International Teach Like A Pirate Day

I'm very disappointed that nobody responded to my eloquent post in the #change11 Facebook group about International Talk Like A Pirate Day. So I thought I'd up the ante by blogging about teaching like a pirate. I don't mean charging into the room shouting "'Zwounds", and "Harrrr", and "Shiver me timbers", complimenting all the women on their buxom figures, and crossing swords with all the men. Though that has a certain appeal compared to some tutorials I've been involved in.... I just wondered how far we might get by looking at piracy as a metaphor for teaching. First of all, piracy is a subversive activity, and a lot of teaching nowadays is subversive. Is that a good or a bad thing? I'm sorry to say that in most circumstances it is a thoroughly good thing. Sorry because I wish it didn't have to be. But we live in a world where more and more people seem to be concerned to tell people what to think rather than telling them how to think. For me the essence of teaching and learning is that the learner ends up with their own view of the world and the mental equipment to analyse and evaluate any situation they are faced with. It doesn't matter how many A stars you get; if you can't do that, the learning has failed. Pirates live by their own rules. There are many examples of pirate codes. And teaching nowadays involves many collaborative activities, and many classrooms, particularly online ones, in which the rules are negotiated rather than laid down by a person in charge, thus this part of the method seems to fit quite aptly. Anyone can be a pirate. You just need to know how to buckle a swash. And anyone can be a teacher. Not all are called teachers by any means, and not many go through the qualification process to get a certificate that says you know how to teach, but we now demand a lot more from our students in terms of being teachers as well as learners. Two sides of the same coin, and for far too long we've only let students be one side of the coin. Pirates like dressing up in funny costumes and blowing things up. Well, OK, not all teachers would go that far, but we do stretch the boundaries of what's expected from time to time. Actually some of my best teaching has involved dressing up. That's part of transporting the students into a situation where they live the history they're learning. (As for blowing things up, I took a science course a couple of years ago, at the age of fifty-ahem, to fill in some of the gaps left by my lamentable approach to science when I was at school. It was the OU's S104 Exploring Science, and I loved every minute of it. I have only one regret about it, which is that we didn't get to blow anything up, though I very nearly did with my potato in the microwave experiment.) Pirates don't flinch from a challenge. Teaching is a profession of being constantly challenged. Oh, yes, those long holidays, the easy life, regurgitating the same lecture every year..... If only. Our own learning is a constant challenge, and every bunch of new students is a new challenge as to how to get the message across, how to get them learning and being responsible for their own learning in their own way. Pirates never known where they're going to be tomorrow. Nor do teachers. Any class you start may take you in an entirely different direction to the one you intended. Sometimes you have to bring the class back to the learning outcomes, but even so the way you get there can be astonishingly varied. So, are teachers like pirates? We are quietly subversive, and, more and more, we make our own spaces in the world. Rather as there is a public sphere and a private sphere, perhaps what we have, or can occasionally create, as we do with this MOOC, is a collaborative sphere, in which we agree our own rules, make up our own journeys, and have a jolly good time.