20 years teaching at Cambridge without imposter syndrome?
(This is the text of a talk given to mark my retirement from the Faculty of Education)
I have been asked to say a few words this afternoon to mark my forthcoming retirement. (I am afraid will now be a little boring and take up much of the afternoon!) I do not officially retire till the end of September and will still have some doctoral students for a while beyond that, but this was considered a suitable occasion for me to offer a few reminiscences. I have very much valued working in the Faculty and the University, but in recent years have suffered from extreme tiredness and fatigue, and have decided that now is a good time to transition to a life of quiet scholarship and reflection.
I would preface my remarks by making the obvious point that it has been a privilege to work in the Faculty for a period of twenty years over which time I have been able to interact with thousands of brilliant scholars from all around the world, with a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and various areas of expertise. I have learnt a good deal from so many colleagues, and indeed, from so many of the students I have worked with. It has been great to be somewhere that attracts such diversity. To misquote Al Stewart, "And the world goes to Cambridge".
Even more incredible, despite being faced with this vast array of intellect, professional experience, and scholarship, I have found that I have nearly always been taken seriously.
In that regard, in preparing my remarks, I have kept in mind two organising questions. These are:
- How did someone like me come to be teaching at Cambridge?
- Once here, how did I manage to get away with it for so long?
My being at Cambridge, a University I never considered as a potential option when applying to study at University, is largely down to my late wife.
That said, I know I would not have got admitted into Oxbridge as an undergraduate when I was a sixth-former, not only because I simply was not good enough, but also because an O level in a second language was a requirement to apply.
North Romford Comprehensive School had a rather minimalist upper school options scheme where French was up against Chemistry and German was up against Physics: and they were the two subjects I was most keen to study. I had no experience of German at that time. My experience of French had not been great: in the first year we had spent each lesson working individually from a text book with the teacher seeing his role as to ensure we pupils spent the entire lesson in silence, which was not a perfect start for learning a living language. [My understanding was our 'French teacher' was actually a retired teacher brought in to cover a gap in staffing: I do not think his subject was French, but rather music. He told us that our class reminded him of the story of the driver who, finding the roads clear, stopped to ask a policeman where the nearest traffic jam was. This was meant to suggest that our tendency to want to occassionally talk was misguided. At least, I think that was the point.]
The quality of pedagogy was indeed rather variable in my school. I had some excellent teachers along the way – including an English teacher who taught the entire potential 'O level' cohort (about thirty percent of the year group, or a hundred of us) as one massive class. That was long before social distancing of course.
But then I remember my upper sixth lessons with the head of maths who's response to a student not following her argument was to "look at the ruddy diagram", because she apparently had no idea how to respond when what was so obviously a simple logical deduction was not so obvious to her students. (Those who attended my professorial lecture may recall a very similar anecdote about a maths lecturer at university – I would like to reassure my maths ed. colleagues that I am not picking on maths teachers, honestly.)
I remember spending the whole of my second year geography classes doing a project on flags – which basically involved my turning my exercise book into an abridged copy of the Ladybird book of flags. [Some years later I saw the teacher who took my class for geography that year being interviewed on a television show, and realised he was a special needs expert. I assume he was basically timetabled to cover a class for which no qualified geography teacher was available.]
I had a music teacher who had two distinct teaching methods. One involved us doing comprehension exercises (answering worksheet questions such as in which City was Beethoven born?) whilst he played the piano. His other teaching technique involved us doing comprehension exercises (in what year was Mozart born?) whilst he played an LP (that's a vinyl record for the youngsters amongst you).
There was a science teacher who also had two distinct teaching methods: his fourth year chemistry lessons alternated between him writing passages from the book Chemistry by John O. E. Clark on the board for us to copy; and him dictating passages from Chemistry by John O. E. Clark for us to write down. I remember the specific book as I have had a copy since I was at primary school.
There were plenty of similar examples, as attracting suitable teaching staff seemed to be an ongoing problem in the 70s. On entering school I took classes in woodwork and metal work – I still have the screwdriver that I cut, and turned on a lathe, and hardened and tempered with blow torches (health and safety was not so pronounced in those days) – but I remember then spending some of my craft lessons reading in the library, and others unsupervised in a first aid room making a papier-mâché volcano. When they found a new craft teacher who was prepared to work in the school he would only work in perspex, and would stop us from time to time to tell us what were referred to in those days as 'Irish jokes'. He also went on about handkerchiefs, or as he preferred to term them 'snot-rags'.
