Brace yourselves, this is a long one.

It’s the end of my first placement as part of the QTS/PGCE process. I’ve also not run in 4 weeks. A strained soleus saw that little fancy resigned to the gutter. It’s been a miserable month in that respect.

Teaching:

Teaching has been going well though, relative to my state of experience at least. I’m REALLY glad I’m doing this.

I’ve finally finished “The World-Ending Fire” by Wendell Berry. It’s pretty mind-bending but, if you’re reading it, stick with it. One of his essays is called ‘Two Minds’.

It’s mega.

The ‘two minds’ are the ‘Rational Mind’ and the ‘Sympathetic Mind’. The Rational Mind, ever in doubt, “attempts endlessly to inform itself against its ruin by facts, experiments, projections, scoutings of ‘alternatives’, hedgings against the unknown.” The Sympathetic Mind, pre-eminently a faithful mind, “is informed by experience, by tradition-borne stories of the experiences of others, by familiarity, by compassion, by commitment, by faith.” Wendell Berry uses the parable of the lost sheep from the Gospel of St. Matthew to contextualise how these two minds work.

The parable works perfectly when viewed from the perspective of a teacher (or ‘wannabe’, in my my case). Apologies, but it’s worth quoting in full. This is the starkest example of what separates a ‘great’ teacher and ‘all the others’. The ‘sympathetic’ and the ‘rational’, if you will.

Here she blows (and please excuse the self-righteous connotations of ‘sheep’ as ‘children’ and ‘shepherd’ as ‘teacher’; it just fits well and makes the point required is all):

“‘If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray.’

This parable is the product of an eminently sympathetic mind, but for the moment that need not distract us. The dilemma is practical enough, and we can readily see how the two kinds of mind would deal with it.

The rationalist, we may be sure, has a hundred sheep because he has a plan for that many. The one who has gone astray has escaped not only from the flock but also from the plan. That this particular sheep should stray off this particular place at this particular time, though it is perfectly in keeping with the nature of sheep and the nature of the world, is not at all in keeping with a rational plan. What is to be done? Well, it certainly would not be rational to leave the ninety and nine, exposed as they would then be to further whims of nature, in order to search for the one. Wouldn’t it be best to consider the lost sheep a ‘trade-off’ for the safety of the ninety-nine? Having thus agreed to his loss, the doctrinaire rationalist would then work his way through a series of reasonable questions. What would be an ‘acceptable risk’? What would be an ‘acceptable loss’? Would it not be good to do some experiments to determine how often sheep may be expected to get lost? If one sheep is likely to get lost every so often, then would it not be better to have perhaps 110 sheep? Or should one insure the flock against such expectable losses? The annual insurance premium would equal the market value of how many sheep? What is likely to be the cost of the labor of looking for one lost sheep after quitting time? How much time spent looking would equal the market value of the lost sheep?…And so on.

But (leaving aside the theological import of the parable) the shepherd is the shepherd because he embodies the Sympathetic Mind. Because he is a man of sympathy, a man devoted to the care of sheep, a man who knows the nature of sheep and of the world, the shepherd of the parable is not surprised or baffled by his problem. He does not hang back to argue over risks, trade-offs, actuarial data, or market values. He does not quibble over fractions. He goes without hesitating to hunt for the lost sheep because he has committed himself to the care of the whole hundred, because he understands his work as the fulfilment of his whole trust, because he loves the sheep, and because he knows or imagines what it is to be lost. He does what he does on behalf of the whole flock because he wants to preserve himself as a whole shepherd.

He also does what he does because he has a particular affection for that particular sheep. To the Rational Mind, all sheep are the same; any one is the same as any other. They are interchangeable, like coins or clones or machine parts or (future) members of ‘the work force’. To the Sympathetic Mind, each one is different from every other. Each one is an individual whose value is never entirely reducible to market value.

The Rational Mind can and will rationalise any trade-off. The Sympathetic Mind can rationalise none. Thus we have not only the parable of the ninety and nine, but also the Buddhist vow to save all sentient beings. The parable and the vow are utterly alien to the rationalism of modern science, politics, and industry. To the Rational Mind, they ‘don’t make sense’ because they deal with hardship and risk merely by acknowledgement and acceptance. Their very point is to require a human being’s suffering to involve itself in the suffering of other creatures, including that of other human beings.

The Rational Mind conceives of itself as eminently practical, and is given to boasting about its competence in dealing with ‘reality’. But if you want to hire somebody to take care of your hundred sheep, I think you had better look past the ‘animal scientist’ and hire the shepherd of the parable, if you can still find him anywhere. For it will continue to be more reasonable, from the point of view of the Rational Mind, to trade off the lost sheep for the sake of the sheep you have left – until only one is left.”

Phew!

Go and make yourself a brew, stretch your legs and I’ll see you in a minute…

What does that have to do with ‘great’ teaching? It should be fairly obvious but, just in case, it can be boiled down to this…everyone’s kid is deserving of the best we can give them.

No excuses.

Education is the best thing we can give as a society. There is no place in the education system for people that don’t want that. In short, there’s no excuse for anything but ‘great’ teaching. From what I’ve seen since September, your kids are in great hands.

NB: It would be remiss of me not to publicly (as public as this blog reaches at least [!]) acclaim the awesomeness of the UCC Geography Department. Every one is different, every one is exceptional. I hope so much that wherever I end up after this year’s training, it’s in somewhere even half as much fun as that.

Running:

The less said the better.

A small ‘niggle’ in my calf has led to a month of enforced ‘rest’. Difficult to do in a job that requires you to be on your feet all day. Not helped either by the frustration of not moving about as much as I’m used to but with the appetite of a body used to moving about as much as I’m used to.

I’ll eat. Get pissed off that I’ve eaten ‘lots’. Go out on my bike. Knacker the calf up a bit. Get pissed off. Eat. Et repeter s’il vous plait.

Quid pro quo…I’m no longer race weight (not that I’ve become an overnight fat knacker!!).

Discipline lacking. Discipline required.