Opinion: Teaching will be good – for me and the students
© Adobe Stock After eight years on the run, my past has finally caught up with me.
OK, I was asking for it, renting a farm a scant mile from Devon’s last remaining agricultural college.
How long could I escape their attention, especially while using them to earn money on my “educational visits” Countryside Stewardship scheme?
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Maybe it was ego, maybe it was just nice to be asked, maybe it was my wife urging me to get off the farm (I can take a hint).
But the muffled cries of “no, I’m far too busy” could only hold off the press gang for so long.
Anyway, I now find myself teaching one morning a week, and actually it’s probably good for me, and possibly of some discernible benefit to the students I have been entrusted to educate in everything about farming by the end of the summer term. Three months away.
I had to dig out the hardest-earned trophy of my life – a PGCE I keep as evidence that I can survive two years of Tuesday evenings enduring a monotonous drone emitted by a man who surely missed his calling in life running the white noise psychological interrogation department at Guantanamo Bay.
And since I can afford a reckless disregard for any prospect of a long-term lecturing career, I don’t have to pretend to be omniscient.
In fact, I don’t have to know anything. I can look it up in books.
But you can surprise yourself with what you know, and also what you’ve forgotten.
A suitably bright class will ask you questions that make you reflect on your own motivation and maybe see things differently.
Since I’m just down the road, I can use my farm as an extended teaching resource as well.
It is often stimulating to see the place through other people’s eyes. Our tenanted acreage is set in a stunningly beautiful landscape, but when I’m forking up dung, doing the accounts or driving up and down the same old fields, I rarely step back and appreciate it.
My current group of students are studying for a Foundation Degree in Rural Regeneration.
I’ve had to research the topic and I’m probably not alone in struggling to pin down exactly what qualifies as rural regeneration.
Where, for example, does regenerative agriculture begin and end? I suspect my charges are beginning to think I’m a salesman on commission for the Groundswell Festival and its YouTube channel.
Despite this, I’m not sure many lecturers at our rural colleges can really be interested in money – pay in further education is miserly.
A college paymaster handing out the cheques at the end of each month makes Scrooge look like the proverbial inebriated matelot.
However, there are fringe benefits. Teaching is great cover for broadening your horizons and having a look at other people’s farms.
I always thought the best part of the job was to open students’ minds to learning, rather than preach endlessly from my personal experience.
Years ago, I organised a week-long agricultural study tour encompassing most of southern and central England.
When the exhausted students finally made it back to college, they unanimously informed me that they had learned more from this epic odyssey than from a year of my teaching.
To this day, I still can’t work out if that was a good thing or not.