Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good Morning, My wife has taught English at the same school for 32 years. Last week she finally wiped the white-board clean on a long and quietly excellent career. She did it on the very day the Government announced a pay rise of between 5%-9% for state schoolteachers! But she was never in it for money. I’m not sure many teachers are. At her leaving do, her head of department thanked her for her professional commitment as ‘an act of unassuming but constant service to her students and fellow teachers’. Paraphrasing Seamus Heaney, she described her as being ‘like a stone mason - nudging, placing, shaping, and leaving her students that little bit more constructed.’ I must take these wonderful words on trust for, despite being married to her for 31 of those 32 years, I have never seen my wife doing the job she has evidently done so well for so long. In a way this is appropriate for there has always been something unsung and unseen about the work teachers do. As the heartfelt thankyou cards from her pupils testify, praise is usually best left to the ones taught. My favourite message being, ‘Thank you Miss, You made me realise how much I love plays and literature.’ A good teacher is someone who knows where the gold is buried and is able to show others how to find it. In a sense, teaching is a calling – a vocation - not unlike that of a priest. It certainly has many of the priestly requirements: a right balance of character and ability, a willingness to serve, to enable others to live fuller, richer lives. Most of us can probably name a teacher who made a positive difference to us – thank you, Mr Chapman! Despite this, I wonder if we value teaching as a profession as much as we say. (I often thought we should have clapped for teachers during the pandemic – as they too were operating in the front line of people’s lives). Perhaps there is something in the culture that still believes that egregious George Bernard Shaw quote: ‘Those who can do, those who can’t teach.’ Not that teachers are waiting around for accolades – any more than for pay rises! I guess they have to be motivated by something else, a passion for their subjects for one, as well as a desire to share their passion with others. Jesus was often called ‘Teacher’ and he didn’t refute this job description. His class sizes and methods may not have passed Ofsted, but He fulfilled the dual demands of education: to train and mould (educare); alongside a capacity to draw out what is already in us (educere). He had that ability to show us what matters, without telling us what to see. And leaves us, if we are willing to listen, just that little bit more nudged, shaped and constructed as human beings.