June- my story

Day one: Pythagoras. The teacher stands up at the board for half an hour, explaining why A squared + B squared = C squared. A worksheet with twenty questions that you get halfway through before break time hits. You’ve got it. You maybe just need a tad more practice to consolidate it.

Day two: Pythagoras. The starter and another explanation take twenty minutes out of the lesson, then the teacher gives you a hundred-question worksheet, all filled with questions like “a=6, b=8, c=?”. You finish the entire thing, getting onto the second question of the extension.

Day three: Pythagoras. Another ten-minute starter, another twenty-minute explanation, another twenty-question worksheet. You finish the whole thing, and all of the extension work.

Day four: Pythagoras. Another ten-minute starter, another twenty-minute explanation-

Aren’t you a little bored?

Hi, I’m June, and I’m one of the founders of the CALM project. Welcome to my story.

To start off, primary school. I have very little recollection of anything before P5, when I moved schools, so I’m going to begin there. Between the ages of nine and ten, I was part of 2021-22’s primary five class. We had a newly graduated teacher for most of the year, but he had trained during lockdown, so thirty nine-year-olds was genuinely his first experience of teaching. Therefore, it will come as no shock that although his PowerPoints were amazing, his person-to-person accuracy and adaptation skills didn’t quite meet the same bar.

I, at that point, was pretty good at most things. For my age anyway. I read whole books regularly, I could work with fractions, I knew my times tables, and I could spell “pneumonia”. Most of the time. So, when my wonderful teacher pulled out two-digit addition and subtraction, you can probably guess that I was not particularly amused. Of course, it didn’t help that there wasn’t ever any extension work and the poor, overwhelmed, sole adult in my classroom was always trying to shut down some sort of fight in the corner of the classroom.

So, imagine this. I’m sitting at my desk, third row from the front, second column to the left wall (where I knew a story I’d written about a guy called “meringue monkey” was hanging), staring at a sheet of paper with thirty questions of two-digit subtraction that I finished an hour ago. What do I do?

Shut down. Obviously.

For about half of primary five, I did very little. I didn’t stick my hand up, I did the bare minimum accepted, and I didn’t ask questions. I stuck inside the bubble I created for myself. After all, if I knew all the answers from primary three, why should I do it in primary five?

Of course, when my teacher noticed, he helped me find work that was more at my level, and much more engaging. He pushed me to my limits, entering me in writing competitions and helping me start attempting the IYMC questions and…

Yeah no. That didn’t happen. However, he eventually collapsed under the pressure of teaching my class and moved to a different school, so guess what I got?

Supply teachers!

We would have a different teacher pretty much every week for around three months, sometimes switching once before break, again before lunch and a third time with half an hour remaining till the end of the day.

And people wonder why I struggle to stick to one task.

You may be thinking this was an even easier period of time for me, what with nobody actually getting the time to know me and search for my limits, but it was actually quite the opposite. These wonderful, wonderful people, as they had no idea how each individual person worked and what level the class was at, brought in heaps upon heaps of worksheets, spanning from primary two to secondary level! As you can probably imagine, I was thrilled. Sure, I was still sometimes bored, but it was during this period that I taught myself decimals, squares, basic algebra and negative integers. It was great!

Then I got to primary six.

Don’t get me wrong, my teacher was lovely. And, for the majority of my classmates, her teaching methods were highly effective, stretching them enough that several began complaining of regular headaches. I just kind of… sat there.

Unlike primary five, I actually did the work. I tried. I read the twenty-page Oxford-reading-buddy stories I was told to, I finished worksheets and extension tasks, I didn’t scream and cry when the teacher announced it was time to get into groups… I even watched when we put a tampon into water to watch it inflate!

So, yeah. Primary six was kind of uneventful. As was primary seven. I had the same teacher, I gave the same amount of effort, my “nurture base” teacher hinted at me being autistic as well as the ADHD diagnosis I was persuing… you know. The usual. Nothing much had changed, but then again, when did it ever, in primary school? I think the hardest thing I learned that year was at residential.

Don’t go on the high ropes when you’re scared of heights.

