Last Tuesday, I went on one of my weekly expeditions to Kings Cross to help out with the teaching at one of the Supplementary Schools that Civitas organises there every week.  We all - four teachers of whom I am the most junior, and about twenty five or so children - get there just before 5.30 pm, and we all leave just after 7.30 pm, there being a rather spartan community centre in a rather nice little housing estate just to the north of the big railway station.  I walk through the concourse of the railway station and along the right-most of its long platforms on my way from the tube station to the community centre, and back again afterwards, which are pleasing things to do.  Something about that vast Victorian roof elevates the spirit, and I’ve retained my small boy’s love for trains.

The routine that has become established for me is that for the first hour, my job is to teach Small Boy.

Teaching Small Boy last Tuesday was a pleasure, first because he was a little more biddable and obedient than usual.  I don’t like bossing children around, and am consequently very bad at it.  In my fantasy world, children would learn for the sheer joy of it, rather than being nagged by parents and teachers to learn.  Magically, the children in Brian World would be eager to learn just the sorts of things that we adults wish them to learn.  They would badger us to help them learn to read, and once they had done so, they would devour knowledge of all (virtuous) kinds, from books, from the internet, by attending lectures and tutorials given by scientists and scholars and men and women of action of all kinds, all the while keeping us informed of their self-educational triumphs and of their movements, and eagerly listening when we advised them about their next self-imposed tasks.  They would spend a little of their time playing computer games (of a deliberately educational sort – which now exist, apparently), and they would spend a little time watching television (again, to learn things).  But they would not spend all day and every day doing these things, thereby becoming zombies unable to sleep because hypnotised all day.

Meanwhile, back here on earth, my job at King’s Cross for the first hour is to nag Small Boy into learning to read and write.  This is mercifully easy, because he is only about five and although not very frightened of me, he is frightened of his mother, who would be told if he was too recalcitrant.  We read through the Butterfly Book - that is to say, he reads while I point at the words and stop him if he makes any errors and make him read it again right.  Small Boy then does whatever writing he chooses to do, my only rules being that he has to write something and that it has to be as neat as possible.  While he does that, I wander around in the rest of the big room, looking at what some of the other children are doing in the other three classes, trying not to be too annoying, and trying to learn about how that teaching is being done.  I then return to Small Boy and complain about his writing, politely but informatively you understand.

In among all that, Small Boy and I talk about things, as a sort of reward to us both for the diligence with which we both mostly do what we are supposed to be doing.  This time, I gave him a physics lesson.  I showed him how light that looks blue from indoors, surrounded by yellow indoor light, looks grey when you go outside.  We went outside so that I could show him.  Nobody seemed to think this was strange.  If they did, they didn’t say so.  (Actually, the light still looked rather blue outside, so it was actually not a very successful lesson from my point of view.  It turned into one of those Teachers Can Be Wrong Too lessons.  Can’t win ‘em all.)

What pleased me most about my session with Small Boy last Tuesday was that, whatever it is that I and all his other teachers are doing, it is clearly working.  He now knows words which he definitely didn’t know when I started with him and he reads more fluently.  His writing is definitely improving.  He is, in short, one way or another, being successfully educated.