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R D Kernohan
Photograph by Islay McLeod
I’m sorry that Kenneth Roy, whose liberal conservatism about language is one of his gloriously redeeming features, should be in danger (27 September) of losing his ‘illusion that teachers were fighting a rearguard battle against the barbarians’.
I share his concerns but instead of adding complaints I’m stirred into a testament of critical appreciation for what teachers did for me long ago and even continue to do. For ‘life-long learning’ does exist and is important – less, perhaps, as used in political and educational clichés than our capacity to go on using both what was deliberately taught and unconsciously absorbed.
This isn’t an article whose words come trippingly on the tongue – I use the Shakespearean phrase as a retort courteous to Kenneth Roy’s mild devaluation (2 October) of the greatest master of the language he fights for. Even now there are school memories which, when awakened, bring back childhood loneliness and adolescent shyness. I also know that aged persons’ reminiscences invite all too readily younger persons’ tolerant disdain. Yet there are some things where it may only be possible towards the end of a long life to realise how much is owed and to whom.
I don’t write to contrast an ancient educational age of gold with our tarnished or barbarian times, for I think there probably is no glaring contrast. In my children’s schooling, and now my grandchildren’s, I’ve still encountered not only much good teaching but many teachers ready to go second or third miles to help and encourage. But I wonder whether changes in attitudes and school structures, never mind pressures of paperwork and on the curriculum, allow some of the opportunities I was given in schools well eastward of Glasgow Cross.
I offer an example where labours of love might have seemed lost. After I had sat my five highers – then a surprisingly common but now a rarer event in that area – someone unearthed a Glasgow University faculty rule which also demanded a Latin pass for some honours classes. French and German wouldn’t do.
Two classics teachers, approached by their English and history colleagues, yielded up their free periods to give me a summer-term crash course, moving rapidly from basic grammar to Caesar’s PR handouts about the Gallic wars. It let me scrape a lower Latin at the now forgotten late summer ‘uni prelims’, but by the time I got within range of Gilmorehill honours courses the archaic faculty regulation had been scrapped, leaving me with a useful tincture of Latin and slightly embarrassed sense of gratitude. Only now do I realise how these tutorials expressed a heart-and-soul commitment to teaching and helping that was outside any contract as well as the formal curriculum.
We took for granted then the quality of teaching and the scholarship that sustained it. But there was more to teaching than irregular verbs, isosceles triangles, and the greatest hits from the Golden Treasury. There was a French teacher of whom I went in terror. She had a pudding-bowl haircut and ferocious temper; though now I wonder if she just thought attack the best method of defence in dealing with second-year boys.
She forced us in turn to stand up and read in French from a travelogue about a family perpetually travelling around France to see the sights and sample the regional cuisine. As I waited my turn I grew more and more fearful and, when called on, increasingly struggled and stuttered for breath and words. I suppose now it would be diagnosed as some kind nervous speech impediment and addressed after months on a speech-therapist’s waiting list.
One morning she tackled it by taking me to the headmaster and leaving him to talk to me about it. Even the most sceptical of my contemporaries with memories of 1940s schooling will appreciate that this was like being ushered into conversation with the Almighty. And that headmaster did have something near omnipotence, for (to use archaic but biblical language) in a few minutes he cast out that devil from me.
I should have remembered that teacher and headmaster with thanksgiving every time I spoke in public or responded to a green light or a cue in a broadcasting studio. But even when we feel a perpetual gratitude we give it very intermittent expression. However, I think the headmaster would be content to know that I often think back to that morning when my sceptical journalist’s mind encounters the Gospels’ reporting of the wonderful experiences known as ‘miracles’.
It is also only with age that I’ve learned to appreciate the different gifts that teachers could bring to the same subject. I owe to one German teacher the way he conveyed the pain of studying in 1930s Germany while the ‘Juden verboten’ signs were going up; to another a happy diversion from Goethe and Schiller to the parables in the Luther Bible; and to a third, a diminutive but determined little woman with the bandy legs that rickets once made all too familiar in Glasgow, the linguistic grounding which still draws the response: ‘You may speak rather odd German but you seem to get the grammar right’.
Teachers also share gifts useful far beyond the classroom. I learned something about forgiveness from a commercial subjects teacher, low down in the school hierarchy, who was drafted in to accompany our rugby team to a Marr College match in Troon and whom we forgot when we shared out the expenses money for fares. We were delighted to have a few shillings over and gave them to a couple of girl supporters. He belatedly complained and eventually forgave, adding a few kind words about our scrummaging.
There was also an unintended lesson in humility at a time when I rather fancied the literary style I had worked up for the university bursary competition. I thought my English teacher would be impressed but he was very cursory one day about what I thought a wonderful essay and talked only of a rare talent he had stumbled on elsewhere in the school. He showed me a literary gem in a jotter, then took me downstairs to a junior class and pointed out Alasdair Gray.
But age brings discoveries as well as memories. In primary school those of us who enjoyed the seats at the back (or top) of the class took our annual prizes a bit for granted. One year the teacher announced that she had also a very special prize for the pupil who had made most progress in the year – a cheerful boy from a single-end (Glaswegian for one-roomed flat) whose mother was astonishingly tolerant when he brought all his friends to admire a new baby brother. We were decent enough to think the teacher’s special prize a good idea, but only with age and a little wisdom do I now realise she almost certainly paid for it herself.
I didn’t clutter up this testament by linking incidents to names meaning nothing to readers. But in case anyone encountered them elsewhere I extract some names from my roll of teaching honour: Donald Duff, Dolly Gray, Helen Gordon, Robert Weir, Clark Henry. Anita Mitchell, John Hutchison, Arthur Meikle, and Miss Calder (for in primary schools then it would have been almost as improper to learn the Christian names of lady teachers as to give them nicknames). There were many more.
I hope there are still many like them and that they aren’t too harassed by today’s educational bureaucrats, ill-to-please parents, and social-networking pupils. But they have to realise that it may take half a century and more for their best work to be appreciated by those who benefit most.
R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster
