Cornstarch (for #teacher5aday)

Propping up the bar at the Dog and Tweet, and a fellow barfly side-eyes me and, noting that we both were sporting elbow-patches, he says ‘you a teacher, too?’

‘For my sins, yes.’

Our eyes roll in unison with a mutual, but warm resignation. The barfly thumbs his argyll tank top: ‘geography and PSHE’.

I acknowledge the thick twill of his cords and give him a flash of my battered brogues.

‘English and Theory of Knowledge’ I reply, taking a swig of Golden Pheasant.

‘Five years, overseas, me. How long have you been on the circuit?’ he asks. The barmaid moves over to another band of punters, all wearing the same pink bowler hats which read ‘Bazzer’s Stag, Prague 2023’.

I look the barfly full in his two eyes with my two eyes. ‘Nigh on 14 years,’ I say. In my imagination, I’m chewing the end of a match. In reality, I’m chewing a crouton of fried bread from the less-than-hygienic bar snack ashtray.

My barfly’s eyes widen a little: ‘You must’ve seen some action. Where’ve you been?’

‘Here in Prague, of course, but China, Peru, the UK…’

His eyes widen even more. ‘The UK?’ He fingers the handle of his beer glass. ‘Shit.’

There’s a silence between us punctuated only by Bazzer’s stagmates chanting ‘chug, chug, chug!’ at the other end of the bar.

‘Ofsted?’ my new friend asks, suddenly smaller.

I turned to him again. If it were possible to look at him even more levelly than I did before, I look more levelly at him and I level with him.

‘Three times,’ I say. In my imagination, I lift my shirt and show him three scars above my right hip. In reality, I take another pull of my pint of Golden Pheasant and let out a sigh, singed with vocal fry.

‘Shit,’ he says. Again.

People ask me what I’ve learned on the international circuit. I don’t know whether to answer with what I’ve learned about life, whether to answer with what I’ve learned about education, whether to answer with what I’ve learned about the world or about my own stroppy little corner thereof.

I’m a woefully small sample, worthy only of ethnographic study, but sometimes these stories need to be told. There are vantage points in one’s life when one has a duty to set a few things down, to straighten out a record and make sense of the narrative if only for one’s self.

Have you ever played with cornstarch? Get a tupper-ware container and fill it with cornstarch and water. If you push the mixture of water and cornstarch and water around the container, it’ll bunch together to form a solid. If you let the mixture rest, it’ll resolve itself back into a liquid. That, my friend, is the perfect analogy for the human mind. Focussed and attending to particulars, the mind is a solid, constricted to a point; relaxed and wide-angled, the mind is liquid, a pond, a lake, an ocean.

My teaching career has taken me to each corner of Earth’s tupper-ware container: each of the four hemispheres has echoed with my ‘ssshhhh’ and suffered my teacher’s glare. If I could boil my findings down to one or two, I’d have to admit that, in actuality, I’ve learned more about myself than about much of anything else. Everywhere I’ve taught, I’ve encountered broadly the same needs, wants, desires and avoidances amongst my students. My humour has proven to be enormously portable and my steadfast determination to smile well before Christmas has always enabled me to forge trust and partnership either side of the Andes and through the ideological curtain that separates the West from China.

I’ve learned that, until recently, I have been searching outside of myself (and often across multiple borders) for something that had already rested within. I’ve learned that this bowl of cornstarch is infinitely more interesting and manageable if you just let it be from time to time.

Since the day of my birthday in 2018, up until this present moment, I have meditated for 20 minutes every morning. That is over 40,000 minutes of sitting. 2,300 instances of allowing the cornstarch to rest.

I started meditating using an app called Headspace. Now, I hover between Headspace and another, more esoteric app called Waking Up (run by the neuroscientist and one-quarter horseman of the atheistic apocalypse, Sam Harris. If you’ve been reading my blog for years, you’ll have read enough between the lines to know that my beginnings with meditation were prompted by a near-miss with a nervous breakdown in China in 2018. My globe-trotting solutions to inner problems had run out of road: the only route to the light was to let go of the road. So I did. And I haven’t looked back.

Teaching is a moral endeavour. When you’re in a bad place, it’s harder to serve your students and that can deepen your depression and further erode your self esteem. It’s really important to give yourself a bedrock of self-love, to take the time to find silence and learn to read the eddies of your mind. If you’re a teacher, you’re not an oligarch, you’re not an internet billionaire, you’re probably barely scratching and scrabbling at what used to be a middle-class, professional life. You’re suffering, but you’re far from alone.

What I’ve learned in my travels is that there is nowhere that I need to go. I’ve learned that there is an enormous difference between the sunburn of loneliness and the bliss of allowing oneself to sometimes be alone.

The care that you give yourself will not only return to you, it will spread to your family, your friends and to your students. There is a dinner bell and there is a bell that calls us to and from prayer. Heed both bells.

May you be happy.

May you be free from suffering.

May your life be filled with joy, peace and ease.

No, if you’ll excuse me, I have a bar to prop up and some cornstarch to play with.