Then there was the new drama teacher who introduced himself very dramatically: "My name," he said v-e-r-y slowly, "is Vans-Wallenberg – it is written on the blackboard" – although the lesson took place in one of the school canteens which did not have any chalk boards. He may have been demonstrating some drama technique; but, if so, this was never elucidated.
To be fair to the teachers, it was not an easy place to work. We were expected to choose a craft subject in the upper school, and I chose technical drawing as that was something I quite enjoyed. But the lessons involved a continuous pattern of chairs being kicked under desks so legs would dig into the back of the student in front, and set squares and protractors and other equipment being hurled around the room, and these lessons were constantly visited by senior school staff who seemed to have standing orders to drop into that particular teacher's classes whenever passing to quell the inevitable riot.
I never wanted to drop the subject, but when I asked the school if they would enter me for biology O level if I studied the subject in my own time (as I was taking social and economic history in the option slot that included biology) I suddenly found myself taken out of the battle zone and sitting in the back of whichever of the head of biology's classes happened to be taking place at that time. He was a good teacher and a very nice man, but today he would be discouraged from having a smoke whilst teaching his sixth form group in the biology prep room.
Somebody must have disliked him as they put sugar in his car petrol tank. The sugar had been stolen from a facility that had been introduced by a new headteacher to improve discipline. Upper school students would be able to come in before school began and have a tea or coffee. However, if they misbehaved, they would be punished by having the privilege revoked, and would not be allowed to come into school until the official start time. It seemed obvious there was a flaw in the logic there, as the miscreants were more likely to be absent or late for school than early, but it was an attempt to find an alternative to the corporal punishment which was still commonly used in schools here at the time.
My being moved out of the technical drawing battle zone seemed to reflect an implicit assumption that although the school gave upper school students subject options, this was managed to try and keep the more academic students in groups where progress could be made. It should be borne in mind that at that time school options involved subjects deliberately designed to keep some children out of classrooms. These included community service, where students spent time removing supermarket trolleys from the local river, and reputedly returned them there in their own time to makes sure there was something to do in the following lesson; and leisure pursuits – a subject that seemed to mainly involve playing golf on the school field.
I remember a caretaker cutting his hand clearing up a broken window that was smashed out of its frame by a large metal hinge that had previously supported the heavy wooden lid of a standard school desk. I was in the class when the object was hurled across the room and hit the window, after narrowly missing the intended target: another pupil's head. And some people say school standards have dropped.
In any case, I would not have considered Oxbridge even if I had thought I was good enough, as I imagined it was full of those from, shall we say, rather different backgrounds to myself. I was even put off Bristol University when the student showing interviewees around asked "did you apply to Oxford, or Cambridge?" I was not wishing to join a university if the student body considered itself as failed Oxbridge candidates. Instead I went to Nottingham, where I slowly realised that despite lots of Scouse, Geordie and Brummie accents, most of the students in University at that time seemed to be from middle class backgrounds. All three of the full time Union sabbatical officers had stood for election as members of the conservative party! Radical student politics, indeed.
I still remember the only question I was asked in my admissions interview at Nottingham after taking the tour of the department of chemistry. It was something of a loaded question, as it seemed obvious what the preferred response was meant to be. "Well" my interviewer said, "we are running a little bit late today, and this is the time we normally have afternoon tea, so unless you have any questions, we are going to make you an offer of three Es." I replied that I had been able to ask all my questions on the tour, and my interviewer happily went for tea. That may not however have been ideal preparation for three years later when I went for an interview in the School of Education looking to stay on to do a PGCE, and was rejected.
I was devastated to be rejected, especially as my friends had suggested the university liked to take its own graduates and the interview would be a formality. I should not have based my expectations on gossip and other peoples guesses: it is a bit like naively accepting someone else's take on a lecture one has not personally attended. I went instead to Trent Polytechnic, now Nottingham Trent University, which turned out to be a blessing, and not just because it moved me out of a context where I had spent much too much time working on University and Union committees and such like. I had initially applied to train for chemistry teaching with computing as a subsidiary. At Trent I did chemistry and physics as joint major teaching subjects – which stood me in very good stead for what I have done since.
As the Polytechnics did not have degree awarding status, they offered post-graduate awards of associated Universities, so I ended up with a University of Nottingham PGCE despite having been rejected by the University. In one of those delicious ironies that life offers, the University regulations allowed distinctions on the PGCE, but the University's own School of Education – for some reason – did not award them to its own students: by being rejected, I was able to get a distinction that would not have otherwise been available to me.
After I had been teaching for some years and had got the research bug, I did start applying for university positions in education. I was really pleased to be interviewed for a post at Nottingham. Although I did not get the job, I liked the idea that I was shortlisted to teach on a course that I had not been considered suitable to study on.
