Today I was at Hammersmith Saturday again.  Apparently there was some confusion in parental minds about whether this was the half term break, which for Hammersmith Saturday is not this week (as it already is for regular schools) but next week.  Present were a mere five pupils, and five teachers (assuming I count), plus one teacher’s daughter, who joins in as a pupil or not as she pleases.  So, I was pretty much surplus to requirements.  I myself will not be attending Hammersmith Saturday for one Saturday in mid-June.  When I revealed this news to Other Man Teacher today, he hardly panicked at all.

So, what did I actually do today?  One thing I did was sit down and, as a pretend pupil, do some of the arithmetic tests that Miss Maths sets her charges.  I did this because (a) it will make me better at teaching arithmetic, which I want to get better at, and (b) because it does the children good, maybe, some of them, the ones who care, to see just how very very quickly, compared to most of them, mental arithmetic can actually be done by someone who is quite good at it.  As I told Miss Maths, Rachmaninoff used to teach the piano by just himself playing the piano to his pupils.  He didn’t make his pupils play, or tell them how to play.  He just played.  He set a standard.  I was, in a somewhat more mundane setting and far more mundanely, attempting the same technique.  It didn’t work, though.  The ones that didn’t care didn’t care.  The ones that might have were busy doing their own sums.

But the main thing I did was just get to know a few of the children who were there that little bit better.

I have long held to the theory that one of the Great Educational Divides in Humanity is between People Who Were Confused At School, and People Who Were Bored At School.  Education Theory, for instance, is either elaborated to solve the problem of Confusion, or of Boredom, the Traddists being the ones who were Confused and the Progressive being the ones who were Bored.  Two of the girls present were classic “I’m bored!” pupils.  “I’m bored,” they said.  “This is boring.” But one of the boys in particular is a classic Confused type.  He doesn’t mind being bored, so long as he knows what he is supposed to be doing, and is left to get on with it.  Children are different from each other.

Talking of children being different, another basic divide in educational theory concerns whether education means focusing on strengths, or on weaknesses.  Are teachers supposed to bring out spikes of super-achievement from their pupils, while those same pupils continue, e.g., to do sums by counting on their fingers?  Or are teachers supposed to home in on weaknesses and try to correct them?  Miss America, who is a very capable and much loved teacher of English at Hammersmith Saturday, is, so it appears to me, a weakness correcter.  My lazy, fun-loving instincts tend towards playing to strengths and dealing with alleged weaknesses by just going around them.  My understanding of a lot of home educators is that they feel this way too, not just out of laziness and not wanting to have perpetual fights, but because they think it’s for the best.  (I recently read an HE-er’s posting about a son who learned to hand-write very well but in his own good time, without being pressurised.  But, I can’t now find this.  It has a picture of his writing.  Anyone?)

So, for instance, those two Bored Girls were being driven almost foetal-position with the tedium of the sums that Miss Maths was giving them.  So after their ordeal, to cheer them up, I just sat down and had a conversation with them.  This worked well.  They are both highly witty and stimulating conversationalists, and conversing with them is playing to one of their strengths.  (Women love to talk.) They soon cheered up.

My playing-to-strength way of teaching arithmetic would be to find out what a kid really, really cares about, and find the arithmetic in that.  Miss Actress, for instance, would be asked things like: how many lines are there in this Shakespeare play?  How much money did Angelina Jolie get for her last film?  If she got this for her last film, and this for the one before, and this for the one before that, etc., how much did she make in the last decade?  Things like that.  And as for all those boys who are going to be international footballers ...  (By the way, the England team is going to have thousands of young men in it in fifteen years time.) Well, the Premier League is an absolute hotbed of arithmetic.  I learned a lot of my mental arithmetic listening to cricket commentaries on the radio, and reading the scores in the newspaper.

Well, that is what I would do with the Bored ones.  With the Confused ones, I simply let them get on with their arithmetic, helping them with any confusions.