Do you have any rules and superstitions that you follow?
Below you find some rules relating to fishermen of Cromer. Some are harmless enough but there’s one or two that might raise an eyebrow:
- Never wear or own anything green
- Never mention cottontails (rabbits), longtails (rats) or curlytails (pigs)
- Never allow a woman on your boat
- Never start a new venture on a Friday
- Never whistle on a boat
- Avoid cross-eyed people and parsons
A bit of fun perhaps and it does need putting into the context of the times as the third bullet point is woeful.
But what about teachers? Are there things that you would recommend colleagues should never do or always do?
There are some great examples from the past that we can draw on that seem just as crazy. Here are a couple of American examples from 1872 and 1915:
Although we have teaching standards and things expected of us, I have yet to find anything approaching the scale of advice offered to what teachers receive in Ghana. Perhaps we need something like this that really spells out what the rules are.
Read this document and judge whether some of the rules would apply elsewhere and what you would consider out of place such as those relating to child labour.
Rules are tied to context, circumstance and time period so perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh in our reactions.
So what rules would you expect teachers to follow today? In 50 and 100 years down the line people will just snigger at us and say, “What? They really had to do that?!”