After more 35 years in teaching and more that 18.5 years as a Head, this is my final day! I'm in a reflective mood...
I remember very well the moment I knew I was meant to be a teacher, and exactly where I was when it struck me. It was the summer of 1983, and I found myself contemplating my future as I cycled back from York University to my tiny terraced student house tucked behind the Bootham Crescent football ground. I recall vividly that I experienced a sudden and deep conviction that teaching was absolutely the thing for me. Not quite 'Damascus Roady' (there was no blindness or horse riding involved) but mildly of that genre!
I had loved school, thought from the age of about 14 or 15 that I would be happy teaching and was aware that a frightening number of my closest relatives (5 out of 8) were or had been teachers, so knew it was in the blood, big time. That idea had drifted away during my gap year and the first couple of years at uni, but had been building inexorably. It came back with a sudden force on that particular bike ride.
The exact place mentioned above turns out to have been important to me later on in my life, too. On the morning of the final interview for the Headship of Bootham School in 2015, I was walking the few hundred metres down the road to the school from the hotel in which we had been put up, when I suddenly remembered the revelatory experience from 1983 that I have just described.
I was floored for a few seconds by the realisation that this conviction that I should be a teacher had struck me as I was actually cycling past the very place I was about to interview for and, if successful, at which I would hope to finish my career! It was one of the reasons that I knew it was right to accept the job when I was offered it, and it has sustained me many times over some very difficult periods in my current role, when I questioned whether I was really in the right place.
40 years on from that bike ride, today is my last day as Head of Bootham, and the last day of my full-time career in education. It feels strange, sad, exciting and liberating all at the same time!
Inevitably, my thoughts have turned to the matter of ‘legacy’. What has all the hard work and growing pressure of the past 35 years been for? What lasting effect might it have had on the many lives I have encountered and on the world inhabited by those who live those lives? Was it worth it? If, to quote Lin-Manual Miranda’s brilliant Hamilton libretto, legacy is “planting seeds in a garden you never get to see”, will I ever find out in any meaningful way? And does it even matter?
In all honesty, I’m actually not much bothered about the grades my students have achieved, the universities they went on to, or the status and wealth they may have gained in the careers they have pursued, except in as much as those things might have enabled them to live truly fulfilling lives. That is, lives that have had a tangibly positive impact for good on the world within their sphere of influence.
That is because perhaps the most consistent theme of my career has been a desire to ask the question of all the young people for whom I have had responsibility 'How will the world have been a better place for having you in it?'. It's been at the heart of the decisions I have made about my work, and the context in which to share whatever talents I might have been given. But, in the end, if there are men and women out in the world whose actions and choices have made it a kinder, more fair, more peaceful and generally better place in some way because of the challenge and example I have set them -and who have then directly helped others to enjoy opportunities and progress that they would otherwise not have experienced- then my career will have been worth it. I’d like to believe there are, and that it has.
In the end, however much I have genuinely loved what I have done in education in its various incarnations over five schools since my very first well-intentioned-but-stumbling attempts as a 22 year old, straight out of university, this is the yardstick against which I believe I should be judged.
So, onward to new adventures with Carol, more joyous grandadding, different (and more intermittent) professional challenges and (hopefully) travel, gigs, sport and friendships aplenty. And sincere thanks for the fellowship, encouragement, advice, correction and support of so many of you who have been fellow-travellers on the road -colleagues, students, parents, friends alike.
It’s been a blast!