To My Teacher: 15 Years Later

When we first met, I had been branded a troublemaker. My previous school, just a few hundred meters down the road, had emblazoned my file with warnings to that effect. As far as they were concerned, they had sent you the devil in the shape of a blond-haired, 8-year-old boy.

But you didn’t see it that way.

The truth is that I wasn’t a troublemaker (I know everyone says that, but I really wasn’t) I had just desperately wanted to learn in a place where learning has come secondary to crowd control. It was a rough school, more of a day-care centre with whiteboards than a school. Lessons were challenging, not because of the content, but because you had to strain to hear the teacher over the chaos and noise.

Once, in the middle of a lesson, a classmate of mine punched me in the stomach. Doubled over, winded and grasping my torso, I waited for my attacker to be reprimanded and removed from the room. Instead, I was moved to the front of the class ‘so he couldn’t get to me’ and he was left to his own devices. For the next hour, I sat at the teacher’s feet, facing my classmates, embarrassed and seemingly singled out for being the victim of an assault.

I remember enough about my time in that place to know how unhappy I was. As an adult, I have since been told that I was mercilessly and violently bullied there.

I don’t remember this. I’ve tried. I can see the pain in my parents’ eyes when they tell me of my own suffering, but I have no memories of it. I can only assume my youthful ordeals are hidden away somewhere in the deepest reaches of my mind, safely under lock and key. With any luck, that is where they will remain. Some memories are not worth the pain they bring.

I was a troublemaker they said. But perhaps everyone looks like a devil when you’re teaching them in hell.

And so, I moved. A new school, new teachers, new friends, and a new life. It shouldn’t have been the biggest change, though. The schools were less than a mile apart, almost on the same road, so I didn’t move town or have to rebuild my life outside school. So much remained the same and yet, without so much as a sliver of doubt in my mind, I know that it was a move that changed my life. The person I am today, the interests I indulge in, the morals I hold, the way I view the world, were all shaped for the better in that new school and, in particular, by you.

There are many qualities that a good teacher is required to have. I know because I tried to become one and proceeded to fail quite spectacularly. Patience, empathy, intelligence, awareness, observation, critical thinking, rock-solid morals, and a host of other things are naseberry for an individual to become a successful educator. You had all of these, but you were still a maverick, and we loved you for it.

I thought of you as a gardener first, a teacher second, and a chess player third. You taught us everything we needed to know in year 4, of course, according to the ridged curriculum, but you also taught us to be eco-warriors. The school had a small garden, a realm over which you presided with glee, and we would often find ourselves working alongside you when there was time, or as a treat if the class got all their work done.

Once, I remember, on a sparkling summer afternoon, your individual teaching style hit a fever pitch. Having come to the (not incorrect) conclusion that the repetitive arithmetic we were learning was boring and a waste of a beautiful day, you decided instead that mathematics would give way to nature and botany.

It was a spectacular day. The sun shone high in the sky as our class drifted through your gardens, learning about each of the plants and helping to tend to the beds and crops. It wasn’t arithmetic but it was still a valuable and formative education. With tools in hand, dirt splattering on our uniforms, we learned to appreciate the sanctity and delicacy of life, the pride of working with your hands, and the joy of being part of a team, part of something bigger.

I sometimes wonder how many students you helped throughout your career. After decades of serving your community, thousands of children will have passed through your care. I know that, for my classmates at least, almost 15 years after you were our teacher, your name is still spoken of with affection.

You were hard on us, make no mistake. Unkindness or the wasting of learning time were not tolerated. Ever. But we were never scared of you. We respected you, but we never feared punishment because it never came unless it was earned. And it never came without an explanation as to why.

Arguably your most ardent disciples to this day are your chess club. Break was short, just long enough for one game, and so each week there was only time for one of your students to test their mettle against you, while the rest of us had to do battle amongst ourselves. The posh set of pieces that you kept behind your desk dwarfed our tacky, plastic school sets, only further adding to the ceremony of a game against the teacher himself.

I don’t remember anyone ever beating you. You didn’t let us win, and that’s how we liked it. We swapped stories of individual manoeuvres and times where we almost took your pieces, but never of victory. I certainly never beat you, on the few times we played together, but I didn’t care. In fact, I was ecstatic. Because you respected us enough to play against us as equals, not as children.

On a parents evening way back in the mid-noughties, you paid me a compliment that has remained with me to this day, even though I was not there to hear it.

‘He’s one of the most natural scientists I’ve ever taught.’

Whether or not that was true, I will never know, but it gave me confidence in my abilities in the classroom. Right up until university my academic roadmap was predominantly scientific, in no small part due to that one little comment. In the end, I went in another direction, but my interest in science remains undiminished, and I exercise one of your most fundamental pieces of advice on a daily basis – always ask questions.

