From the Memory Box 

Issue No 29

Amongst my memories that have stood the test of time, I have never forgotten the experience of listening to other boys on the school bus, on the way to their secondary school, make a virtue out of what I considered abhorrent. Several were taking bets on who would be first to get the ‘cuts’ as the strap was commonly referred to in those days. A couple were betting on who would get the most! I was quietly shocked. Interestingly, today, I can still recall in relatively good detail the scene in the school bus. Why so? I have asked myself that question from time to time – particularly since there would be so many other events of which I have no recall at all.

Neuroscientists know that what makes a memory really stick is reconsolidation, when a new memory is reactivated by identical or similar experiences, stimulating the creation of additional and stronger neural connections. Over the course of my teaching career, on more than a few occasions, I have witnessed children for whom success must seem so far away that they had all but given up. Perhaps this explains my persistent memory of that event on the school bus all those years ago.

One year, in particular stands out in my memory – I was teaching a grade 5/6 composite grade in a metropolitan school, one in which a substantial number of children belonged to families that had known little else other than generational poverty and whose belief in education as the means by which to escape their circumstances was virtually in tatters. To boot, several children were experiencing extreme stress in fractured families, blighted by domestic violence.

In the early months of that year, try as might, I could not win them over. Some still not so by year’s end. What struck me most was that, for some considerable time, the harder I tried the more some rebelled against me. As a young and inexperienced teacher that shocked and frustrated me. I had assumed reciprocity from my students. 

A wise, experienced colleague set me straight. “Why should they respond in kind?” he asked, almost rhetorically. “They’ve been let down in life so many times, why risk another disappointment?”

At the time that was very sobering news to me. It did, however, enable me to view the behaviour of my students through a very different lens to that which I had done to that time. Success is cloaked in many colours.

Fast forward to the present. Challenges abound in almost every direction for school leaders. Covid and breakneck-pace technological changes have seen to that. I’ve seen colleagues quit in search of greener pastures elsewhere, searching only because they’ve had enough. Then there are those that have stayed. If success is truly cloaked in many colours, what colours do they seek? More to the point, what are their options?

It's said that success breeds success. On that basis, I wonder, with some trepidation, as to what successes followed those students on my school bus, in their adulthood. They had, after all, done a brilliant job of making a success out of failure all those years ago and, most likely, caused their teachers and parents grief along the way. 

There are more than a few students in all our schools who, in these post-Covid days, ensconced in new-age technology, face similar choices to those of yesteryear. What can we bring to the table in their support?