Probably the most frustrating part of being a Principal is that it pulls you away from the cheerful, prosaic, rollicking ordinariness of school life. There are plenty of moments of celebration shared with groups and crowds; and plenty of moments of emotional intensity shared with girls and families in intimate circumstances. It is a great privilege to share these. But there is far less ordinary relationship: the shared silliness, the scoldings, the simple quotidian rhythms which make teaching such a rewarding profession.
For this reason, I have had particular pleasure reverting to classroom teacher over the last few weeks. I have had a fabulous class of Year 7s who progressed from rigid wariness in the first lesson (the curse of being Principal!) to cheerful and often noisy unselfconsciousness two weeks later. A key challenge is to wean girls away from their tendencies to perfectionism, and to overcome the aversion to risk which undermines all learning. This is particularly damaging in Maths, because there are right-or-wrong answers which scare off the anxious, and because expanding mathematical knowledge – even more than most disciplines – relies on a rock-solid understanding of what came before. One shaky concept can consume all higher learning, like some sort of intellectual black hole.
So encouraging the girls to overcome both their fear of imperfection and their fear of exposure in front of the Principal was a challenge. Fortunately I was building on the confidence which their usual teacher had established over the past two terms, and the discussion quickly developed in profound and thought-provoking ways. One line of questioning started with the probability of dice, wound its way through the design of games which are fair or unfair to the players, explored Australia’s status as the world’s biggest gambling losers and touched on the constitutional structures behind this (ie state governments’ dependence on alcohol, tobacco and gambling revenues since they relinquished their power to levy income tax).
This may sound rather high-brow, but rest assured that the girls quickly brought the issue of problem gambling back down to earth, with eagerly offered stories of the 12-year-old’s version of problem gambling, ie the tantalising Claw Crane machines in shopping centres which hold out the false promise of a plush toy which can never, in fact, be secured by The Claw Descending From Above. We all agreed that we had been fooled into wasting good money on this – all except one girl who proudly boasted of an improbable run of success and the resulting stash of stuffed animals, thus bringing the edifice of probability theory crashing down on Thursday afternoon.
One often reads in educational literature of the importance of making students’ learning ‘relevant’. Conversations like this one with Year 7 are exciting: their eyes open; you can almost hear the sound of their young minds expanding; the world in all its complexities is coming into focus for them. When the connection with the world is genuine, and it arises naturally out of shared exploration, it is priceless. Generally, however, I am sceptical of the push to ‘make learning relevant’.
Quite apart from the fact that we can never predict what knowledge will eventually become useful, the idea that all learning should be relevant ignores the fact that human beings find enormous pleasure in things entirely disconnected from the real world. Many people do mathematics for pleasure, but it is always of the most abstract kind (Sudoku, Bridge, puzzles); not many people choose to calculate the horizontal displacement of a projectile over their Sunday morning coffee, despite its undoubted utility. Secondly, the search for ‘relevance’ too often results in highly contrived, time-consuming activities which don’t fool kids for a second (and don’t engage them for half of that). Thirdly, the insistence on ‘relevance’ seems to assume that learning is not intrinsically rewarding. This flies in the face of my experience both as a student and teacher.
There are, of course, great rewards in using knowledge to build something or solve a particular problem: one of the most wondrous and stimulating things about mathematics is that the same set of equations or techniques can be applied to explain both DNA and earthquakes; or planetary motion and road engineering. But throughout human history, we have delighted in learning for its own sake, we have appreciated beauty for its own sake, and we have sought understanding for its own sake. In other words, the great aim of a liberal education is to stimulate ‘a lifelong awakening to the complexity of the world’. So: relevance by all means – but not as the objective.
Ms Elizabeth Stone
Principal