Staring into Space is a new campaign, launched today by children’s laureate Lauren Child. The campaign – and its array of fabulous resources – aims to get teachers to build daydreaming and simply looking around into the school day.
Staring into Space
On one hand, I’m all for this. I love daydreaming and staring into space. I can remember very frequently gazing out of the window at primary school. It was an interesting view: my school was on a hill and looked down on a river, beyond which there were high hills and busy roads. I’d imagine complicated scenarios involving the cars and lorries on the other side as well as the odd sea monster. One day I became convinced that an oddly placed sunbeam was a UFO. I spread the rumour round the class, who all agreed with my assessment of the situation,until Miss found out and put the kybosh on my fun by explaining it away as a trick of the light. In my book, Maddie Doyle and the Mystery of Heather Bank Farm, Maddie uses daydreaming as a way to escape school and the stress of her father’s disappearance.
On the other hand, I think it’s a pity to make it into a formal item on the list of hundreds of things teachers have to do every day. Surely part of the joy of daydreaming is the knowledge that you are mentally playing truant for a few minutes, rejecting a lecture on oxbow lakes or your husband’s mansplaining of the Highway Code? The resources created by Lauren Child and Josey Scullard are wonderful and I shall be using them – but I worry that teachers are being encouraged to take responsibility for something children should already be embracing. Many would say that teachers should encourage creativity but when it comes to daydreaming, children need to seize the moment for themselves.
Tuition is not the same as classroom learning: at Better Tuition our lessons are very intensive and designed to demand full focus from our students at all times. Because of this, we build a brief creativity break into our 75 minute sessions. These are as integral to the learning that takes place as any other element of the lesson. Students are encouraged to draw or to daydream in order to rest their brains so that they can keep going at full power for the rest of the lesson. It’s highly effective and students are always amazed by how much they have achieved by the end of the lesson.
I suppose that I, and other teachers, need to recognise that everyone is different. Some people can whistle, others lack the knack. Daydreaming and staring into space doesn’t come naturally to all of us. If we teachers can set out students on the path of daydreaming then, whatever the restrictions of the curriculum, their adventures will know no limits.
