Role models

Teachers often base their practice, consciously or unconsciously, on the models they best remember from their own school days. Or on the models they most value. I am no exception, except that I think my parents influenced me a great deal. Both police officers straight from leaving school at the age of 15/16, I saw what they put into the job and, as I grew up, I discovered what it took out of them (in my Dad’s case this resulted in his being ill in his early fifties: it was stress-related). Seldom did they talk about work per se, albeit they captivated me when they did, but every evening without fail we sat around the dinner table and talked. They were, and still are, loving and interested parents. There are areas in which they are uneducated (history, language, literature--neither had been as fortunate as me in terms of their schooling. This is written without a shred of criticism or embarrassment; it is simple fact); I suspect this is part of the reason they decided to send me to a fee-paying school. What’s important, though, is that they introduced me to so much of the real world which would otherwise have been closed to me. Though not teachers in the strictest sense, they encouraged sensitivity to emotion, concentration, absorption and a sense of wonder. I genuinely think that underpins everything.