So, yeah, okay, my primary school experience wasn’t exactly wonderful. But when I got to high school, in S1, suddenly all became clear and I was given work that was so insanely challenging that, as I was hunched over doing work in these perfectly bright classrooms, I began to get chronic migraines and my posture was completely destroyed. Nah, you know this pattern. None of that was true.

Except maybe that last point.

All jokes aside, S1 was pretty much just primary seven all over again. Top set maths somehow covered the same topics as bottom set with little addition, PE was exactly the same living nightmare as it had been since primary six (before then we would just play tig for half an hour, then leave. Pure. Bliss.), and teachers were just as useless at spotting who was doing well and who was struggling. Except, of course, the science teachers.

Everyone loves the science teachers. Not only are they conscious of neurodivergent people’s struggles, but they also accommodate for them. Extra time, digital exams, scribes and readers, you name it. They challenge those who are excelling, and they help those who are struggling. Everyone should be like the science teachers.

So, let’s skip to S2, shall we?

Towards the end of the first term, I got so incredibly bored that I talked to my parents about what I should do. Their response? “Talk to your teachers and ask for harder work!”

Well. Why hadn’t I thought of that? As it was the subject I was doing the best at, I decided to approach the maths department. The conversation went a little something like this:

I walk in, sitting down opposite the teacher’s desk. “Hi! I’m finding the work a little too easy. Could I get some harder stuff?”

She looks at me, then at the board, where last lesson’s work is still up. “Mmm, no, it’ll get harder soon. Plus, some of the stuff we’re doing is Nat5. You can do the stuff the rest of the class is doing.”

Naturally, I accepted this, curtsying to my teachers in the halls and smiling sweetly during classes. The next lesson, I kid you not, she brought out two-digit addition and subtraction. Remember where else I mentioned having done this? Oh yeah! Primary five.

This was top set S2 maths.

And we were doing addition and subtraction.

I went home and told my dad, and he said something like “tell your guidance teacher you need harder work!”.

But I hate bothering the pastoral team, so, instead of taking my dad’s advice, I went back to the maths department. That meeting went significantly better than the other, and I was even offered a textbook! I walked away feeling very pleased, texting my dad to inform him that all was well and I was getting something challenging.

So, I walk into the next lesson, expecting it to be waiting for me on my desk, and you’ll never guess- it wasn’t there! Nor was it after another conversation. Nor another. She kept saying I had to finish the hundred question sheet first, or that the work was hard enough as it was. So, I escalated it to the head of department.

She told him she’d given me a textbook already and he said that it should be enough for me- however, I did actually get said textbook after that! Sometimes.

So, continuing with maths, as most other subjects I either didn’t care about or didn’t see the point in pushing in, let’s move onto S3, shall we? By then, I’d covered everything on the list that my teacher had given me, composed of “all of the S3 topics” (I know, how nice of her, doing the bare minimum.), and worked through a solid chunk of the Nat5 textbook. So, in comes my mum, and we sit down at a meeting with my old and my new maths teacher, who happens to be the head of department.

My mum and I sit down. I lean in. “Can I take the Nat5 early?”

My old teacher frowns. “You’re setting yourself up for failure.”

My new teacher frowns. “There’s no point.”

I frown. “Please?”

My teachers, in unison, sigh. “No.”

My mum stays quiet.

So, yeah, that didn’t go very well. Fast forward to now. I have a higher maths textbook in my bag, although I’m not going to be allowed to take any of those exams until it’s my year’s exam time. Most classes are too easy. Biology and physics have both given me a Nat5 textbook, and the science teachers said I may be allowed, if I can prove I’m ready, to do the biology exam early. I’ve covered around half the course in one week, done one past paper (I couldn’t figure out what section I had and hadn’t done so I did the whole thing), and got 80/100. So not too bad.

So, what’s the moral of this story?

Honestly, the system needs to get better at recognising how to help someone reach their potential. That might mean letting them do a couple of S2 worksheets in primary five, and it might mean letting them take a Nat5 in S3. But ultimately, it’s not your future you’re deciding in the way you teach someone. It’s theirs. And if they’re asking you to change something? Maybe just change it.

You never know how far someone can go.