Molly Molloy loved nursing but believes she was destined to teach. Theresa Judge reports
Molly Molloy doesn't believe the change from nursing to teaching techniques to enhance children's ability to learn is a complete turnaround. "For me you can't separate care and learning because if children know you care, they will learn," she says.
From a childhood spent in Connemara, she has experienced a number of fairly dramatic changes - from island life on Inistreabhair to city life in London, and from a secure State job to taking financial risks starting her own childcare business.
She believes now that a teaching career would have suited her, but in the Ireland of the late 1970s career guidance in schools was limited. She says she left school "not having a clue what to do as many of my generation didn't".
She now tells second-level pupils about the way she chose a career as an example of how it should not be done. She was waitressing in a hotel in Galway and happened to tell a guest that she and four friends had just been turned down for a nursing course in Dublin. The man told her the name of a hospital he knew in London and within months she and her friends were training there.
It was a major transition to make but not the first of her life. Her father had died when she was just 12. She was the eldest of eight children - her mother was actually in hospital giving birth to the youngest child when her father died. Shortly afterwards she moved to the mainland to start boarding school, another life experience she now shares with schoolchildren, as an example of extreme stress making learning practically impossible. She says she now meets children with the same problem - struggling at school because of a recent bereavement.
Once she started nursing she loved the job. It didn't seem like hard work at the time. "That didn't come into it for me, because as islanders we had worked as children - milking cows or bringing home turf. The work of nursing didn't feel like work. But now of course I think it was very tough."
She spent 13 years nursing, including a year in the US, and has no hesitation in saying that she loved it. She also liked her social life and the friends she met in London. But eventually she decided there were other things she wanted to do.
"It wasn't the fact that I didn't like nursing. I loved nursing and looking after people, but it was the fact that I had a fascination with business that dragged me away from it."
She says she always found herself reading the business section of a newspaper first - "the story of a business is like somebody's life story, you watch it grow or fall apart".
Her business idea arose partly from her own experiences following the birth of her daughter. She developed an interest in complementary medicine after finding conventional medicine had little to offer her to help her baby's persistent crying. She says a cranial osteopath finally helped her daughter and enabled her to get her "first night's sleep in 18 months".
When it came to childcare she wasn't impressed with the preschools she visited. So she set up "London's first holistic pre-school programme" with specialist teachers. The programme included music and music therapy, art, drama and French. There was also an emphasis on healthy food, cooked by a Jamaican woman. She says one of the most difficult parts was trying to convince a bank manager that this new idea would be a success.
Having run the business successfully for a number of years, she then decided to try to bring the idea back home to Galway. She modified the programme slightly replacing French with Irish but keeping an emphasis on caring for all aspects of the child. "If children had to leave home then I felt I had to give them something worth leaving home for, and I guess that would be the goal of most people working in child care," she says.
This was in the mid-1990s before the Government started giving large capital grants for preschool services, and she found that her emphasis on a quality service wasn't necessarily shared by everyone. "They didn't see the need to pay for that kind of early education . . . and in the end it was an impossible programme to fund on my own as a single income person."
The decision to close the preschool and sell the premises was a difficult one. She knew the parents who had appreciated what she was trying to do were deeply disappointed. "It was like a death. My dream had gone not the way I wanted it to - the children had been very happy so naturally the parents were very upset."
However, it wasn't long before she found a new way to work with children without the same degree of pressure. She trained as a "brain gym" practitioner and started working with children and teachers both in schools and at her premises in Galway. She describes brain gym as a programme of mind and body exercises that are designed to help make learning easier.
"It takes the stress out of learning and gets both sides of the brain to work together," she says.
The system was first developed by US educationalist Dr Paul Dennison. She says it supports other teaching methods and can improve concentration and alertness and help children to develop successful study habits. She also emphasises that it supports self-belief.
She is very conscious of the stress faced by children, saying she often finds what they need most of all is a "brain break" because of all the information they are trying to absorb. "They don't get the time to put all the learning away."
She believes an understanding of how stress affects learning informs her whole approach to children - "then you cannot blame a child, you come from a different mindset, you try to understand the child and the behaviour . . . my angle on it would be that a child who misbehaves is not feeling successful at learning".
She is particularly interested in working with children who tell her they hate school, and trying to find ways to motivate them. She believes the education system is unsuited to many children, particularly those who are very creative.
Her next plan is to introduce motivational programmes to Ireland which have been developed in Britain and the US specifically for children who are not motivated by the mainstream system. She says this is one of the advantages of the way she organises her work life now as she can pursue topics or types of work that interest her.
"I like the flexibility and the contact with children. It also allows you the freedom to explore new areas where you see a need and right now I think there's a big need for these kinds of motivational programmes."