At the chalkface: Dark night of the soul

These Damascan moments were prompted by Channel 4’s “Educating” series. My teaching chums think they’re mostly excellent. I agree. They capture the nuanced drama of the classroom and the vitality and vulnerability of the pupils. They celebrate the teachers’ brilliance, inspiration, intelligence, imagination, empathy and prodigious industry.

But how hard they have to fight for the right to actually teach! Some of that vitality just seems tiresome, rude, unacceptable. I want to see more of your actual teaching, the thrill of learning – a whole hour on Macbeth, for example. Perhaps it’s too difficult to show this, to catch those carefully nourished insights, linguistic breakthroughs and lightbulb moments. They do tend to be slow, incremental and undramatic. I’ve seen it done well only once, in the brilliant French film Être et Avoir.