And his observation made
me look at the world around me with a different perspective. On my teacher
training course (a Post Graduate Certificate in Education or PGCE) his homily
can be rewritten as, “Course members can be divided into two groups, those with
one or more parents who were teachers and those that don’t have this advantage.”
My Mum and Dad were both working as Head of Science (in different schools) when
they were killed and this meant that I was brought up surrounded by the jargon
and professional ethics of the teaching profession. I never considered any
career other than teaching and in a strange sort of way that worked to my
advantage when I was orphaned.
When my happy and secure
world was blown apart I still knew what I wanted to do and what I needed to do
to reach my goal. Hiding away under the duvet and not bothering with school
work was never really an option that I considered because doing that would have
meant that I was letting myself and, more importantly, Mum and Dad down.
Through all the trauma of
emotional, financial and physical abuse that I received from the demon spawn
know as my Granddad I had the image of becoming a teacher in my mind and that
helped me survive.
When I started on my PGCE
I wasn’t surprised to find that some of the trainee teachers came from teaching
families. What did surprise me was the size of this group – far greater than
you would get by chance. In the first few weeks of teaching lots of teaching jargon
is introduced and you could see the cohort sub-dividing into two groups, pretty
much based on their family background. My boy-friend is fiendishly intelligent
but he is a first generation teacher and he really struggled for most of the
first teaching block because the lecturers used specialist terminology without
explaining it properly. It seemed ironic that teacher trainers would do this
because it is exactly the opposite of what “proper” teachers would do in their
daily work.
This subdivision into two
groups is also something I have noticed in the assorted bereavement groups I
have attended over the years. Attendees can be divided into two groups, “those
who attend in order to get better and those who attend in order to get worse.”
Even the students I meet at the monthly group organised by the university demonstrate
this division. Some want to know about survival strategies and they look
towards old-timers like me as examples of the proverbial “light at the end of
the tunnel”. Other are content to share their sadness but nothing more – now this
is understandable in the early days after a death of a parent but some don’t
seem to have moved on in several years and I find that so sad.
In the adult focussed group
this division is even more marked. There will be people who seem to wear their
sadness and their mourning almost as a badge of honour and loyalty to their
dear departed. Getting better and being able to move on is almost regarded as
being disloyal and I have met a few who have never recovered from a death that
happened 30+ years ago. The most extreme example I can remember is a lady who
was the dominant personality in a Worcestershire based support group. She acted
as if she was newly bereaved and it was only later I found out that she had
lost her Mother ten years previously when she was 40 and when her Mum was 76!
If you find yourself in a
group like this then in the words of the famous group Pink Floyd you should “Run
like Hell”!
No comments:
Post a Comment