Sometimes I realise my pupils and I are from completely different worlds. Communication is blocked by this – sometimes disastrously. I am not talking about class, education or culture. I am talking about the totally different assumptions that operate in the minds of the young. I was first truly aware of this when my own children were young. My husband used to go to Pakistan for three months at a time, to work. We would explain to the children that ‘He has to go away to get the money to buy food.’ I thought that was all fine until I heard my eldest, aged five, describing Pakistan to a friend, and realised that she was describing the bank in Dulverton – just much bigger and very far away. Often the assumptions are based in the changes in language. I had a class of girls, mostly lippy and confrontational, among whom...
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