Teachers and Students: a Personal View

Article: A personal view of students and teachers.

                                                              What helped me become a teacher?

I remember all thirty of the names, in alphabetical order, that were called out at the beginning of every day of every week during my first year at Grammar School. ‘Aston, Birch, Corbett, Cresswell…’ up to, and beyond, Hadlington, whom I also recall as the boy who almost died at the hands (and feet) of our French teacher.

LM had been a Commando during World War II. Like many ex-serviceman in the fifties and sixties, he had trained as a teacher. It was at his classroom door one afternoon, squinting sideways through the small window, that we boys waited while he vented his anger and violence on an unfortunate renegade and outlaw. Hadlington had been unlucky enough to fail to hand in his homework the day before.

We had heard the shouting before we arrived. We knew that someone was in for a rough time. We guessed who it would be. Like teacher’s pet in reverse, this boy was so often the sole object of LM’s attention that it was hardly worth placing bets. But this time, things were a little different, a little worse. Not only was LM shouting: he was engaged in what looked like a frenzied assault. Hadlington was standing there, clutching a dozen books, while LM fetched him four, hard, ex-commando whacks around the head. He then pulled the books from Hadlington’s arms and, as the boy bent down to retrieve them, kicked him twice on the backside. Finally, as Hadlington straightened up,  LM grabbed, in both hands, a hefty dictionary from the table and slammed it against the side of Hadlington’s face, knocking him to the ground.

We saw, we cast quick glances at each other, we trembled. Hadlington was propelled to the door, we were called in. The room stung with violence as we sat and took out our French books. And the lesson began in the usual way, as if nothing had happened.

*

Almost fifty years later, here I am, a teacher myself. While I don’t carry that memory around with me like a photograph in a wallet, when the incident does come into my mind I experience a similar shock and fear. It is a fear that no teacher should engender in another person; yet it is partly responsible for my almost natural (as I see it now) move into teaching. It forms a binary pair, a syzygy, along with the influence of a polar opposite, another ex-serviceman but a gentleman, a gentle man. I explore his best qualities later.

My ‘almost natural’ move into teaching occurred in India. Like many of my age, I had done the overland trek across continents and ended up at the home of a friend of mine. His father worked for the British Council. As a result of that connection, I was offered a brief post as teacher of French (at nineteen years of age) with the American International School of Calcutta. The previous teacher had been deeply unpopular, had been the target of many a spit pellet and paper aeroplane and had been sacked. I was deemed young enough to be able to empathise with 16-year-old American hooligans.

It was a happy experience. With the shadow of LM lingering somewhere in a memory-corner, I set out to teach and charm. The fact that there were only around six or seven students in the class made conversation easy. I taught them a little, we talked a lot, and at the end of the few days before a qualified professional took over I was ushered out with a smile and encouraging words. The invisible seed had already formed a sprout.

A few years on, I went for my first proper teaching post at a co-ed private school. As an unqualified teacher I wasn’t paid much and any pay details were written by the bursar in small and large CAPITAL letters on shiny scraps of paper. But I learned how to work with students of every age between eight and sixteen. Mostly successfully and happily: but LM did make his appearance occasionally in the form of my vocal onslaughts which were triggered by inattentive students in the largest classes. And boy, did I shout! In the persona of LM, I would rant and rave for minutes on end, red in the face and providing the ideal environment for the learning of French... Notably, to me now, there was no CPD, no training, no reflective discussions to help modify this explosive approach. We did not watch others teach, share ideas (except by brief chance, in the staffroom) or explore the philosophy of education. Only by the seepage of charitable intention into my acquired teaching methods did I gradually, over the eight years before the school closed down, learn to relax more in the classroom, to lean over shoulders, make sotto voce comments of encouragement and distinguish the individuals from the group.

Then there followed the teaching degree, many years in Comprehensive schools, the applying of theory to practice. Leaving full-time teaching for more fragmented work, I finally came to my present point: as teacher of small groups and individuals, in almost every subject area, for an alternative provision service.

I don’t know whether LM has yet died, and he may have mellowed in his later years, but I would see the earlier LM, the one I knew, revolving like a propeller at the thought of kind words being spoken to miscreants. Truth to tell, there are hardly any miscreants. Trust engenders a willingness to work, to please. Trust means our students offer to make the coffee. At this stage of my teaching life, I can look LM’s opposite, ‘Jack’, in the eye.

Jack, too, came from a military background. He had a club foot, so he may have worked in administration, though I preferred at the time to believe he had sustained a wound as a Spitfire pilot. He called people ‘sirrah’, and he made us laugh through a quiet, ironic but not cruel conversational style. The two Taylors, CJ and DA, were Chief Justice and District Attorney. He did not move around the class, but we were quiet. His confident, authoritative, demanding but friendly demeanour inspired us to do our best. In setting tasks such as writing lengthy narratives concerning a shipwrecked sailor, lasting several weeks, he set me on a course of English and English Literature. I was able to become the sailor, apply the detail, use the imagination. I was rewarded with a tick, a ‘good’, a high mark, and a smile.

I am writing at this moment for Jack. He retired soon after, and died not long after that, but he embodied Attachment Theory at a time when I was detaching from home. He showed me an Adult Other who could be grown up, able to absorb difficulties, deal with them. Resilience. One of those things we hope our students will leave with. Not from our having smashed them against a brick wall, but from the confidence that comes of making mistakes and learning from them. With a smile. Even those who have been permanently excluded from school, who cannot initially speak without swearing, who cannot take without snarling…leave us with a little trust established, a folder of work accomplished, a world to sample. And Jack would have hobbled quietly to the door, and waved them jovially on their way.