I also remember being interviewed at Sussex. Again, I did not get the job, but as well as the formal rejection, I also got a nice private letter from one of the professors on the interview panel, offering some advice. "Personally," he wrote, "I do not see anything wrong with saying exactly what you think in an interview". I guess that had not been so true for others on the panel.
I actually stopped applying for University posts after I got engaged to be married. Strangely, I had finally persuaded my girlfriend it was time to announce our engagement during a trip we made to Liverpool.
Not that there is anything odd about Liverpool, of course – but BERA [the British Educational Research Association]'s annual conference is not known for being an especially romantic setting. A few months later, my, now, fiancé developed a serious inflammatory condition. On her first hospitalisation it was suggested they might need to amputate her foot. Luckily, mega-doses of steroid controlled the inflammation – at least for a few months. But she was never well enough to return to work, which she always regretted. Over the next few years we lurched between relatively normal life and emergency hospital admissions. I remember Philippa going to visit the potteries whilst she was accompanying me when I went to give a talk at Lancaster University. I came out of a conference session to find a message that Philippa had collapsed and was in the local A&E. We saw quite a few different hospital emergency rooms over the years.
So, I threw myself into my teaching and completing my PhD. At that time I was working in Further Education, which had been taken out of democratic local authority control by the Conservative government, and employment conditions were deteriorating fast. The government claimed that they had made F.E. colleges independent corporations, which then sought to impose less favourable working conditions on their staff. European law, however, was used to show that the 'new' [i.e., newly incorporated] colleges remained "emanations of the state" because they continued being publicly funded and under government control, and so employees enjoyed protection under the European Acquired Rights Directive and could not have their contracts torn up. So, I was protected by my Silver Book contract, but in refusing to sign the new contract I was offered (which was a management contract, not a teaching contract, much to my chagrin) I was excluded from successive annual cost-of-living rises, and so we were getting less well-off each year.
My wife had been put on daily steroid tablets when it was felt further injections were inadvisable, and she had become more stable, without the periodic inflammatory events she had been suffering. Although she did not really want to move she said she was happy for me to start applying again for university jobs, provided they were somewhere she would like to live.
So she gave me a list of four places she would be prepared to move to, and this included Exeter, and Cambridge.
I suspect she thought it was very unlikely jobs would come up in these specific Universities, and even if they did, who was going to appoint a mediocre chemist who had been toiling away for years in the Cinderella service of further education whilst the national curriculum had been implemented in schools.
However…
I applied for, and was offered a post as the chemistry education specialist at Exeter, and was looking forward to moving there. Philippa had very happy memories of shopping in Exeter from the summer holidays her family regularly took in nearby Sidmouth when she had been a child. We went to Exeter for a week to look around at housing. Unfortunately, since the time Philippa had been young, and healthy, Exeter had suddenly become extremely hilly, and it was clear it was not a place for someone with increasing mobility issues.
Luckily, Homerton then almost immediately offered me a post here. It was a permanent senior lecturer position, that two years later the University very kindly invited me to apply to have converted into a probationary lecturer position. I made an immediate impact. Almost as soon as I arrived it was decided to change the job description so that I could not have been appointed again. Nothing was stated in the job details, nor at the interview, about expecting the appointee to be a car driver. But then, to work at Cambridge, you are meant to know things without having to be told.
In my defence, I had raised this issue at the earlier Exeter interview, after I was taken out for an evening meal in a 'local' restaurant which had seemed to be at the far end of the world, away from all civilisation or any street lighting. But I had been told this was not a problem as I would not be expected to drive. So, I never thought to raise the issue at interview here.
I hope I have continued to have an impact in other ways, even if not always so immediately. Many years ago when I was deputy master's manager in the faculty I wrote a report on issues relating to master's assessment, and made a recommendation that we changed the length of the dissertation. Recently this has indeed happened.
I must confess, my recommendation was that in order to avoid the problem of self-plagiarism, as the university does not allow students to use material from formally assessed essays again in their final dissertation, we should use the 30 000 word limit we had on the books and have summative assessment based on the dissertation alone. So, perhaps I cannot claim too much credit for the recent reduction in the dissertation word limit.
My first year here was very challenging as although we had already found a house to buy in Girton and supposedly had a buyer for our own house, my wife collapsed out shopping some weeks before I was due to start here, and was back in hospital. She had had her first T.I.A., a mini-stroke, which she had experienced as if something had smashed into the back of her head. This reflected a further deterioration in her health, and stopped any immediate move. In the end, I managed by getting up at 4.30 in the mornings so I could catch a train to London, and then another train to Cambridge. I thought I would have Thursdays and Fridays to prepare classes, but it had been decided I would be a link lecturer and visit schools on one of these days. I really only got my breath back in the second term once the secondary PGCE students were on placements. But when I mentioned this to a colleague I was told not to 'forget' that the middle school trainees were back in faculty the next week. Middle school trainees? Yes, I was expected to know about them, and that I would be teaching them. That was a great course, with great students, but no one had thought to mention this to me at the start of the year.
