This is the front page of the Liverpool  Echo when John Lennon was shot dead 30 years ago today: A very talented student but not recognised as such by his headmaster.

Bill Harry writes in his “Beatles Encyclopedia”

“John Lennon became a pupil at Quarry Bank in September 1952, and the twelve-year-old boy would cycle there each morning from his Menlove Avenue home one mile away on his green Raleigh Lenton bicycle. The school headmaster, E.R.Taylor, found that he had a couple of troublemakers on his hands in the form of Lennon and his mate Pete Shotton.

The pair were very disruptive, were always causing trouble at the school, and they were often disciplined by caning and by detention. Academically John and Pete were uninterested in studying and both were placed at the bottom of the ‘C’ stream where they remained for most of their school lives. When John took his GCE ‘O’ Level examinations he failed in every subject!”

It was while I was looking for Christmas presents 5 years ago that I came across a book full of John Lennon memorabilia, facsimiles of concert tickets, poems in his own handwriting, photographs and a copy of his school report. When I looked closely at the report I recognised the red ink and signature of the headmaster that Bill Harry wrote about, E.R.Taylor. It was the same red ink and the same name as the headmaster that I had at Wolverhampton Grammar School.

I checked him out on the internet and sure enough E.R. Taylor was headmaster at Quarrybank School Liverpool and then moved to Wolverhampton Grammar School where I met him.

He was very aloof and was only really interested in you if you were likely to go to Oxford and Cambridge. I have no good memories of him whatsoever.

This is what he had to say about John Lennon:

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“He has too many of the wrong ambitions and his energy is too often misplaced.” This is the whole school report which I have already used in my class this morning and I think would be a great resource to use in class any time this week or whenever when talking about talent in the class, recognition of it, how to nurture it and how to encourage it. Click on it to see it in more detail.

How we give feedback to our students is a crucial aspect of the learning cycle and I always think that being a teacher is a bit like being a hairdresser in one crucial aspect: having  the power to make people very very happy or very very sad.

The power in the scissors

Morrissey has a song “Hairdresser on Fire” in which he sings:

“Here is London, giddy of London.

Is it home of the free -Or what ? Can you squeeze me
Into an empty page of your diary
And psychologically save me
I’ve got faith in you
I sense the power
Within the fingers
Within an hour the power
Could totally destroy me
Or, it could save my life”

While we are marking work late at night or on a tram or a bus we might sometimes get the marks wrong and while it might not affect us very much it may lead to a student being very very unhappy and if there is one thing that students are very quick to notice it is inconsistency, injustice and unfairness.

This is the comment that the same E.R.Taylor made on my report when I was the same age as John Lennon,15, in the report above.

Ken Robinson in one of his talks on creativity in education attributes Michaelangelo as saying about the  making of the

sculpture David. “I can’t take responsibility for making the David, all I did was uncover it. He was there all along.”

He then goes on to say, “I think this is true for our students as well. Wherever good teachers gather, every child is a potential miracle if we help change their self-expectations.”

Being Positive

If you are postitive about your students and positive about your classroom, you are more likely to enjoy teaching and experience quality of life both inside and outside the classroom, that is the message of this blogpost and the message of this blog too. I’ve spent the year trying to get to the bottom of what exactly “quality of life” in the classroom is. As teachers, we don’t often look at classrooms from this perspective, focussing more on learning and learning outcomes. I am coming to the conclusion that looking at quality of life first is likely to create the conditions for quality learning to take place. This may in fact be a pre-condition with some students to making  sure that we really educate our students, in the real sense of e-ducere, and lead out whatever talents students may have inside them.  Or should we just tell them that they have too many of the wrong ambitions and that their energy is too often misplaced? I don’t think so.

R.IP. John Winston Lennon  9th October 1940 – 8th December 1980