Pedalling ideas: learning from the meeting cycle

TES column 11 April 2014 

With anxiety rising and heart pounding, I willed the first arrival to swing round the corner.  My gaze fixed on the corner of a bungalow – the end of a block of modest homes lining an otherwise empty suburban street.  I held my breath and counted as a whipping gust sent a shudder down my back.  Then they came – the laughing, worrying, wobbling class of ten year olds whose cycling I was struggling to raise to proficiency.  I watched; carefully, noting the quality of their hand signals and ensuring that they checked over their shoulders before turning.

Two of the lads raced up the road towards, me.  One girl absently mindedly held her ‘arm-out’ signal for a good 100 meters.  Another pushed his mount with oil-covered hands – testimony to ‘mechanical issues’.

After a few of minutes, all 25 of them were back – demanding to know what would be the next two-wheeled adventure?  There would be no more today.  Their first solo trip around the block, out of my sight for a shade more than three minutes, was enough for my nerves.

Hopefully by the end of our course my young changes had gained confidence and skills on their bicycles.  The journey that brought me to that street corner had certainly taught me an important lesson in managing interventions at meetings.

Six weeks earlier, a neophyte on the governing body, I had asked what provision the school made for training pupils in safe bicycle riding.  There was none.  “Why”, I demanded, reeling off a few half-remembered facts that correlate cycle instruction in childhood and the propensity to travel by bicycle in later life.

The head let out a long buy online valium in india sigh.  Childrens’ cycle training in Suffolk was, at that time, largely provided by volunteers.  Alas, the man who used to run lessons at our school retired some time ago and his shoes remained unfilled.

“Perhaps you could step in”, suggested the head.  “We learn better from teachers who are committed to their subjects, and I can see that you really care about this”.  My fellow governors all craned their heads, looking expectantly in my direction.

It was a text-book example of meeting-skills brilliance; the head flattered me, but also implied that if this really was a cause to which I was committed, then surely I would step up to the plate?

For three years I took time off work to coax the children around the streets that surround our school.  Waiting nervously for them to circumnavigate the block gave me time for reflection – not least on the genesis of my predicament.

In meetings of any kind, research and planning are key, unless you are content personally deliver the initiatives for which you lobby, I concluded.  In my case, I should have enquired what pressure the school had put on our local authority to insist on proper professional cycle training for our children?  Doing that would have saved me a lot of nervous minutes on windy pavements.

Now that I have hung up my high-vis ‘instructor’ vest, though, I am glad that to have also discovered the more important truth in the head’s clever retort.  Spotting the now teenage graduates of my cycling courses speeding by on their bicycles I am persuaded there is a beneficial connection between effective pedagogy and personal passions.