Teach Secondary Issue 14.8

For whom the bell tolls If he had his way, Gordon Cairns would sound the death knell for those rude, school-wide blasts of disruptive noise that signal the end of one period and the start of the next… E arlier this year, I was at a family gathering when the conviviality of the afternoon was suddenly shattered by a 3pm test of the government’ emergency notification service blaring out from the numerous phones left in jackets and bags around the room. As I searched for my own mobile to turn off the infernal racket, it struck me then just how bizarre it is that we teachers actually choose to expose ourselves to the same brutal noise multiple times over the course of a typical workday. Not to alert us to a terrorist attack or national disaster, mind you – just to let everyone knowwhen it’s time to transition from one place to another. Unnecessarydistress The ‘school bell’ is a remnant fromwhen timepieces weren’t readily available to the general population. Schools needed a method of mustering their students, similar to how churches still ring out to summon their parishioners. But today, regularly interrupting the school day with a loud, toneless sound feels so unnecessary – as well as being unnecessarily distressing to those many neurodiverse students who are sensitive to noise. Young people already struggling to overcome many barriers to education don’t need an extra sonic one. I know of students who have to leave the classroom before the bell goes to find a quiet space. Others will put on ear defenders in anticipation of the end of the period. Many more suffer in silence, their focus lost as they anticipate the aural assault and think about how to deal with its aftermath. Aquestion of trust For the school community as a whole, this all feels a bit reductionist. The school bell seems to suggest that we, much like Pavlov’s salivating dogs, can be trained to perform desired reactions simply by hearing a loud sound, despite being surrounded by more than enough timekeeping technology to know exactly when our lesson is just about to finish. Maybe the fear is that we can’t be trusted to end our classes at the appropriate time without some kind of centralised notification system. Segmenting out the schoolday into time slots abbreviated by the bell was apparently once done to prepare students for factory life, yet they won’t be encountering bells anywhere in their working future. Unless they become teachers, of course. In fact, the lack of a school bell would do far more to prepare them for today’s working environment, where the amount of time given to an activity isn’t generally broken down into alarm- delineated chunks. Classroomflexibility The dead hand of tradition aside, there seem to be few good reasons for keeping the bell around. Changing the systemwould simply involve us educationalists synchronising our classroom clocks (or watches, phones, tablets or PCs) so that we knowwhen our students should be dismissed. After all, it’s not as if they currently arrive en masse at the start of the next class just as the bell rings. There would be tangible benefits to teaching and learning too, in that the lack of a centralised alarmwould give teachers more flexibility in the classroom. Currently, if I want my students to finish reading the chapter of a book before the period ends, I keep one eye on the book and the other on the clock as the minute hand creeps ever closer to the ringing bell. I know the class will have lost their focus when they hear the sound, as they think about their transition to the next class. But if the teacher is given control over ‘when the bell rings’, the work can be satisfactorily concluded with only a minute or so of overrun, if that. Sadly, today’s electronic buzzers are nothing like the ‘ Laugh of a bell swung by a running child ’, as recalled by Carol Ann Duffy in her classroommemories. If and when silent bells are eventually introduced, the ideal scenario would be for students and teachers alike to develop a ‘sixth sense’ that something is coming to a close, without needing a bell to remind them– akin to waking up naturally before that other unavoidably ubiquitous modern noise, the morning alarm clock... ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gordon Cairns is an English and forest school teacher who works in a unit for secondary pupils with ASD; he also writes about education, society, cycling and football for a number of publications 75 teachwire.net/secondary O P I N I O N