On being a teacher

For Katie. Because I think you care a great deal about what you do.

The old woman sat on the train, dozing in the warmth of the day as they travelled through the Cambridgeshire countryside. Her book was at her side, for she was never without a book. Generally, she had three books open by the bed  because it was so hard to decide to follow one; downstairs, it was the same story. By her side on the train a book she hadn't looked at for a while but felt compelled to bring with her today: The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice. MacNeice had been a favourite of hers at university but, much to her dismay, was scoffed at by some of dons who considered him a lightweight - poor cousin to Auden. Shoddy classicist! Kind of Anglo-Irish literature pretender! But that didn't matter now. She dozed and let the ruminating thought settle.

A younger man was walking in her direction down the train; he must have been in his sixties to her eighties. She happened to open her eyes and wondered where she had seen him before; she could see that her recognised her immediately. Then,

"Miss Williams? Is that you? Hello. Do you remember me?"

This made her start. She hadn't been Miss Williams for a long time now. A memory formed. The man was once a boy - a boy from one of her classes. She couldn't quite remember his name amongst all the thousands of students she had taught and dragged through literature and grammar and parts of speech and all those seemingly unfashionable things that people don't bother with these days. The semi colon! The subordinate clause! Ha!

"It's John, Miss. I was the annoying one in year 11. You know: the one who always drew rude cartoons of you - always having to see the Head? "

Memory formed and reformed and she had placed him: "Of course. And it's Anna. Not Miss. How nice to see you."

They didn't speak for long as the train was about to halt and John explained he would have to get off at the next stop, but he told her some things. That he still doodled -"Good for my arthritis these days!", was still a rebel of sorts and that, above all, he read. Everything he could get his hands on - but most of all, poetry. It was hunkered down in there so deeply now, he could recite reams at will.

"Never knew I had it in me, Miss - um, Anna."

He would turn to it when sad, when celebrating, looking for an answer or just at odds with the world.

"This is my stop: it was really good to see you again. And, well, thank you. Thank you."

She sat and pondered on this. It had felt so often with syllabus and curriculum and telling off and - the word she detested - relevance - that this was a strange old world to be in. What good could you do? On the train she had an answer, of course: the good of what she might have done was not quantifiable immediately; might not show up until years later but, with patience and care, you just had to trust that it would.

***********************************************************************************



A note from me: I worry that this story sounds trite. But it is pretty much how I feel about teaching English - especially literature. That our response to poetry, in particular, may be both visceral and intellectual. If what we read is any good, of course. And one other point: the story is true. It happened to me and to a teacher older than me. In the former case, in meeting a student; in the latter, when the teacher whose work I have admired enormously met his former teacher (one was 60, the other in his mid 80s) and told him that he read, he remembered and he was grateful. Uh oh: down come the tears in quite a deluge. I will sign off.

The photo was taken in the library of St John's Colleg, Cambridge by Ben Gallagher (www.flickr.com). Thank you to him and thank you Alma mater.