Teaching English

After a brief and largely unsuccessful foray into teacher training (11-18) at St Martin’s College in Lancaster, I completed a part-time RSA/UCLES CTEFLA course at Huddersfield Technical College in February 1994 and a week later I was faced with four teenage Parisian students in my living room. It was a salutary experience. They expected a teacher’s discipline but found a nervous man trying to be their buddy and they simply weren’t interested.

My next class, less than two months later, were given a set of rules almost as they walked through the door, with the promise that failure to work would mean my boss ringing their parents. It was a practice other teachers working for the same company adopted with similar success.

What followed then were treasured times: talking in halting English about international politics with one student; helping another with special educational needs learn to ice skate; and a letter from one student thanking me for helping him get through his school exam. And, of course, devotion to planning and resourcing as high a quality of teaching as I could possibly manage.

It was Poland where I discovered what I really loved about teaching. First and foremost, when the classroom door closes, it’s all yours! I like that independence and responsibility. I planned hard, taught hard, played hard and took chances. My employer, something of a rebel herself during the Soviet occupation of Poland, encouraged me to be my own person but with a commitment to my students to make sure they really did learn and enjoy their lessons too.

And mostly, they did. In my leisure hours, I painted the town red with my flat-mate and good buddy Mark and shed some of the demons that had long haunted me. My intention was to stay there for a year, satisfying the requirements for an MA in TEFL at a British University which would then qualify me for an EFL teaching position in the UK. But it was not to be.

In February, 1995, my partner rang me to tell me my son Joel - then aged 30 months -had stopped talking. I knew she had been concerned about him for some time and had been struggling to cope back in England. But that a once very vocal and lively child should have suddenly become mute, withdrawn and unmanageable was a cause for very serious concern. I thus decided to cut my year in Poland short, and returned home.
 

One day, Leanne and I were “flying” noisily around the house when two other children who lived nearby turned up. By the end of that Summer, the garden was regularly host to a dozen or so local children, with our slide ‘extended’ using dustbin liners and soapy water, or whatever activity we (and I mean we) could come up with. Nobody told me I was running a playscheme, it was simply children and one or two adults having a great time together. Conflicts were resolved in the context of mutual respect and friendship.

This experience was to stand me in good stead for what I had to face when, in October 1995, my son Joel was diagnosed as having an autistic spectrum disorder. It was soon clear that the question, ‘What is the best way to educate a child with autism?’ - would require the kind of independence and single-mindedness which has become my mark. My research soon made it clear that, if anything was to be done, it had to begin at home and at once - what local authorities were offering pre-school kids with autism was quite clearly half-baked and too thin on the ground. I therefore set out to find all I could about educating children with autism - and I became Joel’s teacher.

Autism and learning