Examinee (Part V)

"Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more!" Whenever I reach the fifth installment of something, I cannot help but recall the days of my youth, and my father reading Shakespeare's Henry V to me. The quote is, of course, taken from Act III, Scene I.

But yes, after a year of mucking around with 2-bromobenzyl bromide and silanes and phosphines and triosmium clusters and the fatal lure of x-ray crystallography, I went back into school to do my postgraduate qualifications in education.

I will never forget my early introduction to silliness in the educational world. At my entrance interview, the chairman and then-director of the Institute of Education asked me, "Are you trying to tell us that your father is Professor [name omitted]?"

I replied rather heatedly, "On the contrary, I have been trying hard to not bring up the topic of my heritage. It was not my choice to be born into such a family, and I think it is not right for you to keep trying to bring it up." I think I looked sufficiently disgusted that heads began nodding round the semi-circle and I was told, "Thank you, we are sure you will make a good teacher."

And so, I entered the admittedly comforting halls of what used to be the local university and had by then been converted to the sole institution of teacher development in the land. Examinations were interesting. They were held in a converted lecture theatre, where the heat prompted me to complete my examinations even more quickly than the cold of the previous experience.

It was in this milieu that I made friends among senior staff only to find that they were already friends of the family. I made friends with classmates who to this day continue to struggle on bravely and "close the wall up with our English dead". I was very fond of my classmates, and we went to each other's weddings and later in life got to attend courses together.

But examination technique became a very different animal at this level. I had no idea why I hated the textbooks so much, but I swore to build a philosophy of education by learning from what my tutors and lecturers taught and what they did which worked — rather than what they might have said which didn't seem to work on us who were their students. They were a mixed bunch, but they taught from their hearts and their deep experience. And when I sat down to examinations, I was pretty sure that textbook learning didn't come into it.

I was proven right. In the examinations we got, the papers required answers that were reasonable, sound and showed effort on the part of the student to make coherent sense out of a chaotic mess of theory. The psychologists warred with the sociologists, the anthropologists with the historians, the linguists with the biologists. The grades went to anyone who made a cake out of the grungy bits, and somehow along the way, I learnt the art of baking a good one.

The recipe was pretty straightforward. You wrote about existing theory. You showed how existing theories contradicted each other. You offered a better metaphor and pursued the metaphor to its logical conclusion. You designed a plan for executing the implied strategy resulting from that pursuit. You broke it down into steps, tactics, learning points. And you linked the whole package with careful welds and joints, making it as steady as possible while flexible enough to work.

It was a great game. But it was also deadly serious. I never lost sight of the fact that all that knowledge engineering had eventually to do something useful. I prayed hard that one day I would be of benefit to my students, and not let them down.

I had a bit of a shock on the day the results came out. My name wasn't there. Then someone said, "Hey, it's on that list over there." The list looked ominously brief. In fact, it looked like the list of people who for one reason or other had to retake papers in order to pass. Then I realised it was the Distinction Award list, and I crept away to a quiet corner to laugh.