A Classroom With A View
I thought I would shed some light on why I decided to call this blog A Classroom with A View. It goes back to my own school experience, well my sixth form experience anyway (any of you who have read my first post will be aware of my lack of enthusiasm for my secondary school). After a lot of negotiating (my gentle euphemism for begging and tantruming), I left the all girls exam factory in London aged sixteen and moved to a sixth form that in many ways is very similar to the sixth form I teach in now. Except for the one big difference which is that whilst I attended a boarding school in a village in the Surrey hills, one of the wealthiest areas in the UK, I currently teach in a state funded, free school sixth form in Tower Hamlets, one of the most deprived boroughs in the UK. It turns out that the locations of these two schools, as different as they are, have been responsible for two of the best memories of my experience of education.
One of the many reasons for my dislike of secondary school was the fiercely academic and competitive culture that was built. This was a school where every time there was a test of any description, the standard expectation was to see all of the results brazenly pinned to the wall of the main assembly hall from highest to lowest to grade. Now whilst I fully support the celebration of success you can imagine how it felt to regularly be at the lowest age of the dreaded print outs. Not great for even the most confident of teenage girls. However, English was always my saving grace and the one subject where I actually felt capable. So moving to my new school I was excited to begin studying English Literature A Level (had I stayed at the exam factory my B grades in English GCSE would have deemed me “unable to keep up with a rigorous A-Level course” apparently). So fast forward two terms into the course and I am loving every moment of it having already finished King Lear, The Magic Toyshop and The Handmaid’s Tale. Our next text was E.M Forster's A Room With A View, which for those of you who haven’t read it, follows the adventures of Lucy, a young English girl as she navigates her coming of age years between England and Italy and during the process becomes trapped between two love interests, Cecil and George. Now whilst I was loving the course so far, disappointingly upon starting this book I was left feeling a little underwhelmed. I felt crushed. However, that all changed on one particularly memorable spring afternoon, probably the most memorable of all my school experiences to date as both student and teacher.
On this gloriously sunny day my English teacher led us out of the classroom informing us that due to the beautiful weather we would be having an outdoor lesson. At the time I was just pleased to have a break from taking notes and welcomed the opportunity for some additional suntan as it was a hot June afternoon. Being in a Surrey village we were surrounded by serene and picturesque look out points just minutes from the school site. Upon arriving at one of these we began to read a particularly engaging passage of the book describing a breathtaking view of the Surrey countryside. The sensory description and imagery on the page seemed to stir in me an appreciation for Forster’s style that I had not yet connected with and as we continued to read, my teacher asked us to stop momentarily, raise our eyes and take in our surroundings, all of the beautiful colours and the sounds of nature moments before she revealed to us that Forster’s rich and evocative description of the rolling Surrey hills that we had just read was in fact a description of the exact view that we were looking at. It blew my mind. She had deliberately concealed the fact that the setting of the book was a stone’s throw away from our school and with the majority of students living far away from the school, our knowledge of the local areas had limited our awareness of this key fact. My love for the novel instantly rocketed based on that moment and it is still a moment that gives me butterflies to this day.
Jump forward fifteen years and here I am in my classroom in Tower Hamlets preparing my introductory lessons for a new play that I am teaching for the first time. Set in Hackney in 2003 this play follows the life of a group of men living on the media dubbed “Murder Mile” that became so infamous for the high rates of gang related crimes and violence at the time. Wanting to explore the impact of wealth divides in London boroughs on crime rates I merrily went about my preparations, selecting various articles, images and news clips to explore for contextual value. Excited to teach my first session to such a bright and vibrant group as my A Level class I welcomed them into my classroom and began my lesson. As they were circulating the room exploring the resources that I had provided, following my instruction of discussion based on the stimulus, I was suddenly stopped in my tracks. Without even thinking, one of the images that I had selected to discuss in relation to the topic was of Canary Wharf, with its impressive skyscrapers saturated in wealth and success, towering over much smaller, scruffier blocks of council housing. As I looked up from the worksheet and out of my classroom window I realised that the image on the page was my classroom view in print. And as I asked my students to put their worksheet down and look out of the window and take in the view the butterflies that I felt fifteen years before instantly returned.
When I started teaching it was always my dream to replicate the experience that I had on that June afternoon at the lookout point in Surrey. It turns out that I replicated it all on my own, and without even trying.