Observations of a spy

What if we taught the person, not the content?

I have no shame in admitting that I spent some time spying on my neighbors this year. I am always dialed in and switched on when it comes to education, particularly for those that have barriers to access or quality of provision, so when I found myself temporarily living next door to a refuge for vulnerable children and young adults, overhearing an intervention tutor providing one-to-one support… I couldn’t help but be very nosy.

I was sat on the other side of a fence for the first meeting between the tutor and the student, and I made sure I was there all week for subsequent sessions. Over the course of that week I developed a deep respect for the tutor, they were incredibly patient, compassionate, and they were never going to succeed, I couldn’t help but think it was their own fault.

The child was difficult, to put it very mildly. There was plenty of swearing (from the child), times where I could hear the child just get up and walk away from the teaching space, times where I could hear the fallout from the child throwing objects around the space, it was not a good environment for learning. The tutor didn’t raise their voice once, and slowly, day-by-day they made progress through Math and English standards. In the months that have passed since I overheard that week of teaching, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that the tutor failed the student.

They were never going to close the gap, if anything it was widening just at a slightly slower pace. The tutor themselves, I couldn’t help but wonder how long until they burnt out. In the months that have passed I haven’t been able to stop replaying the first conversation I overheard them having, here’s how it went;

Tutor: Hi, I’m Tutor Pseudonym, you can call my Su if you’d like, what’s your name?

Student: My name’s Long, you can call me Long (laughter)

Su: Hi Long, it’s nice to meet you, what do you like, what do you enjoy?

Long: I love fast cars, and motorbikes, and engines.

Su: What’s your favourite?

Long: The Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, it's really fast

Su: That’s great, it’s good to have things we like. Do you know why I’m here?

Long: Yeah you’re my teacher cause they won’t let me go to school

Su: That’s right, and I’m here to help you with English and Math, I’m here to help you and only you. If you help me help you we can get you there, does that sound okay to you?

Long: I don’t like math.

You heard that as you read it right? The drop in energy? The boredom, the depression, the ‘this is just part of the same system that’s been failing me for years’ attitude creeping in. I did. I was so disappointed and I couldn’t help but wonder what if? What if ‘Su’ had grabbed hold of Long’s interest in cars and connected as a person. A person with interests and passions.

I’m familiar enough with the curriculum they were using to know what they covered, and they covered one, perhaps touched on a second, objective in math that whole week, it’s a common objective in many curriculums at some stage or another, reading, writing and ordering place values up to 1,000,000. It’s a key objective, it underpins so much of what comes later. Long struggled. The gap widened. Su struggled. Long slowly got it. They inched along.

Here’s how the conversation could have played out, and how it’s been on repeat in my mind for months now.

Long: The Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, it's really fast

Su: How fast? I mean could it get me to City faster than my car could, I’ve got a NewerCar?

Long: Yeah it could, it has a top speed of 155mph and does 0-60 in 6 seconds.

Su: Yeah but you’d have to stop for petrol, my car doesn’t have to and mine has an arbitrary top speed that’s close, prove your car is better.

Long: Nah, I wouldn’t need petrol cause it’s not that far, could do it on one tank so I wouldn’t need to stop

Su: How do you know that? What’s the fuel economy per mile?

Long: What’s that?

Hook. Line. Sinker. Math. Wouldn’t that have been a different conversation? Imagine the objectives they could have covered that week, or even in that conversation? Ratios, speed/time/distance equations, conversions of metric and imperial, comparison of numbers, place value, the list is endless and it far exceeds content expectations. Long would still have challenges, and at times would still have been difficult, undoubtedly, but they would have found a passion for learning. A passion that started when we teach the person, not the content.

Of course, this is a what if scenario so there’s no way to know for sure what would have happened if Su had taken a different approach. But what if I had intervened sometime that week to test my theory. I did.

Later that week they were working on adjectives and descriptions with their English work, the same issues were present, I could hear the same behaviors happening but I had a chance to intervene. One afternoon Long kicked their ball over the fence, into the property I was in and they could hear us in the garden, so they called over ‘throw my ball back’.

‘Which one?’

‘The one I just kicked over’

‘Didn’t see it come over, what’s it look like I’ll check in the bushes’

‘It’s a blue one’

‘Anything else? We’ve got loads of balls in the garden’

‘It’s got stars on it, red ones’

Luckily, we really did have lots of balls in the garden, my own son having lots of mini footballs due to a very enthusiastic grandad being a huge football fan. I threw one of my son's similar-looking balls over. ‘That one?’

‘Nah, this is a size 3, mine's a size 5’ the little one comes back over.

‘So it’s a blue, size 5 football with red stars, right?’

‘Yeah’

For those of you not in education for that age, the description I repeated back to Long, that he had constructed, would exceed the objective level for his age. Long wasn’t incapable, just tired of not being seen for who they are in a world where they are never seen. ?Over the following weeks we come to learn quite a bit about Long, they would have long conversations with my son, who is significantly younger, over the fence. They were a lovely, energetic child. Their story was heartbreaking, being bounced around schools, homes, communities, eventually finding themselves our neighbor.

There isn’t much we could do to help Long but the question remains at the front of my mind even now. What if Long and every other student like Long were seen as individuals, even if just for one hour by one teacher? What if every student was taught like an individual?

What if we taught the person and the content taught itself?