The relationship between a teacher and a student can be profound in ways that are not realised at the time. It can be the start of a journey for the child and the reason, in its rewards, at the heart of why someone becomes a teacher. So, it’s a bleak and depressing landscape to look out over when you read the recent The Age’s headline, “Reports of assaults at Victorian schools soar”. In the past two years, assaults have surged 50 per cent. It brings into sharp relief an anniversary this month of what teaching should be.
This month marked the 65th anniversary of the death of Albert Camus. He was 46 when he died in a car crash, just two years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. Recently, the letter Camus wrote to his former teacher Louis Germain after winning the award has appeared on social media. It reads:
Dear Monsieur Germain,
I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited.
But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.
I don’t make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.
The reading of Camus’ letter of thanks transported me back to high school. I never wrote a letter to any of my old teachers, and nor with the certainty of night following day will I win a Nobel Prize. But in the letter from Camus to his old teacher, there is a thread that I am sure runs through the minds and hearts of many students to their teachers. There is within me.
A few years back, our high school leaving year had a reunion in Newcastle. Among the slightly at-odd memories of distant events with reality, and the embrace of old friends, there was a door that opened, and through which I gladly walked. It was to reach out to a former teacher, shake his hand, and thank him for helping instil in me a love for words.
I hadn’t seen him since leaving, but I like to think in that moment when I just said, thanks Mr B* for being a great teacher and showing me the possibilities that can open up with the written word, the years melted away. He was taken aback, I think, by my gesture. And grateful. I would be remiss not to mention another teacher, Mrs H*, who was not at the reunion, but who had a similar effect. (Even now, I still refer to them as Mr and Mrs, a lasting sign of respect, but in a F for memory, I can’t recall the correct spelling of their surnames or their first names, hence the initial letter only.)
It may have seemed a small thing to them, but what both did for the teenaged McFadyen was simply to show interest in what I said or wrote, and encourage me. Simply encourage me. To a kid in suburban Newcastle, the world an unimaginably vast place, this was a big thing. Only later would this morph into the wider observation that it was not only the classroom that was for learning, it was life, too (apologies Joni Mitchell).
'No doubt, few children will realise it at the time, such as myself all those years ago, but an education is a blessing. Indeed, it might take a few years for the thought of how much a teacher helped to crystallise, but it will come in perhaps the least likely moment.'
The reunion handshake and reaction also made me think that perhaps teachers don’t get the feedback they deserve in proportion to their work. This is more than a shame. Teachers have been under pressure in recent years through the conditions under which they work, not only just through purely curriculum or administrative based issues. There are staff shortages in what should be, must be, a noble profession. They are, after all, teaching those who will hold the future in their hands. They also should not be going to work at a place of potential violence
It should not be a thankless career path. No doubt, few children will realise it at the time, such as myself all those years ago, but an education is a blessing. Indeed, it might take a few years for the thought of how much a teacher helped to crystallise, but it will come in perhaps the least likely moment. How lucky was I to have such a teacher as (insert name) through my (insert subject, and/or year) to encourage me.
Albert Camus knew and he held that gratitude through his adult years. He knew how deep the noble profession can run in a life awakening.
Warwick McFadyen is an award-winning journalist. He has won two Walkley Awards and four Quill Awards. He has published several books of poetry. The latest is 21+4 Poems. His prose and poems have also appeared in Quadrant, Overland and Dissent.
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