Mini series: Whichever Way You Throw Me (Episode5)
The final episode of Whichever Way You Throw Me, a week of stories from my own career and what each one taught me about leadership. The series takes its name from the Manx motto, Quocunque Jeceris Stabit.
A few years ago I was leading an assembly at Laxey School. An ordinary one. I have led hundreds and I could not tell you what this one was about, which is part of why the story stays with me. Nothing about the morning was designed to be significant.
The children were sitting in rows on the hall floor. The staff were standing around the edges, the way staff always do, half watching the children and half watching me. And somewhere in the middle of whatever I was saying, I looked up and properly registered who was standing there.
Along one side was a teacher near the start of her career. She had been a child in my very first class as a newly qualified teacher. Year 3. Seven and eight year olds, my first classroom, the year in which I mostly worked out how much I did not know. She had sat in front of me then. She was now a grown woman, qualified, employed at my school, teaching a class of her own.
Along the other side was a teacher at the other end of her career. Retired, back on supply, working at Laxey that day. She had been my teacher. Year 3 at Onchan School, when I was seven years old. The same year group, thirty-odd years earlier, in the school you read about yesterday if you have been following this series.
Two women. Two Year 3 classrooms. One hall. And me standing at the front of it, employing them both.
I lost my thread. I would like to report that I carried on seamlessly. I did not.
Here is what struck me and has not stopped striking me since. Every part of my professional life was in that room simultaneously. The child I was, sitting in Year 3 being taught to read properly by a woman who is now on my staff. The young teacher I was, muddling through my first Year 3 class, one of whom is now a colleague I rely on. The head I am, standing in front of children who will be somebody’s colleague in twenty years and do not know it yet.
The distance between those three versions of me is, in one sense, everything – three decades, several schools, a career. In another sense it is about the width of a school hall.
Careers in education are not linear in the way careers in other sectors can be. You do not leave people behind you. They come round again as colleagues, as parents of the children you teach, as governors, as the person interviewing you, as the person you appoint. On an island this size that is intensified to the point of absurdity, but it is true everywhere. Teaching is a profession in which the people you affect stay in the system with you.
That has consequences for how you behave, and this is the closest thing to a lesson I want to draw from a week of stories.
The first is about the long horizon. When you teach a class of seven year olds, or lead a staff meeting, or handle somebody’s grievance, you are dealing with a person who will be in your professional life for the next forty years. Not necessarily in your building, but in your world. The teaching profession has a memory. People remember how they were treated by the head they had at twenty-four, and they carry it into how they treat others at fifty. Every interaction is a deposit into a system you will still be living in decades later.
The second is about respect running in every direction. There is something clarifying about employing your own former teacher. It removes any temptation to imagine that the hierarchy you sit at the top of describes reality. She taught me to read. I sign her supply forms. Both are facts. Neither one is more important than the other, and the second one is temporary.
The third is about what actually lasts. I could not tell you what that assembly was about. I could not tell you what my Year 3 teacher taught me in any particular lesson either, or what I taught my own first Year 3 class in any particular week. What survives is not the content. It is the relationships, the standards, the sense of what a place expects of you. The children in that hall will not remember my assemblies. Some of them will remember, thirty years from now, what school felt like, and a few of them will be standing at the edge of a hall somewhere doing this job.
That is the thread running through all five stories this week. A first headship inherited from a man who took it back eleven years later. A school I helped build, left, and returned to lead. A field in Onchan with my whole life visible from it. Three schools and one diary and the guilt that taught me what leadership actually is. And a hall in Laxey containing my past, my beginning and my present all at once.
I did not plan any of it. Nobody’s career is designed. You get thrown by circumstance, by opportunity, by other people’s decisions, by a pandemic, by a vacancy appearing at the right moment or the wrong one.
Quocunque Jeceris Stabit. Whichever way you throw it, it will stand. Every Manx child learns those words young and most of us never stop to think about them. I have spent a career finding out what they mean, and I think it comes to this. You do not get to choose which way you are thrown. You only get to decide what you are made of when you land.
