Liberal Studies

Today

This morning my nephew was grumbling at the prospect of giving a training course to a group of reluctant students. "A good trainer," I sanctimoniously told him "Should be able to make almost anything interesting to almost anybody".

In My Day

When I worked for the Inland Revenue, back in 1983, I was asked by my boss if I would carry out some training requested by the local sixth form college. The idea was that, in order to prepare them for the real world, the students should attend a series of "liberal studies" classes or lectures.

I would be giving a forty-minute session on the subject of tax to a class of seventeen year-olds - a topic which they would be sure to find fascinating. I didn't really know where to start. I drafted a few notes and trotted off to the college well in time. I met the form teacher who asked me if I wanted her to be present. "You see", she said "when the man from the Abbey National came to give a talk about savings and mortgages he was so dull that there was a lot of misbehaviour and he lost control."

This cheered me up a great deal. "Well", I replied"My job isn't discipline, so please stay in the class."

The students filed into the classroom in an uncommitted way and took their places. As the teacher introduced me I wondered how I was going to fill the forty minutes. After deciding that running screaming with panic out of the classroom wasn't an option, I started with a brief introduction on the English tax system. 

Clearly this wasn't going to keep them riveted - I glanced around the room at the bored faces and decided on a new tack. "That's just an introduction", I said "I'm now going to take you through your adult lives with some information about the tax consequences. I need two volunteers." I pointed at a girl and boy "your names? Right, Darren and Sharon, let's see what you might encounter."

I then proceeded to sketch out their lives - they had jobs, married each other, had babies, mortgages, company cars, were divorced and lived abroad. Darren and Sharon loved being the centres of attention and the rest of the class were so busy running behind me to see what I'd dream up next that they didn't have time to misbehave. The forty minutes flashed by and I breathed with relief.

I continued with these sessions for the next couple of years and the form teacher marvelled at my uncanny instinct for spotting the potential trouble-makers and making them my focus. (I'm still not sure what it was - a little swagger, a challenging look at me, a little admiring entourage who followed them in?)

But I proved my point - you can make almost any subject interesting to the most reluctant group and I'd rather come away with a sense of a job well done than simply coast through it as some of my nephew's colleagues suggested to him. And it seems that Chris took my advice and did such a good job that more training has been requested.