Literally No One Knows it's The Good Old Days.

As a teenager, once I got to seriously thinking about what I wanted to “be”, I knew I never wanted to be a teacher.  My mother was a teacher.  Her evenings and weekends were spent marking and planning, ringing parents, organising meetings outside of school time, spending her own money on resources the school wouldn’t provide.  No thanks, that’s not for me. 

When she died, however, so many people came out of the woodwork to mention what an impression that she’d left on them.  Many of these were people I didn’t know, that had had her as a teacher.  I’d been in her classes a few times, when my school wasn’t in session but hers was, or when I was sick enough to not go to my own classes but had nowhere else to actually be for the day.  I never saw her as anything extraordinary.  She neither sought the limelight nor received it.  Even then, she touched lives, and she changed lives.  That meant something.  And between that feeling of making a difference to individuals, and wanting to use my talents in a better way than shuffling papers for corporations, I decided at 30 years old to retrain as a teacher. 

Maybe it’s just me, but the curious thing about being a teacher is that I spend a significant amount of time in my head remembering the teachers that I’ve had along the way.  It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I remember all my teachers, but I remember the majority, even the ones that I remember rather neutrally as having no impact one way or another on me. 

Three teachers stand out in my mind as being the most influential on me.  The first was my sixth-grade teacher.

My sixth grade teacher managed to run a huge combined class of 5th and 6th graders as a community, to the point that he had the class virtually running itself.  Granted, he provided the content, of course.  What I remember of his class was the connections being built, and a general feeling of good-naturedness amongst all the students (or at least that’s how it seemed to me).  He ran a classroom currency, with prices that changed each year (inflation, he told us, which prompted us to respond ‘what the heck does that mean?’) 

At eleven years old, I didn't think much about how unusual any of this was. It was just school. Looking back now, after more than a decade of classroom teaching, I still strive to be more like Mr V when I grow up.

From this teacher I learned never to draw a straight line without a ruler. Basic maths facts that, somehow, are still instantly retrievable three decades later. Basic grammar in much the same way. I also learned that embarrassment is fine; humiliation isn't. And "Yes. Oh, yes." Well... those who know, know.

More than all of those, however, I learned that it was okay to be different.  It was okay to be me.  It was okay to be a bit weird, and a bit nerdy, but also, that I could find friends while being all of the above.  We, in his class, always felt that he was on our side - whether we’d done something brilliant, or something brilliantly stupid.  He looked out for those who were having struggles, in ways that the rest of us had no idea about. 

His room was famously cluttered and chaotic - organised chaos, he would say.  He set up a student government, which had ‘trials’ when grievances warranted it, but it helped teach about the government and justice system.  He had us make board games for review - and then we spent whole afternoons playing them.  He taught us how to take charge of our own learning, and be decent people at the same time. 

Back then, these just felt like fun things that happened in our classroom. I never once stopped to wonder where the classroom currency came from, or who spent an afternoon laminating game cards, or how a student government somehow managed to teach us about justice without us realising we were learning. I simply assumed that's what school looked like.

What I take from my time in his class is more than just the content, although I learned that too.  He taught me that learning could be fun - although as an unidentified autistic and gifted kid, I already had plenty of interest in learning, or at least, learning what I wanted to learn about.  Most importantly, I learned not only that I mattered, but that I could help other people feel like they mattered, too.  

As a preteen, I wanted to be in his class because that's where my friends were, and that's where the fun was.

As a teacher, I can finally appreciate just how much of that fun was carefully built.

Thirty years later, I still don't know how he did it.