Many years ago, I worked in a school with a large underground carpark which was never more than a quarter full. I remember one the senior leaders had a notice pinned on the parking spot nearest the pedestrian entrance to the school - Reserved for XXXX. It offended me beyond all rationality and I took great pleasure in surreptitiously moving the notice to the most distant spot, some 100 meters further back (it was the days before CCTV). The notice always appeared back in the prime spot a few days later, and I would wait a time, and then move it again. We played cat and mouse like that for over a year, until I left the school.
This admittedly childish anecdote foregrounds an important theme in school (and likely in any organisation); status and 'perks'. Of course people have different roles in organisations, so there are all sorts of very justifiable differences - but when does a difference become unsupportable?
A colleague recently told me an interesting story related to this - he was in the canteen, and he saw a long queue with a teacher in line waiting to be served. He could see the teacher was ‘twitchy’ and was clearly itching for things to move along a bit faster - and it looked like she was even going to go ahead of the students to the front of the queue. But she didn’t - not because she couldn’t, and not because she was being watched (the person who told me was a long way off and unseen).
This seems to me to be one of those unspoken culture pieces - where we understand culture to be the way we do things around here. Teachers should not automatically go to the front of the queue; if we want relationships that are mutually respectful, then of course teachers and students have different roles, but the need to eat is common, so there’s no need to make any hierarchy there. I suppose the underlying value is the starting point that the students’ time for lunch and teachers’ time for lunch are equally important. The equal approach to queues is a manifestation of that value.
So far so obvious, but I realised I had missed a slight subtlety here when I was discussing this with the colleague who told me the story. We agreed that this approach was the right one, and I told him, with some shame, that I did jump the queue a couple of months ago, when I had time-sensitive, rather difficult back-to-back meetings and had not brought a packed lunch. I remember apologising as I asked the students if they would mind me going to the front of the line; they were gracious and there was no problem but it still felt awkward. I said to my colleague that this was probably not the right thing to have done.
But that’s fine, he replied because the context matters more than the rule - you had a good reason; and you would have been very happy for a student who has good reason to have done exactly the same. Aha! I felt a lightbulb go off then; that's exactly right and indeed I have often happily given way to a busy student. So the whole idea of focussing on whether or not teachers can or cannot, should or should not get priority in a line is misplaced; using the categories of teacher or student is just the wrong framing. Rather than use status and role as a starting point, it is far better to look at the needs of the human beings in line - we all have a common and daily need to eat - and at the same time circumstances and context should provide good reasons for us not to becomes mindless slaves to the rule. And most of all, we can be reminded that sometimes the best solutions arise when we just have a conversation with the people around us to find the best way to work together.
A common charge against schools is that they are built on factory-like models that value consistency and uniformity above all else. But it does not have to be true, and the message here goes far beyond the canteen. Consistency - at least, consistency in the form of rules and regulations - are means to end, to be discarded, carefully and after due consideration, when necessary. Ralph Waldo Emerson was right when he spoke of 'foolish consistency [as] the hobgoblin of... [the] mind'.
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