Always Learning
About Rich Galloway
Aristotle said that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. It’s a thought that has followed me through a learning journey with more twists and turns than I ever anticipated. One that somehow ended with a Master’s in Leadership and, in February of this year, a promotion to Principal Teacher. Neither would have seemed likely to the student who scraped through his B.Ed in the early nineties, more interested in everything else on offer than what was actually on the curriculum.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
After those first years in the classroom, I had one of those moments, the kind you can’t entirely explain afterwards, and decided to become a photographer. I moved to London, worked in the industry for a while, and then, at the age of 29, ran away to sea with Princess Cruises. What I didn’t anticipate was that running away to sea would be where I met my wife Christa. She’s Canadian, and when I met her, she was, to put it plainly, gorgeous and a few years younger, facts that haven’t changed much over the 26 years we’ve been together. It wasn’t love at first sight. Not sure I made a great first impression, but charm and humour are a hard combination to resist, and during an overnight in Acapulco we ended up together. From the moment onwards, we balanced and complemented each other in a way that made everything else make more sense.
I worked my way up to photo manager on some of the biggest ships afloat at that time, which is a job that sounds glamorous and occasionally was. Eventually we left, started a business, and started a family. Our son took longer to arrive than we’d expected, and when he did, we quickly discovered that running a business and raising a child is not a situation where the child gets the best of the deal. He was always with other people. My father had been in the military, and I never really knew him growing up. I didn’t want that for my son. So in 2013, when I started this blog, I made the decision to go back to teaching.
The road back to the classroom was neither quick nor straightforward. I started back supply teaching in the Yukon, which is as remote and remarkable as it sounds. It turned out to be exactly the kind of experience that was one of the reasons I wanted to teach in the first place. From there I retrained in Alberta, earned my certification, and eventually found myself with a full-time post in Alexandria, Egypt. A sentence that still sounds unlikely when I read it back. We arrived in Aberdeenshire eventually, and it’s where we’ve stayed. I’ve taught on four continents. Not bad for someone who had walked away from the profession entirely.
These days I’m a principal teacher in Aberdeenshire, currently holding responsibility for ASN, though that’s set to change after the summer, and a P7 class teacher. I write about what happens in my classroom, and in education more broadly, here on Once More Into the Classroom. The questions that keep me engaged are the same ones they always were: how do children learn? What are we teaching them and why? How does assessment shape the experience rather than just measure it? There are new questions now too. Artificial intelligence has arrived in the classroom whether we were ready for it or not, and I’d rather understand it properly than simply react to it.
I have one eye on what comes next, a Depute headship, or perhaps leading a smaller school. But I’m in no rush; most days I love where I work. The classroom is still where I want to be, doing the work I came back to do.
It turns out, Aristotle was right. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. Which is why I’m still a teacher on a learning journey.