Practice Makes Perfect

It is a huge privilege to work with young people, to watch them grow, fall and pick themselves up. Helping them to navigate those early teenage years with skill and often remarkable maturity is never dull. The Talmud (Taanit 7a) quotes Rabbi Chanina who declared: “I have learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues and most from students.”

Each and every day, in interacting with young people, I learn something new. Personally, the thing that gives me most satisfaction is the number of my own students who are now my colleagues: those who I taught as young teenagers and who have decided that the memories of their own schooldays are so positive that it is a vocation to which they want to dedicate their own lives. It makes me feel that we have done so much right and that all the frustrations, moaning and threats of looming school inspections were worth it after all.

Teaching, of course, is a postgraduate profession that takes years to perfect. Many people, particularly in our community, feel that as they once went to school, they could be a teacher. Because they are educated in something, because they have knowledge, teaching would be easy for them, and I have often wondered whether if we applied the same to other professions it would hold true. We have all been to the dentist and many of us have GCSEs or even A-levels (or equivalent) in science, but we wouldn’t presume to take up dentistry with nothing but optimism and minimal training. In our schools, we work hard with training teachers both in the initial training year and the subsequent two years through the Early Careers Teacher Framework to coach, mentor and support those at the beginning of their careers so that they can forge a path towards a long, fulfilling and successful professional life.

Perhaps next time we interact with our