In common with most teachers, I quite often bump into some notoriously challenging former pupil, only to find that person “completely charming” nowadays.
“I was terrible at school” comes the typical humble apology, as he or she cheerily fixes our boiler, nurses our loved ones, books us for speeding or whatever.
Teachers generally respond to such confessions in a kindly way, perhaps making reference to their “strong personality”, how it was a “difficult time in life” for them and how “school is not for everyone”. I do, however, know one teacher who questions whether we should always be quite so forgiving at such times.
She says that she has had enough of ex-students casually fessing up to some past misdemeanour at school and expecting her just to smile indulgently. She wants us to start imposing the appropriate school punishment retrospectively. “It doesn’t matter how many years or decades have passed, a bunked lesson is a bunked lesson.”
‘Never too old for a detention’
“It’s for the greater good,” she argues. “Today’s pupils are going to behave a lot better if they know that their personal slate of sloth and sin is not going to be wiped clean when they leave school. It’s never too late for someone to serve their school detention or day of isolation, however old they are. It’s like war crimes.” She is only partly joking.
When I have come across a certain generation of ex-students, however, I have taken neither the forgiving nor the unforgiving line. Instead, in the case of the unfortunate children I taught in my first couple of years, I am the one who feels moved to apologise. I am the one who says, “I was terrible.”
As a novice teacher, I was primarily focused on trying to establish control. Unfortunately, this led to a teaching strategy guaranteed to have the very opposite effect. My approach was to try to keep all students’ heads down as much as possible, making them copy excessive amounts of notes from the board with a view to minimising any opportunity for interaction with each other or with me.
Surely - went my flawed logic - if they just wrote notes and I scarcely talked, there could be no interrupting me, no talking across each other, no apparent inattentiveness? There would be no learning, either, but this seemed a small price to pay at the time.
It was an approach that might “work” for a genuine old-school disciplinarian but it did not even begin to work for someone as soft-centred as I am. As a result, my classes inevitably became bored, disaffected and poorly behaved. Paper planes, pellets, dismayed-looking French exchange students and half-eaten sandwiches all regularly flew across the room. There was the find-the-hamster incident, the mysterious frozen haddock and an impromptu barbecue inside someone’s desk. Anything could happen. Even the good kids began to seem like devil-children.
By the time my tutor and colleagues had sorted my teaching approach out and I had developed the confidence mainly to be myself, too many students had already passed through my ham-fisted hands. My reincarnation as a proper, half-decent teacher was too late for too many.
So whenever I have met a pupil from that particular generation I am the one who is first to apologise, for damaging their exam grades and/or destroying many a young person’s burgeoning interest in history.
I like to think that I have done a much better job in the subsequent years, if not with every class or with every student. I am just grateful that those particular let-down students have always been as kind and forgiving with their former nightmare teacher as we are with those former nightmare students.
Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire
