Ronan Swift is a teacher and a musician. He is also well known for his unusual choice of shoes! In this More Stress Less Success guest post Ronan recalls a particular question posed to him some years ago at the end of a lesson and uses his shoes as a platform for a provocative discussion on imagination, inspiration and creativity in the teaching profession.
“Sir, we were just wondering (giggles); why do your shoes (more giggles)…look like Cornish pasties?” Much giggling.
This little enquiry was a genuine end of class interaction some years ago now and the reason I’ve included it in my post is because it started me on a train of thought that has led me to writing this post. Today, I’d like to talk to you about shoes.
Well, no what I really want to talk about is not strictly speaking shoes but has more to do with imagination, inspiration and creativity.
When a country decides what to include in the courses it makes for its children’s education it has to include all the building blocks of knowledge that are the basics upon which further learning can blossom. Every school system needs to both provide its young people with fundamental knowledge and equip them with certain skills so they can perform various tasks and so they can do their own learning. On this we all agree. It’s too easy to give out and say that our education system places far too much emphasis on learning facts and stats and not enough on cultivating imagination and creativity. That’s not really what I want to do.
I just would like you to be a bit more aware of the importance of creativity and imagination in making the world a better place and for you to be aware of the potential to be creative that you, that we all have. For me creativity begins with a sort of openness, with allowing thoughts, words or phrases, ideas to enter your mind, to wash over you and to allow your thoughts to roam, to make connections and links that may lead to a spark of something new and different. Certainly you can’t shut yourself off and be ‘closed’.
Some of the greatest leaps of creative thinking are of course in Science where the cutting edge thinking isn’t even provable and takes a leap of imagination just to begin to get your head around it. So we’re not talking about the arts alone but cures for cancer or space exploration are all driven by the creative impulse that we all share.
It’s often, quite annoyingly, mentioned on teacher training courses that educators need to be creative in how they approach their job of classroom teaching. This is of course absolutely true and highly desirable. But imagination and creativity need to be properly supported and provided for. It is irritating when throwaway references are made to creativity which in most cases can make an individual teacher shrivel inside with feelings of imaginative inadequacy. But maybe that’s just me…Anyway the notion is usually mentioned, and then left to dangle in a haze of wishy-washy-ness, with an excruciating vagueness that suggests that imagination and creativity are ‘god-given’ bolts from the blue rather than faculties worth working upon, cultivating and genuinely valuing.
I hope at this stage that I have not lost any of you but, just in case, I'm going to stop for a brief Einstein quote moment - every MSLS guest-post worth their salt ought to have an Einstein quote moment!
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
Be aware that new ideas and creative leaps can’t take place in a vacuum and in this educational process we’re engaged in we should all feed off one another in the cut and thrust of the classroom dynamic…and beyond.
Take for instance the business of my Cornish pasty shoes. Now that to me is a nice, creative, imaginative leap; a simile or metaphor in the lingo of literature. Maybe it was a seemingly small, throwaway gag aimed to giggle at me rather than with me but nonetheless I’d like to think I had the openness to chuckle about it but also to reflect on the remark and let it develop into further thoughts.
I got to thinking that yes my teaching shoes were rather tired and worn looking, it even made me take a step back and realise that I had a pair of shoes that were my ‘teaching’ shoes, ones I pull on at the start of the day and usually throw off after classes and rarely wear otherwise. When I looked around the common room I reckoned the same was true for my colleagues.
If my ‘teaching shoes’ were that jaded looking they must have been on the go a long while; I wondered how many miles they’d covered. And just how our feet are probably the part of our bodies most taken for granted and yet they our vital grounding contact with the earth.
I thought about the different expressions in English related to shoes, ‘how he’s too big for his boots’ and ‘hang up one's boots’, ‘the shoe is on the other foot’, ‘walk a mile in a man’s shoes’, ‘those are big shoes to fill’. And I reflected that yes, they certainly are big shoes to fill if you’re talking about teaching shoes; having the wellbeing of young growing minds upon your shoulders is a huge responsibility.
Shoulders. I got to thinking how as teachers and learners we are of course all standing on the shoulders of great teachers and thinkers of the past; a vast chain of human knowledge and endeavour with many links stretching into the distant past and reaching for a better future. I reminded myself that while education seeks to find new worlds in outer space and open up unimagined vistas into the future, it still remains the key to raising billions of young people out of crushing, brutal poverty.
In some small way to practise what I preach I have written a song taking the Cornish pasty joke as my start point, my inspiration. My colleagues and I have often agreed that creating art to do with teaching is a risky business because the end product often turns out to be sentimental garbage, for example the film, Dead Poets’ Society, so I hope this goes down all right.
And thanks for the idea to whomever you Cornish pasty people were all those years ago…and most importantly remember that you can be an inspiration for your friends, your family and yes sometimes…even your teachers.
The song, predictably enough, is called Teaching Shoos.
Teaching Shoos
These teaching shoos look like two stale pastries
Their shabby, scruffy suede has seen much better days than
These teaching shoos have walked a thousand miles for you
Checking copybooks and writing on the white and blackboard
Not too long ago these teaching shoos were pupil ones
Trudging up & down the soulless corridors of high school
When in rebel mood, and a bit too cool for school
I’d swap my leather brogues for trainers and try to start some revolution!
Mr. Socrates walked barefoot round the agora
He couldn’t teach to save his life he only claimed to make men
Think about the truth, of justice and obedience
He favoured death before dishonour as he downed the hemlock
Then when rabbi Christ was scolded by a Pharisee
For having let a sinful woman wash his feet with grateful tears
He saw his chance and taught without a lesson plan
‘Abundant love shall flourish forth from great forgiveness’
To be or not to be the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the
Volume of the object or subjunctive, ‘Ou est la boulangerie monsieur?’
Norwegian acid rain, the Balkans like a tinder box about to
Blow The Glass Menagerie i smidirini, amo amas amat
These teaching shoos are standing on the shoulders of
All the dedicated educators through the ages
And we’re striding down this two way street of learning curves
And out into the stratosphere of unimagined dreaming
These teaching shoos can sometimes be longwinded
And it comes to pass that it’s almost time to walk to class.
The lyrics of "Teaching Shoos" are posted here with permission from the composer and are subject to copyright.
No comments:
Post a Comment