PgCert to sit back and reflect on the various roads that got me to this point. Taking any conclusions into a room full of school-leavers next week is part of the magic of teaching.

I watch my own kids now and marvel at just how engagement and encouragement are all that it takes to be good at schoolwork, and how resistance, control and childish stubbornness are what stands between the bright and the dull. Years spent watching small children investigate the world, picking it up and exploring it with their mouths at first, their thoughts later proved to me that it's education itself that sorts kids into those who can and those who can't. Creativity, the keen insinctive desire to know and grow is in everyone until it's knocked out by streaming and target levels. How different would school have been for me if my teachers had remembered that. Learning how best to tease it out of the recalcitrant and applaud the energy in the already shiny without skipping a beat in my teaching is what I need to do now.

But maybe the first thing for me to do is to recognise the rhythm of a learner. How many artists have I heard recently admit to being 'observers' at school now that their thoughts are cooked and dished up so elegantly for us all to try? I was one of those, and I have a 14 year old version sharing my roof right now. Watching her sit on the sidelines, much the same was as I did, just taking it all in, is not as simple as 'lack of engagement', 'shyness', 'laziness', 'recalcitrance', 'teenage behaviour'; it's perhaps more about taking time for all the ingredients of life to steep.

I was a slow-cooking student. School for me was a long sleep over party, and college pretty much the same. I was conscientious and did what I was supposed to and on time - unlike most of the brighter sparks around me - but only because I didn't trust all those chaotic thoughts to come out with anything of any substance. Relying on any creative brilliance or original thought that might be the result of a morning deadline and a night full of caffeine was just too much of a risk. There were the bright kids, and then there were the drones like me who slogged and did just fine. Nobody then showed me what sparks really looked like. Most of the teachers who stood in front of me for all those years would be scratching their heads now - if they could even remember my name.

If I'd only known when I was at school, at college, at the BBC, where Oxbridge was the elephant in the room, that some of the brightest, most creative people take their time to come to the boil, I would have enjoyed life so much more. It didn't feel to me like I was simmering; it was me that put myself on the back burner. Paranoia, defeatism, constant judgements - on me by me became chips so heavy that I was weighed down throughout my twenties. I hid myself away and watched all my 'brighter' friends taking risks, trying things out, doing well. Being seen. I was vicious then, mentally lashing myself for not blagging my way into being a radio producer like Clare, for hiding under the duvet while Al sashayed her way through the music business, for just not being an operator like Charlotte, Phil, Carolyn and Mark. For being me.

And now, here I am twenty years later with more ideas than a saucepan full of popping corn. Of course there were a lot of crossroads and many wrong paths along the way, but where I am at 46 is where I could only dream of being when I was 26.  Simmering my little pot of life, finding more ingredients along the way, increasing the quality as my palate becomes more refined, and stirring it all up every now is what slow cooking is all about. And any cook will tell you that the quality of your curry is down to how long you cook your onions....