Why we do what we do has been on my mind recently (I mean teaching!).

It’s been the most bizarre 18 months of most of our lives and the world feels like it has got a lot smaller.

Yesterday I saw an ex student. I was walking into a supermarket (masked up) and outside there were two girls in their early twenties trying to encourage people to join the local gym. One of them was staring at me as I got closer and she bounced towards me “are you Mrs Muldowney? You won’t remember me!” … my response was “Of course I do, Anna”  …  she beamed and then threw her arms around me (I know … social distancing and all that but she didn’t give me a chance to respond if I’m honest!!). This specific student is one that I talk about a lot and her journey with us as her maths teachers.

When we first moved to Alcester Academy we base line assessed the year group (Haters can do one, as its one of the things that we do … context, context. context!) and Anna got 12 out of 100. She was devastated at the score and in her mind it reinforced her belief that she was rubbish at maths (and as it turned out she felt she was rubbish at everything).  As we always do, we reinforced that its not about the score – the score does not define the student. It’s a starting point. We spoke at length about what we were going to do together with her over the next nine months and that we would never ask her to do anything that we didn’t think she was capable of, but that didn’t mean the work would be easy … learning isn’t always a piece of cake. Anna wasn’t the most confident student in maths and neither was she personally confident. She didn’t follow the trend at the time of oompah loompah style tans and fake nails. Whilst Anna was very mature for her age we must be reminded that being 15/16 is horrible at times, often in terms of “friendship fallings out”. Anyway, she did everything that was asked of her and more – she attended after school revision, came to do maths work and often ate her lunch in my classroom so I got to know her quite well and badgered us for past papers. In lessons though she was an easy student in that she was very quiet and I got the impression that she could easily be one of those students that drop off your radar because of this.

At the same time we came up with the idea of supergrouping our (mine & Seagers) two teaching groups (so we had 48/50 kids in a normal classroom … yes it was cosy!) as we needed to offer the students a different diet to the one that they’d had until the end of year 10. Routines were key and starting every lesson with one of our bread and butter starters reinforced the prior learning on an ongoing basis and Anna was one of the students that at the end of the year said that this regular revision helped her massively.

Anyway, on results day it was delightful to see her face as she opened the results to see that she’d gotten a grade B (it was one of the last years of the old spec). I think I may have even cried because she deserved it so much.

Yesterday as she unwrapped herself from my neck I could see what a delightful, energetic, confident woman she had become. So very different to the girl she had been but always had the promise of being. She stepped away and said “I need to say thank you, thank you for everything you did. You believed in me.”

No Anna, Thank You. Thank you for reminding me that what we do as teachers matters.