This is why I say that you played such a significant part in shaping my character rather than just informing my academic and professional careers. The subjects in which I gained higher qualifications are largely unrelated to the things I learned from you. You didn’t just teach us to be good mathematicians, or historians, or athletes. You taught us to be kind, to do good, to be unashamedly passionate about things, to strive for lifelong learning, and to never, ever fear failure.

In short, you taught us how to go forth into that waiting world and leave it better than we found it.

What could be more valuable than that?

***

Life goes on after primary school, and even the most wonderful childhoods can become difficult teenage years. Mine, I’m sorry to say, was no exception. High school was difficult, formative, tainted by bullying, but occasionally enjoyable. University brought more anguish but, in fairness, for different reasons.

A diagnosis of depression is not really what you want at the start of your university journey. Frankly, it's not the most ideal of revelations at any time. But, that’s the diagnosis I got. The beginning of the rest of my life.

You’re probably wondering what this all has to do with you, right? How on earth is my mental health over 10 years after we last met relevant?

It wasn’t. At all.

Until we did meet again, and just at the moment I needed it most.

I am not a man of faith. Hell, I’m not even vaguely spiritual. Ideas of fate and universal meaning make me snigger slightly but, beyond that, I give them next to no thought. Life is random, there is no meaning, general hyper-realist stuff that smacks of nihilism but isn’t quite as dark. That’s the sort of thing I believe in.

Therefore, you won’t be surprised to hear that it takes a great deal of coincidence to shake, even slightly, my deeply seeded atheism. One of the rare occasions on which this has occurred, however, involved you.

18 or so months ago, I was at my very worst. Having suffered for months on the cusp of crisis, I found myself sitting in my childhood home, pouring my heart out to my mother. It was the first time the extent of my illness had become apparent to her, I think, and was therefore an important and terrifying moment. I remember being deathly afraid that she would think I was insane, and the men in white coats would come and take me away.

Given that I am not writing this to you from within the confines of a padded cell, you can probably deduce that my issues were not nearly as bad as I had feared. All that my mother offered me in lieu of a straitjacket was love and support. Nonetheless, the conversation drew to a close with my soul slightly lighter, but my proximity to crisis stubbornly undiminished.

I stepped out into the coastal air, my head awash with emotions and my heart thumping inside my chest. My car was in need of picking up from the mechanics around the corner, where it had been undergoing minor work. The walk was to be no more than a few minutes, but it was welcome. Treading streets that I had known my whole life grounded me as my legs took me where I needed to go and my mind pondered its own maladies.

Before I knew it, I found myself stood beside my now fully functioning car, bill paid and keys in hand. Truth be told, so deep in my own thoughts was I, re-enacting the conversation I had just had, that I have no idea how my interactions with the mechanics went because I wasn’t really part of them. The part of my brain still able to interact with the outside world took care of it all while most of me drifted in the inky blackness that lay behind my eyes.

A car pulled up behind me, barely registering. It could have hit me and I’m not sure I would have noticed or cared.

Then you stepped out.

And suddenly I was 8 years old again. Back in your classroom. Back in your garden. Back in the place where I had learned so much but, most of all, where I had found my confidence.

You recognised me, albeit after a few moments. I remember a smile spreading across my face, cracking through a stony expression that I had not expected to lose for days. We talked about life, about how my former classmates were doing (how you remembered them all too I will never know), and how you were doing. You told me about how you were now a grandfather many times over, and how you were helping to teach your grandkids this and that whenever you could. Retired though you were by then, you were still teaching, and I could see in your eyes that you would never really stop. That same fire, that same passion for knowledge and for passing it on, still burned in you. And it warmed me too.

Nothing that was said in our conversation was life-changing. We exchanged pleasantries, reminisced a bit, and traded compliments, as those who know each other of old so often do. We were still student and teacher, but we were also two adults, chatting as adults do. It was nice, but unremarkable.

But it was you.

And that made all the difference.

From the moment I arrived in your classroom, you believed that I could do great things. You took a child who had been told he was bad, and you gave him room to thrive.

You took me, you took all of us, into your class, and you taught us that the world was fascinating, colourful, brutal, challenging, diverse, funny, beautiful, and, above all, ours to explore.

There wasn’t much life left in me when I arrived at that mechanics to pick up my car. My grip on the world was slipping away and, if I’m being honest, my desire to hold on was at its end.

But seeing you, a figure from my past that looms so large in the man I am today, gave me hope. There was still work to be done, and I am lucky to have been surrounded by many wonderful people on this endless road to recovery, but such a chance encounter was so improbable, so unbelievable, that it stood out. It reminded me that, sometimes, the universe does provide. Whether by pure chance or some kind of design, we may never know.

I was still a broken man when we said our goodbyes and I drove away, but something had changed.

Somewhere, in a distant corner of my memories, an 8-year-old boy full of hopes and dreams and optimism began to wake up.

And the world got that little bit brighter.