Teachers also have Teachers teachable times....
When I first started teaching I was 21, just finished with 4 years in varsity. I had no idea what I wanted to do other that I knew I wanted to work with children. I didn’t have a teaching qualification...so I got a job as ‘principal’ to a little so-called coloured school in Grahamstown (this was the early 80’s in SA) where I had to teach the children in Afrikaans (a subject I had taken on the lower grade at school...) I enrolled with Unisa to get my HED.
I had a marvellous older pre-school teacher I visited each Monday afternoon for tea and help with planning what I did with the children. Without her I am not sure what would have happened given my youth, impractical nature and a complete inability to ‘do books’.
So, back to my story, I went off the rather famed Ichthyology department at Rhodes on my second week to get some things for my theme table on the sea. They were amazing – I came out with bottles of fire fish, a parrot fish and other things I can’t remember. They even were prepared to lend me a coffin sized tank holding a shark but I was driving a Volksie then sadly (I thought)...I also was given a lovely sea snake which they said I could take out of the formalin to show the children.
So I gathered the children for morning ring and then said with an excited voice ‘just wait I am going to show you something’. I went to the bathroom to wrestle the sea snake out of the bottle of formalin. The snakes head protruded proudly up from the bottle. I walked through with great aplomb to the children. With one smooth movement and no sound at all they sprang up and ran as fast as they could through the door...
The image is from Clip art
We are always talking about using ‘teachable moments’ with children – and I do so agree learning can happen from anything – even memorably from a sewage leak once....
But this moment in my teaching career was a teachers ‘teachable moment’. And I think we forget these – or forget to remind ourselves and student teachers of these moments that happen perhaps every day of one’s teaching life.
I learnt more that day about teaching, children, and what I was actually supposed to be doing that day of the snake than perhaps any other time in my life.
Most of teachers ‘teachable moments’ happen when one makes a mistake, but many are also just from keeping open to learning from others, the children, life and the funny, glorious things that happen every day one works as an ‘educator’...
I am trying to inculcate this idea into my own students...