There are certain words and phrases that I think should be part of our life and learning, our talking and teaching. Let’s start with three:
Quiddity
As a teacher my first Principal was Glynn Watkins. The year was 1979 and I taught English and Social Sciences at Wanneroo Senior High School. Even though WSHS was a Government school, it was a state experiment in Western Australia that all potential staff had to go through a series of interviews in order to be accepted to teach.
As part of the interviews Glynn asked me, “What was my philosophy of life and my philosophy as a teacher?” I was 21. I’m not sure what or how I answered but he then asked me to continue to think on this question because all of his first year teachers would be sharing their philosophies with the staff at the beginning of the fourth term. By age 22 I had to be able to express my philosophy of life and education.
Many years later I was able to interview Glynn and record his thoughts on life, learning and leading. One of the final things he said was, “You must have a philosophy about learning and teaching. You have got to have a philosophy about how children learn.”
Years later still, I discovered the word quiddity: meaning ‘your essence, your essential about-ness’. What is it you are about? What is it you stand for? The second layer of the word is that it can sometimes refer to your oddness, your uniqueness.
I love this. What is your classroom, what is your school and what is your teaching most about? Bring your essential uniqueness to your essential belief as an educator. As you teach, help each pupil/student discover their quiddity – their essential driving force, their own unique about-ness.
Cheong
I was invited to speak at the 50th Birthday of my student days High School. Churchlands Senior High (now College) was my school from 1970 ‘til graduating Year 12 (then 5th Year) in 1974. Churchlands was a government school and is now a government independent school. It is now also a special music scholarship school and has a pool, two theatres, a gymnasium… oh the list goes on.
When I was at Churchlands the motto was (and remains) Aim High. For the Churchlands founders that motto may have been an affirmation, for me it was more of a seed of an idea that gradually grew over time.
It was an honour to speak at the 50th. Former students from all years gathered for the reunion of all reunions. We sat in year groups at round tables and sipped wine or drank beer. We all remembered sitting in the grassed quadrangle of the school grounds munching sandwiches.
When I spoke I introduced my Churchlands mob to a word I first heard in South Korea – cheong. Cheong; the effect of spending a lot of time or living through an experience with others.
I later read of cheong in a column by Mia Freedman and I quote her as saying that cheong is about the fact that “Even if you’re not on exactly the same wavelength with these people, you’re connected together, because you’ve travelled through some significant life together.”
In their paper The Socio-emotional Grammar of Koreans, Sang Chin Choi and Soo Hyang Choi go on to say that cheong embodies the emotional links among individuals connected to each other by feelings of we-ness and exhibiting the humanistic side of their selves.
When I started teaching at WSHS Glynn Watkins said, “There is a mysterious thing in a school, a mysterious thing in a classroom, called a climate. It is something you feel.”
Cheong is a climate. Your students will have the cheong of your classroom and school for years and decades. It is the thing that will have some of them returning to reunions and the thing that will have others stay away.
Think about it and act upon it: what is the climate you are creating? Will your students have a positive feeling of we-ness, a positive cheong to last a lifetime?
Pupil/Student
Have you ever thought about the difference between being a pupil and being a student? If you haven’t, please ponder.
One way to look at it is that a pupil requires tuition, needs teaching. Being a pupil is about getting the basics, the foundations, in place. It requires a bit of rigour and a touch of rote. It requires learning something and demonstrating you have learned it. You pass a test, you go through a stage; you transition a rite of passage.
Being a student requires guidance and mentoring. It also requires that the student takes some flight alone and broadens their personal scope, deepens their knowledge base, checking back with their mentor/ teacher as they flow and grow.
Perhaps each of us is both pupil and student pending the situation and context. Knowing when a person needs to be taught and when to be guided is part of the art, science and craft of teaching. Perhaps it is also a big part of wisdom.