I've made it to the end of my first full week back. The high of the week had to be receiving a really nice email from colleagues at the HA telling me that Michael Gove had mentioned me in a speech. When I had a look, it said "...the brilliant young head of history at Lampton School..." and a huge smile spread across my face: "young"!!  I really don't really consider myself young.  And indeed, many colleagues who've seen the speech have had a good laugh about Mr Gove calling me young.  But actually, as the week wore on, I did feel younger, and younger, and younger. 


First, there was the meeting with a colleague who suggested a beautifully simple way of helping the team improve their teaching for OCR Paper 2 (which, if you're interested, involves me taking them through the examiner training I did this summer for OCR), and gave me some great advice on helping a group of boys who are really, really struggling with GCSE History.  His 13+ years of teaching gives him such a wealth of experience and ideas that in my 'youngness' I simply don't have yet. 


Second, there was meeting my new Year 8 class and somehow ending up becoming a ventriloquist for a stuffed toy (George the turtle) who lives in my classroom.  George was [miraculously] a wonderful source on life in England in the 1500s, so much so that the students have vowed to take it in turns to look after him during each History lesson in case he ever decides to speak again and tell them such interesting things.  Only when I became conscious of how much I was laughing with the students did Gove's word pop back in my head: "young".  


Third, there was the discussion I had with a student after school.  I've put some film posters up on my classroom walls, and she stayed back to ask me a question (I've decided that getting the students to try and draw parallels between films and history might provide a 'hook' for some of them, hence the film posters).  She asked if the actor knew that his film could have a link to history.  Obviously I didn't know.  But then she confided in me that she thinks this actor is the best thing ever, and that she has a crush on him.  And it was one of those moments where I remembered being that young and "fancying" people til it hurt.  And so I made a promise: "we will find out".  So now we've got a plan: we're going to ask this actor on his Twitter site and post questions on his Facebook page, and we're going to try and mail his agent.  We want to know if he likes history, and whether he thought his film had any links to history. 


In all, Mr Gove calling me young has actually done me a great favour in my first week back.  It's reminded me that (1) I need help - I can't run a department on my own, and there are plenty of people with experience who I need to call on, (2) The individuals I teach are young people: fun is far more important to them than learning history... so I have to remember to bring the two together if I want to make learning successful (the ventriloquist turtle may have to be a very regular appearance), (3) The youngness of the individuals I teach means that my 'hooks', or the ways in which I think history can be made accessible, risk having up to a 20 year age gap... If I want to engage my students, I have to start where they are in their historical thinking and then lead them from there.  I know we all check their prior learning when we start each new task, but do we check their prior / existing interest?!  If I don't gauge their interest and what's hot to them right now, I could be missing some great hooks.