The Secret Teacher: ‘Boys shine brightly at school. We should celebrate that’

“Sorry I’m late, I was helping Mr Carroll, " said Jack, with his head held high and his shoulders back in a way we never see while he wrestles with equations or grammar. His tone could be best described as an audible badge of honour. And just as noticeable was the undeniable evidence that Jack’s voice was in the full throes of breaking.

Engineers make bridges. Artists make paintings. Scientists make rockets. Teachers made them all.

Those engineers, artists and scientists, as well as all of those working in tech, medicine, education and so on, were once the uniformed boys and girls who sat in our classrooms. They wrestled with adolescence and its accompanying growing pains on our watch, and they came out the other side as celebrated school leavers. From there many went on to achieve greatness.

That boys shine brightly at school rarely, if ever, makes the headlines. Not only is this true, but it also needs significantly more highlighting and promoting.

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What if the consistent message we receive about girls outperforming boys in school is the product of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Could a decade of heavily publicising that boys outperform girls at school bring the corresponding change in academic achievement?

A privilege

I have long believed that to have a full-time career in teaching is a privilege. Teaching boys is a huge part of that.

Boys are kind. They take enormous pride in offering to help carry heavy loads. It is not that girls do not offer help; they most certainly do, but schools provide the opportunity for us to catch the earliest glimpses of what fine young men these adolescent boys will be one day. Whether it is helping to set up rooms for guest speakers, internal meetings or any such task, the responsibility that comes with it becomes evident in their posture and pride at being trusted. While, like all of us, they may have their off-moments and require correction or a sharp word from time to time, a student will never let you down when trusted with “a job”.

We don’t see these acts and achievements recognised formally. The media coverage and photo opportunities are largely reserved for those who obtain the maximum number of highest grades. In our schools there are students whose personal circumstances mean that regular attendance and average academic engagement amount to a phenomenal achievement. Even today we have students who are the first in their families to complete secondary education. These are also moments in life worth lauding.

Boys have a courage and an openness to take a chance on answering in class when they have absolutely no idea whether their answer is correct or not. This is invaluable to a teacher. We are always keen to get the balance right between teacher talking-time and student talking-time. No successful lesson in 2022 consists of a teacher sitting patiently (or otherwise) in a vacuum of silence. Girls do tend to want to get the answer right, and this can manifest itself as volunteering only when they have little or no doubt about the answer. I can count on the boys to worry less about this, and so they fill that quiet void significantly more often in class than the girls do. And I love them for that.

A boy knows when he is in the wrong and his capacity to show genuine remorse is admirable. When told off he bounces back sooner rather than later, and will often take the first step towards repairing the rupture with a particularly emphatic “thanks” as he leaves the class that day. He and I always know the extra emphasis is a subtle code to check that we are still okay. And we always are. Boys can be significantly easier to tell off, since they seem entirely uninterested in bearing a grudge. And it is not that girls always do, more that they might need longer for the sting of censure to pass. These are examples of a very specific form of easy sincerity we find in boys’ human contact, but we seem reluctant to place this in the spotlight. Is it just because they are boys?

Upheaval of adolescence

During secondary school both boys and girls go through the significant upheaval of adolescence and its outward transformations. Boys and girls alike wrestle with the growing pains of puberty. Back in the day when we did not talk openly about private physical matters awkward biology lessons were simply the norm. Now, just like back then, the child that shyly enters the vast unknown of secondary school becomes the young adult who leaves while the next admiring junior looks up and looks on, willing his own day to come sooner.

In a school context where so much depends on being communicative in class we must be especially sensitive to a boy’s potential need for space while his voice is breaking. This is intended neither to excessively highlight nor to stigmatise an entirely natural event. It is more to acknowledge that for each individual boy it happens only once, and that his self-consciousness will inevitably be elevated at that time. The point more than anything here is that we do not perhaps talk openly enough about what our students are experiencing individually right under our noses. It is of no consolation whatsoever that every teenager goes through this during their secondary school days; while it is happening for them they are experiencing it uniquely and just once. It is therefore always a huge deal, for both genders.

In the 1950s Maurice Chevalier sang Thank Heaven for Little Girls. More than 70 years later our education system has yet to fully acknowledge the significant contribution boys make to it.

It is not too late to do so.