After twenty years in journalism, I decided in March 2020 to take on a part-time interim job as a Dutch-English teacher at a school in Merksem, Antwerp.
After all those years as a journalist, I had never been somewhere where stories were as plentiful as in today’s classroom. It was a journey around the world and a journey to myself. By stepping out of my comfort zone and standing in front of the classroom, I realized how my image of education was determined by the prevailing clichés. I was able to debunk them one by one for myself.
After my first three weeks in class, I was already crooked from back pain (from stress). I went to the physiotherapist and did exercises with someone else. That man was also stressed because he had to give a presentation at work. ‘My work as a teacher consists of seven presentations / workshops / feedback sessions per day,’ was what went into my head. When I told this to an acquaintance, he said: ‘That is really not the same as in business.’ I completely agreed with her. In education, the public is much more difficult.
It was only in education that I first came into contact with what society really looks like today. Even if I had been to many places in the world as a journalist. I realized how much I had been living in a bubble. The bubble of highly educated colleagues, friends, neighbors, parents, family, … I knew that I lived in that bubble, the so-called ten percent, but I couldn’t really imagine what life was like outside that ten percent.
Those experiences resulted in a book, Expedition educationand as a result I was recently invited to a debate with education expert Wouter Duyck at the literary non-fiction festival Faar.
In preparation, I read his book to know what his discourse consists of. During the reading I made many interested ticks when it came to his expertise in the field of cognitive psychology. Duyck knows how the brain works and what you can do to study better. Useful information with three students at home and a job as a teacher.
Unfortunately, Duyck always finds himself on thin ice when he tries to apply his theory to practice. Teaching ex-cathedra in an auditorium is really not the same as teaching in secondary school.
Knowing Gaza
There are many factors in secondary education that make teaching an extra challenge. For example, the general total fatigue among students. Let me clarify: many students today work after school hours, sometimes literally for a living, with an appalling 11 percent of students in Antwerp growing up in poverty.
As a result, students often sleep with their heads on their arms in the morning. At first it made me angry, but after a while I heard how a student combined two jobs to pay her own school bills, and I was deeply impressed. And after work and homework there are of course the socials. You can prevent screen use at school, but at home screen time can easily increase to seven hours a day. Lack of sleep is a real issue for many young people.
During our debate, Duyck posited the fact that today’s students no longer develop a critical sense because they no longer read. I also see that danger, but I also understand why it happens. This is the generation that was raised with the AVI keys. I regularly meet a young person who has started to associate reading at an early age with something that was not fun.
In my opinion, the Dutch curriculum that I had to follow did not always provide the pearls that can be read today. Fortunately, I read a lot myself, so I set the plan in motion to appeal to students with books that suited them. A student borrowed my own copy of with great interest Seasonal work by Heike Geißler, the story of a literary translator who works at Amazon for a living, because no one wants to pay for the work she is really good at.
When Duyck wanted to illustrate his point about the consequences of reading too little, he cited the example that students do not even know where Gaza is.
We had to correct him on that. Today all students know where Gaza is.
Ask the right questions
During the debate he also accused our young people of a lack of ambition. Research had been done into this. I asked him to explain exactly how that investigation had gone. The questionnaire stated that students had to indicate whether they had ambitions for college or university. Apparently not enough had indicated that they were going for a master’s degree. From which Duyck concluded that our youth are not ambitious enough.
There I had to explain to him that these are not the right questions. Both at college and in secondary school, I have students for whom a master’s degree is not an option. At school I heard the story of a girl who wanted to study psychology, but her father wouldn’t let her because she would have to study somewhere other than Antwerp. So the girl got a degree in Applied Psychology but still wanted her master’s degree. The only solution for that girl was to get married. It was good for her fiancé that she would get her master’s degree.
It is those young people who do not indicate that they want to obtain a master’s degree. “Madam, this is all normal for you, but not for us,” a student once said. When you hear something like that, it breaks your heart.
Apart from that, we are one of the few countries where the emphasis is still on the master’s degree. A bachelor’s degree abroad is just as good. ‘College is college’, to say it in English.
When I recently heard three HR specialists speak at an event at our college, it was unanimous: it has not been necessary to have a master’s degree in the labor market for ten years now.
‘TSO courses do not have the curriculum you expect for future teachers’, it is stated further in Duyck’s book. I have now taught in double-finality classes (formerly TSO) for 2.5 years. There are very different profiles together. In my opinion, many young people who follow courses with a double finality are often more intelligent than the young people in transfer directions (the former ASO). In my classes, half had dyslexia and the other half had ADHD. With help, patience and support, all those young people will get there. In traditional transfer schools, they sometimes prefer not to see students who need help come.
For example, the third stage of double finality often includes students who have been in a transfer direction up to and including the fourth year of secondary school. With frustration and demotivation, these students started the third grade with double finality, ultimately graduating in the sixth grade with renewed energy and life experience. I wonder who is best suited for further studies. The child who didn’t have to put in much effort or the child who had to find a way and found it himself?
I have taught students who approach life with all the zest for life of a seventeen-year-old, but with the life experience that I may have only acquired as an adult. And who know very well how important a diploma is as a guarantee for a better future. I did not encounter that pamper generation that everyone likes to talk about at my school.
More than ever, our society needs diversity in the classroom. In all senses of the word; teachers who are dyslexic themselves and therefore know much better what it means to have a label; teachers with a migration background… Our students need teachers who are role models or who they can identify with. So yes, of course there must also be teachers who have completed TSO.
Teaching expertise? Not necessary
Apparently it is a typically Flemish thing that we expect the most salvation from educational experts who have never set foot in a classroom as a teacher.
In the medical world, professors regularly see patients. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to consult a cardiology professor who has never seen the inside of a heart. In fact, I prefer to see an older specialist who has seen many different cases and can make many connections (pun intended).
The education experts featured in the media and in policy today are all of the same type: highly educated, usually male, white and not provided with extensive didactic experience. Except for the chairman of the Commission of the Wise. For the people who have ever seen the unsurpassed program Radio Gaga have seen: that is the prefect of that time machine disguised as a boarding school to the 1950s somewhere in the Kempen.
So yes, my point is: I would like more lived expertise and also more diversity in who we feature in the media and in policy in the field of educational innovation. Do we want a think tank for the future or a reserve of patriarchy at the top of education?
I rest my case.