I was reminded of this expectation that we should be omniscient a few weeks ago when some of my colleagues here in the faculty expressed surprise that I claimed not to be aware that they were critical of an aspect of my work. They informed me I only had myself to blame for not knowing, as they had been complaining about my work behind my back to colleagues and to their students for years. In most other contexts that would seem a strange stance for professionals to take, but this is Cambridge and we do seem to be expected to have extra-sensory perception.
This became especially clear in terms of the promotions processes here. The first time I put in for a personal readership, I was told I only satisfactorily, not clearly, met two of the five criteria. Obviously, in education-speak, satisfactory is not satisfactory at all, so I knew which aspects of my application I needed to develop. However, the second time I got the University letter telling me I had not been promoted, and that I would get some feedback on why, the feedback consisted of my being told that I clearly met all of the criteria for promotion. That's Cambridge: you have clearly met all the criteria for promotion, but we have not promoted you, and we hope this feedback will be helpful for your next application. It transpired it was not helpful enough, as on my third application I again clearly met all the criteria for promotion, and was again not promoted.
It does seem that once you are working here you can be expected to teach, and indeed assess, any topic. As someone who had only ever used Apple computers, I was rather surprised to be told one Summer that I would be teaching the European Computer Driving License course, all based on MS-DOS machines, the following year.
On the other hand, this assumption of omniscience has its advantages. I was brought into the faculty to support trainees preparing for school science teaching, but for the second half of my extended sojourn here I have been primarily working as a research methods teacher. I was allowed to reinvent myself and no one ever asked – 'but how can you, teach that?'
When we set up the MPhil 'core' course to make MPhil teaching more cost-efficient (and then failed to achieve this by designing the 'core' with myriad complex options) I planned a session that was basically philosophy of knowledge and another that was essentially curriculum theory, but no one thought to ask why I considered I could take on those areas. Unlike Father Ted, we do not have a colleague here such as Father Dougal, who on learning that an injured priest was undertaking medical tests, asked but "what would he know about that?" Academic freedom is a precious thing.
Perhaps part of the reason I have managed to survive here so long is that I have been based in a secret location hidden on the site, known as the Science Education Centre – which for much of the time I have been here was sign-posted as the Biology building, presumably to confuse any invading enemy paratroopers. This building is also protected by an invisibility cloak, such that one Saturday a few years ago I startled a group walking literally a few centimetres from my open window as they came on site to watch a Shakespeare performance, when I contradicted the loud claim, "oh Homerton, it's not part of the university, it's just a teacher training college".
I was originally based in the office James [de Winter] now has, which has a window directly in front of what used to be the building's main entrance. I was always amused each October when the undergraduates first arrived for lectures, and the keenest, earliest, arrival would announce that the building was locked, and gradually a long queue would form outside the building waiting for someone to unlock. This was in the good old days before it was decided that a lecture theatre was not something that was useful in a teaching institution.
The door had been set up with the handle turning in the opposite sense to that most people expected, and I would reflect on how all these exceptionally clever people had been admitted to Cambridge, but they were unable to cope with an idiosyncratic door handle.
This year I taught a group of second year undergraduates in the science education centre, and despite them having been attending classes at this site for well over a year, with some of them actually living on site, they told me that they had not even known the building existed till they had to find it for their lecture.
But then, Cambridge is a special place – neither attracting plain square pegs, nor offering simple round holes. I remember sending the email requesting my MA degree with a sense that it felt more like I was claiming a prize award from a token found in a cereal packet, than an academic qualification.
I also remember my bemusement when I was invited to the University's reception for staff with 25 years service. At the time I had been working here about eight years. I wrote back to point out that although technically I did have 25 years of continuous service, most of this was due to 'continuation of service' transferred in from other institutions, and I wondered if I had been invited by error. It seemed not, but virtually everyone else attending the reception had been working in the University for 25 years, so I felt a bit of a fraud. That said, the University went to town with the catering: providing us with both olives and mixed nuts.
In conclusion, I cannot really offer a satisfactory explanation of how I came to be working at Cambridge, nor how I've held on to the position for so long, but can only suspect that perhaps I am just eccentric enough to have worked my way into an odd-shaped niche in this rather bizarre habitat.
