There are no ‘good’ teachers: the teacher who is good for you may wreck another’s prospects
The funny thing is that I’m not sure I ever knew her Christian name. No doubt she had one, and for no reason at all I think it might have been Jean, but to us she was so much, and so completely, Mrs McLeod that as a boy I probably imagined her husband called her Mrs McLeod at breakfast. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I even knew about a husband — but her title was ‘Mrs’ and there was a daughter, so I suppose she must have had one.
And this was the woman whose name came straight into my head the other morning as I listened to Anne Atkins, on Thought for the Day on BBC Radio, suggesting that apart from immediate family, the person most of us would say had exercised the most influence over us in our impressionable years ‘was probably a schoolteacher’.
Without question that would be Mrs McLeod. Small, bun-shaped, yet firm and compact with a beautifully moulded helmet of grey hair, discreetly scented and carefully made-up and powdered, immaculately turned out as she stepped from her grey-green Morris Minor, and forever about 55, Mrs McLeod was my class teacher in Standard IIa at Borrowdale Junior School in what was then Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia.
I was eight and it was 1958. With my family I had recently arrived by train from Capetown, whither we had sailed from Southampton on the Jagersfontein, Holland–Africa line, scattering messages in bottles into the Atlantic all the way via Madeira (no message ever returned to me). I was nervous about a new class, new school, new continent.
Enough reminiscence. Reflections on Mrs McLeod go wider and I had entertained them before I heard Anne Atkins make her point. A journalist conducting a survey had asked me to name the ‘best teacher I ever had’ and explain why. And when I came to explaining why Mrs McLeod, a melancholy thought had struck me. This neat and emphatic little lady, with her faint trace of an ‘educated’ Scots accent and her insistence on meticulous spelling and grammar — the woman who first encouraged me to think I was good at school and could be top of my class — was more than the best teacher I ever had: she was also almost certainly the worst teacher that at least half a dozen of my class of 40 ever had; the woman who helped destroy in them all hope or confidence that they could ever do well at school.
Mrs McLeod had most of the qualities that traditionalist educationalists would describe as necessary in a good teacher. She kept an iron discipline but without needing to knock anyone about, she commanded respect, she set a personal example, she was consistent and eventempered, and she set out with great clarity the values and rules she believed we boys and girls needed to guide us. Most of these were unexceptional though what distinguished Mrs McLeod’s values was the imperative for us to be ‘articulate’ in all senses of the word: to think before we spoke; to frame our thoughts in clear language; to speak distinctly, to speak up and to speak in standard, received English pronunciation. She detested what she considered the sloppy, mumbling, drawling sound of a white Rhodesian accent (the accent of almost all of my classmates) and boys or girls who pronounced words in a strongly accented way were forcefully instructed to try again, in front of the whole class. My Queen’s English accent was music to her ears.
Mrs McLeod’s philosophy was that the first and most important thing, when you were eight, was to learn the facts: the facts of arithmetic, history, geography, science and English grammar. Any personal interest you might develop in any of these disciplines could be followed up as and when appropriate, but (in Miss Jean Brodie’s words) the meaning of ‘education’ to Mrs McLeod was not so much a drawing out as a putting in.
Her method of putting in was to praise and encourage the boys and girls in her class who showed promise, as beacons to all the rest. I was one of these. As to all the rest, they were given to understand (and in emphatic terms) that they were not cutting the mustard.
What followed was the natural consequence: that if you were of average to above-average intelligence, played by the teacher’s rules and did your best to please her, your reward would be conspicuous. Basking in her approval, you would grow in self-confidence. Her absolute command, and the fact that you knew her approval was not offered to everybody but only to a chosen few, made being in Mrs McLeod’s good books a most inspiring thing.
It certainly inspired me. At prize day at the end of the year, receiving (as Top Boy, Standard IIa) my leather-bound Dickens novel from the headmaster, I well knew that it was Mrs McLeod and her belief in my abilities and prospects to whom I owed the discovery, aged eight, that I was quite a bright boy whose growing confidence could take him far. I’ve known it ever since.
But IIa had its losers too. I could still name them, boys like Fernando Rodrigues who, starting with no great intellect, struggled with English. Looking back I cannot recall that there was really anything seriously wrong with any of them, including Fernando, except that for reasons either of aptitude or attitude, they had fallen a bit behind. In Mrs McLeod’s class they fell further behind because her approach was to remind boys and girls constantly of who was succeeding relative to whom.
You may perhaps expect me to conclude that the best teachers are ‘inclusive’ in the encouragement they give, but I cannot betray Mrs McLeod (who is no longer alive) in that way. It was — and was precisely — her exclusivity, her singling some of us out, that so motivated me. It was thrilling. If she’d been finding something to praise in everyone, her praise for me would have meant so much less. I owe her a lot. But I cannot go on to say it made her a ‘good’ teacher in any more universal way.
Instead I conclude that part of the answer lies in smaller classes: 40 was too many for a teacher to do more than pick a few winners and keep order among the rest. I conclude, too, that mixed-ability classes with too wide a range of ability within them can be especially discouraging to the lower end of the range; Standard II was already divided into IIa and IIb, and had IIb been included in our class the effect of Mrs McLeod’s methods would have been fatal to most of them.
These are easy conclusions but there is a harder one: that perhaps there is no such thing as a ‘good’ teacher, but simply teachers who are good for particular types of children. And perhaps — an even harder lesson — the best way of motivating a certain type of child is inherently demotivating to another type of child. It makes me sad to think my good start in life might have been the flipside of Fernando’s failure.
Matthew Parris is a columnist on the Times.
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