Loving community, financially anaemic

This blog is part of a series of stories that explore how teachers are being inadvertently killed by the education communities in which they work.

Educators do excellent work in the development of the social-economic conditions in which we collectively live. They should be fully supported and have their experiences included in the ongoing discussions that inform the necessary changes to the system.

Each of these stories - based on my personal experience - has a few suggestions for developing the education system to better support teachers.
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The five communities are:

1. ​Hierarchical community
2. Closed community based on fear 
3. Loving community, financially anaemic 
4. Alternative community, desperate for solutions
5. Education community, financially driven 

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Loving community, financially anaemic 
​​- You can do it your way but you won’t get paid for it

​I used to have my own school. My students were those who had been expelled from the local secondary schools plus students who wished to have additional tutoring, in mathematics in particular. 

I never had more than a handful of students during the day. We would work on whatever they were interested in and whatever I could persuade them to have a go at. 

A couple of the students could be described as having low IQ, and significant behavioural problems. This was a challenge to my teaching ability, yet never an insurmountable problem for me since I could adapt my teaching to match who they were and what they needed. I did not need to consider the needs of other students at the same time.
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Some of my students certainly had a very high IQ, and different behavioural problems. It was a challenge sometimes, to keep up with them for example. I had to be very careful with my words, because they would remember everything I said verbatim.

The name I chose for my school was Micro Education, 
with the logo “Differently GIFTED”. 

With so few students it was possible for me to invest time in finding the right material tailored to the needs of my students, often simply making photocopies in the library. I also enjoyed the challenge of finding different ways of explaining so that it could be understood why these differently gifted children. 

There was only one problem. The financing. 

Although the schools were happy to pass on their “challenging“ students to me, there was no financial compensation for the work that I was doing. On the other hand, parents who had money and who could see their children needed tutoring outside the school system were able to pay for my time. I tried to balance the two.

It should be noted that I was also working part-time in the evenings teaching English to adults, for which I was paid. Although the budget was tight, I never lacked food and could always pay the rent on time. I could also go out for a beer every Saturday if I wanted to.
I ran the school from my home, a small basement flat with a garden. We made good use of the garden and the local facilities, the library, shopping precinct and seafront being the most popular.

One boy who was absolutely fascinated with the mathematical number pi had memorised it to so many decimal places that I wanted the world to know just how clever he was. I bought a box of chalks and we went down to the seafront and he wrote along the pavement the number pi to hundreds and hundreds of decimal places. 

People stopped and asked why the boy was not in school and what he was doing chalking numbers on the pavement. When they realised just how differently gifted he was they agreed that he should not be in an ordinary school.

Another boy, who was unfortunately involved in low-level criminal activities, took me for a walk through his community describing what happens there, behind the scenes and just below the surface. It was truly eye-opening for me to realise how tough and challenging his world was and how pathetic and how desperately uninteresting school life was for him.
I ran my school on a month by month basis, scraping together money to pay the expenses. In the end, I realised that this single teacher was ill-equipped to take on the entire education system. 

The school closed one summer and never reopened in the autumn. A choice I regret to this day. But I am glad that I made it. 

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SUGGESTIONS

• Pay ‘out of school’ teachers a living wage so they can focus on engaging with differently-gifted learners in a way that is currently not available ‘inside school’.
• Rebalance class-size so that students who can learn by their own efforts are encouraged to do so at their own pace, and those students who need more support, love and attention have individual time with special teachers every day.
• Fund education better! Focus on the long-term return on investment. Be honest about the socio-economic cost of not investing in young learners.