Mud, Madagascar and where an aversion to poisonous snakes can lead

A class of twenty-eight 11 and 12 year olds is a daunting prospect – even for the Vice-Chancellor of the University Of Cambridge. This week Professor Alison Richard met the challenge head on when she went back to the classroom as part of Teach First week.

Teach First is an educational charity which recruits and trains high calibre graduates who might not normally consider a career in the classroom to work as teachers for two years in some of the most challenged secondary schools in the UK. This year forty Cambridge graduates have been accepted onto the programme - 12% of Teach First’s total intake.

During Teach First week, high profile figures in public life or education are invited to give up their time to prepare and teach a lesson at one of the challenged schools Teach First teachers work in.

The Vice-Chancellor visited Stockley Academy in Uxbridge, a school which faces significant challenges but which is working hard and having some success in improving the education of, and opportunities for, its pupils.

First stop was the Year 7 Geography class of Olivia Turner – a Cambridge graduate who’s now well into her second year on the Teach First programme. The Vice-Chancellor had the chance to see the class at work, deciphering the jumbled up names of continents and oceans and placing them in their correct positions on an interactive whiteboard before she spoke to them about her work as an anthropologist.

Professor Richard produced slides and photos of her experiences in Madagascar where she’s worked for more than thirty years. The class were fascinated by pictures of various types of lemur and her description of Madagascar’s different climates. But it was a picture of an enormous Elephant Bird skeleton and one of an even rarer whole Elephant Bird egg which prompted the most probing questions:

“Were the Elephant Birds really heavy, Miss?”
“Wouldn’t the goo inside have gone off, Miss?
“How much would one of those eggs be worth, Miss?”

This last question from a budding entrepreneur we may see in years to come occupying a chair on Dragon’s Den.

These burning issues dealt with, it was on to address Stockley’s Sixth Form. Around sixty students heard Professor Richard explain how she had never really set out on a given career path – and that she’d certainly never set out to be the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

She reflected on the fact that like many teenagers she hadn’t really had a set idea about what to study at University and that that had only changed when she got involved with an archaeological investigation – which inspired her to apply to Cambridge to study Archaeology and Anthropology.

Once at Cambridge the Vice-Chancellor said she spent her first term assuming she was the one mistake the Admissions office had made and admitted it was a desire to avoid doing an exam which took her on a field trip to Barro Colorado Island, in the Panama Canal. There, she waded knee-deep in mud, lashed by torrential rainstorms and terrified of poisonous snakes, vowing never to go on such a mad adventure again. On telling this to one of her lecturers on her return, the lecturer suggested that she go to Madagascar – as there were no poisonous snakes there – and there were regions where it rarely rained. She did, and her 30 year love affair with the island and its people was born.

“Looking back, these strike me now as rather odd considerations to include as I decided what to do with my life. Most important of all, though, were the brilliant teachers who inspired and pointed me in particular directions at ever stage – including Cambridge, where three great teachers sparked my interest in biological anthropology, animal behaviour, and lemurs, - and from there, I’ve never looked back.”

Teach First is keen to show that enthusiastic teachers can make a difference even in some of the most challenging environments and it’s a message the Vice-Chancellor is happy to support:

“I hope that my participation in Teach First Week might help encourage others to give their time to this really worthy cause – it really can take only one inspirational teacher to change the trajectory of a student’s life.”