Hilarie Stelfox: A teacher is for life, not just your GCSEs

Oct 10 2009 by Hilarie Stelfox, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

I can’t help thinking that somewhere along the way I’d lost the plot. But why? And how?

By the end of my afternoon in the 1960s and 70s I had clipped the reports together, put them into a new folder, hidden them from the prying eyes of Secondborn, and was feeling strangely deflated.

“I never realised,’’ I said to my neighbour, who called round for lunch on Monday, “what a terrible under-achiever I was.’’

“Perhaps,’’ she replied kindly, “you never had an inspirational teacher or the right encouragement.’’ Maybe, I thought, I just became lazy, but it’s always easier to blame someone else.

The theme of inspirational teachers, funnily enough, cropped up at the Examiner Literary Luncheon on Tuesday when former schools inspector Gervase Phinn spoke of teaching as the “best job in the world. And incredibly important.’’

“To a good teacher, every child matters. We can all still remember the teacher who made us feel small and the ones who inspired us,’’ he said.

Mr Duckworth made us feel small - and vulnerable. We lived in fear of his bamboo cane. To this day, I can picture his steely-blue eyes and the way he spat when he shouted.

But the same school also had one of the best teachers I’ve ever known. Her name was Mrs Shaw and she taught every child in our class to read music and play a musical instrument. We formed a class orchestra to play at assemblies and school concerts. When we ‘graduated’ to high school she started an ‘Old Crotchets Club’ so that we could stay in touch. Once a month a few of us met at her house for tea, cakes and a sing-song around the piano. We loved her.

I thought of Mrs Shaw when I saw the Examiner story on Wednesday about maths teacher Jonathan Heeley, who calls himself MC Protractor and has been named Teacher of the Year by a national newspaper. Mr Heeley’s energetic teaching methods (“he dances around the room like Tigger’’ says his head teacher Joan Young) have raised GCSE results in maths at Netherhall Learning Campus from a dire 12% to a much more respectable 50% of all students achieving a grade C or above.

Children in secondary school are often told NOT to choose subjects based on who will teach them, but actually who can blame them when they do the opposite.

Because a teacher is for life, not just for your GCSEs!

And if you want to do ‘reasonably well’ in life you need all the help you can get.