The Perfect Classes — Julian Girdham

As teachers we quickly become aware at the start of our careers that there is no such thing as the perfect class. Sometimes we think a class has gone superbly, only to realise weeks later that little long-term learning actually took place. Sometimes a class which seemed clunky at the time turns out to have been successful. Have a look at Alex Quigley’s new book How Learning Fails (and what to do about it) for an analysis of why so often things don’t work out as we hope. Classrooms are extraordinarily complex environments, and naturally there is not an untrammelled route between intent and results. However, let’s not be pessimistic: we can mitigate such disappointment, the sea in which we all inevitably swim.

But every teacher during a long career deserves at least one ‘perfect’ experience.

As a pupil, one of the texts I studied for the Leaving Certificate was Henry James’s masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady (impossible to imagine it being on the course now). My teacher, John, some years later became a long-time colleague and friend. We would often talk about the novel, and indeed after his retirement we put those thoughts together in a podcast discussion (also in a player at the bottom of this post). We thought it would be wonderful to be able to teach it again.

Then one day in 1997 I was walking around the city centre, dropped into Hodges Figgis bookshop and spotted a big pile of hardback Everyman editions of the book, slashed in price. I rang John and we agreed I’d grab 20 copies.

So it was we proposed to our Fifth Year pupils the idea of ‘Evening English’. They were not facing a public examination for another year. They would be welcome to volunteer to come along to my classroom twice a week in the evening (we are a boarding school), having read a section in advance, and then we would discuss the novel, co-taught by John and me. In that edition I have in front of me right now as I write this (pictured) there are 626 pages, and none is ‘easy’: while this is not the late and often impenetrable James of The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove, the prose style is still stately, the narrative subtle and slow.

Somehow, 20 pupils signed up. And then they kept coming week after week, without anyone dropping out. The conversation was rich. Some of that was due to John’s skill as a teacher, and deep knowledge of the book. But it was also informed by a thrilling love of literature, and of study for its own sake. We did not set any written work, and there was no examination at the end.

It is unimaginable now. Who would commit to such weeks at a time when the pace of life has ramped up for teenagers as much as adults? Who would commit to read for no ‘purpose’ such a dense novel so far removed from contemporary life?

But they did then. The classroom I taught in had huge windows on one side beside a luxuriously verdant garden, and on those May evenings 27 years ago the sun drenched the room as we talked and talked.

It was perfect.