Learning: Taking The Plunge

May 25, 2016 writeanne11 Comments

Every week the folks at WordPress set a weekly challenge. I’ve not taken up the challenge before, but this one inspired me. It is to write about a time I learned something new.

In January 2015, aged 58 and a half, I learned to swim.

Now teaching and learning is something close to my heart. I was a primary school teacher for 36 years and I met all sorts of reluctant or struggling pupils. It’s easy to teach someone who’s ready to learn, who’s receptive to what you’re showing them. However, it’s not so easy to coax someone’s who’s afraid to even give it a try, who has decided in advance they’re not capable of learning. But I thrived on such challenges and persisted and tried everything I could think of to persuade reluctant pupils to just give it a go.

Then, nearly eighteen months ago, the tables were turned. I was now the reluctant learner, the one of was afraid, who didn’t believe myself capable. I had never learned to swim. But I’d set myself some personal challenges when I retired from teaching and top of the list was ‘get in the water and swim, woman!” An additional motivation, on top of the personal challenge, was that I wanted to be able to swim with my grandchildren on a family holiday to Cyprus later in the year.

So I booked a one to one hour long session with the swimming teacher at my local pool.

Now, I should say I’m not afraid of water. I’ve always liked bobbing about in the (warm) sea and when my children were wee, I’d always go in the pool with them when we were away on our annual holiday. I made sure they learned to swim – by delegating the task to my husband.

So, no, not afraid of water. It was just I believed I was the only human being in the history of our species who couldn’t float.

But I was wrong. With the confidence building teaching of my wonderful teacher, Yvonne, during that one hour in the pool I eventually took my feet off the bottom of the pool and with a few feeble and styleless strokes I swam. I swam a couple of widths. I went out of my depth and I treaded water. Me! the least buoyant human ever – could both float and swim.

I walked home through the January snow, oblivious to the cold, wrapped in a coat of smugness and pride. An Olympic medallist couldn’t have felt more proud.

I’ll never be a water baby, but yes, I swam with my grandchildren last summer.

I did it. I took the plunge and learned something new. And boy, did it feel good.

New signage needed outside schools

November 29, 2011 writeanne2 Comments

They’ll have to add the ‘elderly people’ traffic sign to the ‘children crossing’ one outside schools…

I have a day off work tomorrow. A midweek day to myself – very rare. I should be rejoicing. But I’m not. It’s not a holiday. I will be on strike. Along with thousands of other public sector workers I’m withdrawing my labour. I’m taking a stand. I haven’t taken the decision lightly, but I felt I had to stand up for myself and others. I hate that it’s being portrayed as private versus public sector – each sector needs the other – we all need both. Didn’t someone say, ‘we’re all in this together’ ?

I voted for the (at least two-year) pay freeze in my own profession. I believe we should take some of the pain. But, to be told I must double my pension contributions – for a smaller return – and that I must work longer wasn’t something I felt I could go along with.

I’m a teacher. I love my job. I’ve done it for more than thirty years. The pay is adequate, the holidays are great, the children make it very special. I find it much more tiring than I did ten years ago and have to pace myself more. But I keep up to date, keep attending training courses, use laptops, a smartboard, MP3 players, blogging, school friendly social media, etc, etc – to meet the needs of my 21st century pupils. I’m fifty-five – but not a dinosaur.

However, I did get a wee wake up call recently from one of the seven-year-olds I teach. She said ‘I like you Mrs Stormont.’ ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I replied, feeling proud and gratified. ‘ You’re just like my granny,’ she added. I was a tad deflated.

But there is a serious aspect to the above anecdote. The government wants teachers to work until they’re sixty-eight. Crikey, if I’m still at it then, I’ll probably drop dead in harness after a P.E. lesson – or a particularly strenuous long-division session. And, I must say I don’t really want my grandchildren taught by (almost) septuagenarians. I don’t mean any disrespect to elderly people, but it seems to me that the requirements of the job are such that one has to be very fit, energetic and have loads of stamina. Yes, some seventy year olds have all these things, but they are exceptional. A sixty-eight-year-old teacher will be older than the primary schoolchild’s grandparents.

As it stands, my pension, which I was hoping to get at sixty, will be about £10000 – even after all these years – but that’s fine. I’ll live accordingly. I’ll bow out of teaching – I’ll be sad to leave my pupils – but happy to hand over to a new generation of eager young teachers. And, I’ll be happy to be a grandparent on the other side of the school gate.

So, tomorrow I strike. We ARE all in this together. We owe it to ourselves, to each other and especially to future generations to do this right thing.

International Literacy Day

September 8, 2010December 3, 2010 writeanneLeave a comment

I suppose it sounds a bit of a grand and pompous claim, but I think I’m justified in saying I’ve devoted my working life to helping children become literate. After all I am in my thirty third year of being a primary school teacher. Ten years ago I did a Masters degree in education and my thesis was on the topic of literacy. And for the last few years I’ve been a teacher of children with special needs such as dyslexia. Added to that I’m also a writer – and writers need readers. So all in all literacy is a bit of an obsession of mine.

Today was International Literacy Day – hence my even higher than normal level of interest. Being literate is something most people take for granted. But across the world there still remain many barriers to people’s acquisition of literacy.

As part of my Masters degree I studied the role of education in sustainable development and through that I got the chance to go and teach in some township schools in Cape Town.

There were classes of 60 or more children with few, or sometimes, no books. But the children were incredibly eager to learn. When I got home to Scotland I contacted my employer, The City of Edinburgh Council, and they agreed to send out the Edinburgh Literacy programme with all its resources and reading books to the schools I’d worked in. I hope my time there and my employer’s support may have, at least in a small way, improved some lives.

But there’s still so much to be done. ‘Knowledge is power’ according to the saying. And it is literacy that gives access to much of our knowledge. Check out UNESCO UK’s website http://www.unesco.org.uk/international_literacy_day There you can read (amongst other things) about projects in the developing world to empower women through literacy. In the words of Irina Bokova, the Director-General of UNESCO, ‘When a woman is literate she can make choices to dramatically change her life for the better.’ And presumably the lives of her children will be improved too. See also the website of Room to Read http://www.roomtoread.org This wonderful organisation does much to create and distribute books to children in the developing world.

On the same website there is information about the forthcoming Knowledge and Innovations Network for Literacy where literacy researchers and practitioners can share knowledge and debate literacy topics.

Education and communication in our globally networked world depend more than ever on the ability to read and type. But literacy is not yet a universal right. So, even if you just read your kids a bedtime story, do your bit to extend that right.