Teachers - good or bad - often leave a lasting impression on their charges

Teachers – good or bad – often leave a lasting impression on their charges

Jan 12, 2013 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
I read Jermaine Figueira’s letter, which I would describe as a heartfelt plea to the teaching profession, and which echoes so much of what I have been advocating for a long time.
When my son was at primary school, his teachers would always express fear of the children being bored with any subject, if they kept ‘drumming it in’. I held the view that children needed mental stimulation and would be
bored only if the subject was presented in a boring way or the teacher did not have the personality needed for the job.
In my own days at primary school (in the 1930s/40s) in B.G., although our teachers were mostly ‘uncertificated’, they always presented lessons in a way that held our attention throughout and, since we were keen on learning, very few of us were left behind. Being known as a dunce was a stigma to be avoided at all costs, so we tried to keep up. Teachers took their jobs seriously, because their increments might have depended on how well their charges performed overall.
“Let us strive to extend our efforts in which we teach our children to teach themselves when they are out of the school’s learning environment.” Indeed. As a child of pre-school age, my brother (older by 3 years) and I had our meals at a table covered with an oilskin (the equivalent of present-day vinyl), printed with animals and their names given below. So, from an early age, I could identify all those animals and he could also spell their names. Of course, we were helped initially by our parents.
With the present questionable standards of literacy and numeracy in the UK,I have often wondered whether a range of bedroom linen, wallpaper, etc., carrying pictures of everyday objects with the names written below, and multiplication tables, simple sums, etc., could be designed and produced specially for children’s rooms. Instead of staring at computers, they could learn from such materials. Much more enjoyable.
Yes, “let us be passionate about what we teach and continue to provide challenges for the nation’s children. Let us continue relentlessly in encouraging creativity in our students and challenge them to think outside the box for new possibilities and solutions that would contribute to a better society.”
Many of the ‘lessons’ I remember from my own schooldays were from throwaway lines by teachers, some of them in no way connected with the subject being taught. At high school, a teacher of languages joined the staff and took over the English Literature class. He insisted that we learn and could recite virtually every major speech from Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ (and later ‘Julius Caesar’) which we felt unnecessary and moaned about it.
One day he said “Long after you’ve left school, you’ll realise how beautiful these things sound”. I got down to memorising the speeches. In the mid-1960s, as a secretary in the public service in London, when my Oxford-graduate colleague could not remember some lines from the ‘The Seven Ages of Man’ (“As You Like It”), I was able to fill the gaps and we laughingly finished the piece together with “…sans everything”. He seemed taken by surprise that a ‘colonial’ knew Shakespeare and other colleagues seemed impressed. I was glad that I heeded that teacher’s wise words.
Incidentally, earlier on, as a temporary agency secretary, I shared a room at work with an elderly, dignified chap, who always wore a bow-tie. One day, as was usual at that time, he asked “What part of the world do you
come from”? When I told him, he gleefully informed me that his very good student had been working in B.G. as an anthropologist. I discovered I had been sharing a room with Professor Dudley Stamp, whose ‘World Geography’
was required reading for our Cambridge exams! Like me, he was at Encyclopaedia Britannica on a temporary basis, presumably updating his entry. Small world.
Teachers – good or bad – often leave a lasting impression on their charges.
Geralda Dennison

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