Thank your teachers

In my teens and twenties, I was always in a rush to achieve whatever was next, so nobody was surprised when I chose to apply for university a year early by taking advantage of having moved back to Scotland and the Scottish system allowing that when taking “Highers” in what is called “5th year” (first year of the Sixth form in the English system). After sitting those exams, that summer of 1982 I then marched into the Australian consulate in Edinburgh to apply for whatever student visa I’d need to then spend a year in Australia on the sheep station of a distant relative, only to be told “you are still only 16, you are too young to be eligible”. Oops.

So, having applied for deferred entry to university and with my travel plans stymied, I decided to simply go back to Peebles Burgh High School for one more year. I could have been a nightmare for the teaching staff, a bright boy who didn’t need to pass any exams as he already had his university place, but one teacher in particular lit a spark in me that sat smouldering within me for many years before finally burning bright now and into the future.

That teacher was Mr Peter Waller, the head of History at Peebles High. For that “what shall I do now?” final year of school, I chose subjects that I thought would interest me, one of those being history. I loved that class so, so much and for three core reasons:

• First, Mr Waller’s absolute passion and enthusiasm for the subject and for lighting sparks in his pupils where he saw they may be as curious about history as he was.
• Second, debating. Mr Waller would often fiercely debate with individuals and the class as a whole, commonly taking contrarian views to the accepted history of the textbooks. He was the first person to teach me “history is written by the winners” and, in one memorable class, he argued at length with me by taking the position that “Hitler was good for Germany”.
• Third, essay writing. We were set many, many essays to write. I soon realised that repeating the facts from the official texts would only get (at best) a “C”, to go better one had to both tell stories and give our own opinions. This was inspiring to me and I loved writing each essay. I was therefore really excited when, one day, Mr Waller pointed to a large board on the wall behind him where the winners of the “Nelson Shield Prize for History” were named, going back to the early 1900s. This was, I recall, a competition within the school, to honour for posterity the top essay writer of the year. If you visit the school now and the board is still up somehwere, look back to school year 1982/1983 and you will see my name

Mr Waller absolutely lit a spark in me about learning beyond the texts, about storytelling, about essay writing. This largely sat dormant for many years as I pressed on to study accountancy and computer science at university, then qualify as a chartered accountant, then build my career. However, the flame never went out, so around fifteen years ago, when asked to write a column for a newspaper in Cayman, the flame started to burn once again, rising up higher and higher until now I have been writing daily posts for over four years, with well over 750,000 words in over 1500 posts.

Why did I think back to the influence of Mr Waller in creating and igniting that spark in me?

Two things

First, last week I listened to one of the “Sideways” podcasts by Matthew Syed, called “Inspiring Bill Strickland“, about how a young man called Bill Strickland was inspired by one teacher at his school and how that led him to create programmes to similarly inspire other teenage high school students. The entire programme was focussed on two things, an homage to the power of our teachers, as well as to rethink our approach as adults to teenagers, including reference to the latest neuroscience and how the teenage brain in in fact still in a stage of continuing development whilst at the same time being at one of the most creative stages across our entire lifetime. In listening to this, I rapidly thought back to several teachers who created a spark in me, the one I chose to write about today was Peter Waller.

Second, my youngest son is brilliant and creative and at the same time does not neatly fit in the narrow boundaries of the education system we still use nearly two hundred years on from the industrial revolution needing society to churn out workers with the “three “r”s” of “reading, writing, ‘rithmetic”. He is in his final year of high school and we (parents and teachers) are supporting him in navigating the path towards university, with a few bumps along that road for someone who doesn’t “fit” for all the standard ways. In recent months I have been deeply grateful to several of his teachers for seeing his unique brilliance and doing everything they can (and often beyond their own standard roles) to first ignite and then fan the flames for him, to use that spark to help him through the “box-ticking” of exams that are used as the filter to get into university.

So, all of this is to say that I am deeply grateful for my teachers, for those who have taught all three of my sons, and for all teachers who seek to see the unique spark in each student and to do all they can to light that spark and fan the flame.