It’s funny how the smallest comment from a child can open up a whole can of worms.
The first time it happened to me, I was in my first year of teaching and triggered a lively debate on the theme of where babies come from, including somewhat more graphic descriptions than I was expecting (it was a village school and they all had animals), all for the entertainment of the silently shaking county advisor who happened to be sitting in the corner.
These days, I am a little more prepared, but there are times when I am rendered speechless - and it isn’t always with mirth.
We all know that children are a bit like blank pages. They have little experience to go on, especially the very young ones. As they grow, go to school, visit places, see a bit of the world, it all starts coming together, but still the misconceptions persist - and this is especially true for some children with SEND.
Every teacher has to get used to thinking on their feet pretty damn quickly, but this is especially true for those of us in primary. We work with them all the time, we get to know them really well; the bonds between us and our charges are close, and it isn’t long before we are asked all sorts of things because they trust us. And, as a teacher of children with SEND in a mainstream school, I get asked questions that raise serious issues for us as education professionals.
Sometimes, the fault is not ours necessarily: you know that if they only stopped worrying about what Ben was doing at the back with his pencil case, or spent more time reading their own book or doing their own work, rather than leaning over the table to see what Katerina was doing, they would have more of an idea of what was going on.
But sometimes they ask you a question, or they fail to answer one of yours except with an utterly blank look, and it stops you in your tracks. You wonder if you and your decisions, not them and their behaviour or particular kind of learning difficulties, didn’t have something to do with their spectacular misconceptions, or enormous holes in their knowledge.
Yes, reading is a vital skill, but there is other knowledge too - and it gives what we read meaning, not to mention holding our interest. After all, there’s not much point being able to decode the word “instrument” if you spent so much time in reading intervention that you missed all your music lessons and you don’t know what one is.
With all the discussion about Sats and exams being difficult to access without a broad base of knowledge, let’s not forget that those very children whose life trajectories we are seeking to change the most, those with SEND, need access to it too. Those awkward questions that stop us in our tracks should remind us of this duty.
Nancy Gedge is a teacher at Widden Primary School in Gloucester, and winner of last year’s TES Teacher Blogger of the Year Award
@nancygedge
This is an article from the 24 June edition of TES. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here
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