'Attitude deliberately indifferent - made no effort to learn his work. Progress very poor.'
So wrote Mrs Wynn during that parched summer in July 1976. Sounds like a 'disengaged learner' alright - although if you'd said that to me at the time I fear that you might have got a gobful of abuse - or, perhaps, I would've simply laughed in your face. After all, who wants to be put in boxes - they're not very people-shaped are they!
I'm not proud to have been a 'naughty boy', but it is a fact that I was. Now, looking back I just wish I'd had some positive role models - or even a mentor. I wish I had some stability in my home, and someone to believe in me... but I didn't. I felt anger which I couldn't articulate... not through words anyway. I boxed and I fought my peers like a snaring whirlwind. I hurt a lot of people, but I also wrote poetry (in secret). I was, and am, complicated, defying categorisation. I felt alone and incomplete; although I'd never have admitted it. Like most boys playing 'hard', in my scattergun way, I was actually terrified, trying desperately to exert power over something - anything!
Now, that that's all in the past, all I can do now is use such experiences as I try to connect with folk for whom learning is not seen as something for them. As I often say, 'it's all credit in my empathy bank'. It is so, because now I am empowered to see it that way, and I chose to do so.
Education gives you choices. It opens doors. It gives you a voice. I believe that people thrive in the light of positive expectation, and that if we're not reaching them, then we need to reflect on ourselves, our practice, and try again and again. We should never give up on those who may have given up on themselves. I aspire to be the sort of person who would've noted the potential in that young me from another lifetime ago. In this game it's often about planting acorns: although you may not see the tree, you've got to trust that they will grow. Learning is for life!
