My Personal Learning Experience

A Bad Learning Experience
When I think back to my school years I remember always managing to do enough not to be noticed; I didn’t want to get into trouble but also really wasn’t interested or engaged in any subject. The senior school I attended taught boys and girls separately until year 10 and I was terrified by some of the older male teachers who must have been teaching since the 1950s and were very OLD SCHOOL. My primary school education was, on the whole, a better time but I remember one lesson, in year 6, when we had to look through magazines to find car adverts and then write about the cars. My family did not own a car and I didn’t really want to admit my lack of car knowledge to anyone. The only car fact I knew was that a Datsun came from Japan (why I knew this I don’t know!) Therefore I found a picture of a car, cut it out and wrote my car fact. I can quite clearly remember the teacher making me stand up and he laughed at me in front of everyone and made me stay in at break time whilst he told me the differences between Japanese cars and English cars (as the picture I had found was, apparently, an English car.)

A Good Learning Experience
I know that without this experience I would not be a teacher now or on this course! On my 30th birthday I decided I needed a direction in life and wanted to prove to myself that I could pass a GCSE. I enrolled on an English course and met Viv Newman. She was the teacher on the course and gave me the encouragement I needed to complete and pass (with an A*) the GCSE; this then led to A Levels and a degree in teaching. Viv was interested in her topic and could explain the history and background of the authors/writers we studied. She listened to what I had to say and made everyone feel part of the group. I suppose she enjoyed teaching people who wanted to learn, but she had a real belief in everyone on the course. It is true that you remember a good teacher forever!

Vicki Foley