Most of us remember our teachers, particularly those who taught us in primary school. They remain imprinted on our memories, their foibles forever illuminated by that limited but merciless clarity that all children possess.
The teachers I remember were characters, in a way that is probably less common now, when any form of eccentricity seems to be frowned upon. There was Mrs Westwood, a feisty lady almost as wide as she was high, who kept a bucket of water on the classroom verandah and, like Betsy Trotwood in David Copperfield (although I seem to remember Betsy was on the lookout for donkeys, rather than canines), would rush outside every time an errant dog padded past the classroom, to douse the offending mongrel with water.
Because I grew up in the 1960s, before teaching as an occupation became almost completely feminised, I remember, too, a number of male primary school teachers, including Mr Rogers, an Englishman, formidable in his grey dustcoat, who taught us our multiplication tables and kept the boys in line with a natural authority that I suspect remains as mysterious now as it was then.
My memories of high school tend to be greyer and more detached. At my state girls’ school, I recall a succession of competent women teachers, although then as now, there was neither the time nor the inclination to give individual attention to students, whether they were conspicuously bright or not. You either swam or you sank, and many sank. It remains the dubious gift of the public school—a kind of prophylactic neglect that proofs those who survive it against the vicissitudes of university life.
I did not think then that I would become a teacher—I fancied I would be a journalist, or possibly an electronics engineer—but when I became an academic, I found that I had to learn how to teach. That meant, in turn, that I had to relearn just about everything I thought I knew about my subjects: policy analysis and public administration. Until then, my knowledge had been implicit, the result of steeping myself in these subjects over a number of years. Now I had to externalise my knowledge, to present a generally accepted picture that could be justified and rationalised. I reviewed textbooks, I created stepping stones and building blocks.
Then came the hard part. Having decided what I thought I knew, I then had to try to impart