Rereading: To Sir With Love

I’ve read To Sir With Love 3 or 4 times now, usually when I’m feeling frustrated with teaching. And who isn’t frustrated with online teaching? I’m also reading a lot of articles talking about how K12 students are 6 or 7 months behind their expected learning, and instead of my usual eyeroll about how end-of-years tests are made-up metrics, I think, phew! My students are only kinda behind where I’d expect them to be, not extremely behind. I’m doing ok! We’re all doing ok!

I first read this before discovering Call The Midwife, but there’s a similar post-war East End setting. It’s autobiographical novel about Ricky Braithwaite first-year teacher, a young Black man from British Guiana, and his first class of high-school seniors. The students have already run their last teacher out, and they don’t expect much from the narrator.

Some of the dated attitudes in To Sir With Love are a little cringey. Not just the obvious ones  in the historical account of a well-educated Black man trying to find opportunities in England, but the background ones, too.  The author/narrator is constantly calling the East Enders earthy and simple, with extra stereotypes reserved for the Italian and Jewish Londoners. But these dated, confusing views serve to make Ricky feel so real. He wants very much to be seen as an educated person first, and as a Black person second, but his narration continually stereotypes the East Enders he encounters by ethnicity and gender. This makes him feel like a flawed, realistic human.

Braithwaite’s goal is to treat his class of seniors like adults and to demand high standards from them, and this brings out the best in them.  At first, the students test him with constant backtalk and mild swearing, but they respond well to the respect he shows them. He changes his lesson plans to focus on applicable skills, discovering large gaps in their basic knowledge and knowing that the teenagers will be working or apprenticing as soon as they graduate, but he also believes the students deserve to enjoy and understand art.

Some moments are a bit too perfect, in that Up The Down Staircase way, where once an inspiring teacher learns to speak the troubled students’ language, troubles vanish and everyone learns. Actual teaching success isn’t nearly as linear. Stories (and professional development talks, ugh) about how one change fixed everything in the classroom ignore just how students’ individual moods, feelings and experiences will affect their learning, and how a great day can be followed by a garbage day.

On this read, the staffroom scenes were probably the best part. I love the art teacher who’s a great artist, but not quite great enough to quit teaching and paint full-time, a very minor but realistic character. Mrs. Dale-Evans provides motherly care and high-quality domestic science classes to students, but she’s also blunt about barely being able to pay her bills.