ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces two teachers in working-class high schools. Both are young and both are teaching in academic areas of the curriculum, but they have already evolved very different teaching styles. Margaret Blackall is a language teacher at a school with a reasonably similar clientele, Greenway High. Her response was similar to Sheila Goffman's first response: to survive you have to get on top. Sheila Goffman is making a success of child-centred pedagogy in an environment where that would not normally happen. Margaret Blackall works in a department where the atmosphere is rather cooler, and no doubt this is one reason for her pedagogy having taken a different shape from Sheila's. The outcome of this search for balance is a teaching style that seems markedly more conventional. Margaret’s classrooms are quiet and orderly; she insists on a degree of decorum that more free-floating staff see as even a shade authoritarian.
