What do consultants REALLY make?

Terry asks whether a passionate poet like Taylor Mali performing ‘What Teachers Make’ can

… make a difference, to anyone or anything? I’m inclined to think not, especially for a UK audience, where we tend to understate everything.

That’s just the point. Here in the UK we understate everything including the excellence in our classrooms and schools. That is not something of which we should be proud or a status quo that we should want to maintain. A bloody window into a bit more grassroots passion might just be the transformative antidote to the insipid reputation of teaching among the general population as a whole.

This is not a rant about Terry -far from it – he is one of the good guys

The post just resonates with me because I have spent three years making extensive use of the Taylor Mali poem to try and get teachers to realise how crucial they are to the whole process of transforming education in 21st century.

Mali has made a difference to 160 people so far, inspiring them to teach. I wonder how many of the educational advice or consultancy community can boast that kind of influence? My personal answer to that question is why I am returning to teaching – a place where I feel I really can make a difference.

What teachers make…

Taylor Mali is one of my creative heroes and his poem ‘What teachers make‘ has served me well at speaking engagements over the last few years. However, it was time to move on and perform some other stuff. What better way to bow out than with a performance (if you can call it that) at the top of the Valluga, at 2,809 m the highest point in the Arlberg mountains in Austria. It was so quiet up there that I felt I just couldn’t rant loudly so just let the performance slip away peacefully.

I always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with the performance of that poem. I love the poem itself but hate how it caused me to ‘corpse‘ on a regular basis. The only time I really ‘nailed’ it to my own satisfaction was at the Communicate.06 Conference last year. The last time I performed it though, I couldn’t even get out of the first lines and had to bail out completely. It was a sign! So – farewell my friend and on to poems new!

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Teachers