World Teachers' Day.

 World Teachers' Day.

Teachers have always been models of respectability and the people we look up to for reassurance, a thorough education and the figures of authority who are simply there to offer wise guidance and experienced pearls of wisdom. Teachers should be our friends and confidants when childhood becomes both difficult and challenging. They're the ones who we can trust and believe in if we're just a couple of minutes late because the bus or train was late and mum had forgotten to pack our lunch. Teachers soothed feverish brows, alleviating anxiety at the drop of a hat and explaining everything carefully.

Today is World Teachers' Day and it's all about taking just a couple of hours for our young students and imparting the best possible advice. School is all about learning, developing those first friendships from a young age and telling your teacher that you may be struggling even though you may think you're not. From our first infant or primary school day, we are all bewildered children because none of us know exactly where we might be going. So who do you ask for help? You turn to the man or woman who rings the bell for playtime and you stop immediately. Teachers instinctively knew what may be going through a child's mind when that bell goes. They may be laughing and giggling but it's all a bit daunting.

Teachers are our first points of academic contact, the ones who point at what used to be blackboards with rubbers and chalks in their hands. Then, all manner of multi coloured chalks scratched out the multiplication table, the alphabet, grammar, new words, the first seeds of a burgeoning vocabulary. So you sit at your desk, waiting patiently and then looking at sir or miss with increasing levels of fascination. Your attention may be diverted by events taking place outside your classroom and the windows with long wooden poles.

As a young child it all felt like the most intimidating challenge of them all, that first week back in early September after an ecstatic summer holiday. Some of us genuinely cried into their bed pillows as kids because we were dreading this new environment or perhaps one we knew everything there was to know about but wished we couldn't be subjected to again and again. Besides, why on earth did we have to go to school because the kids were naughty and nasty, always disobedient and never well behaved? 

All the kids in the playground were just troublemakers, letting off stink bombs, a singularly disruptive influence and just a pain in the neck to all the teachers who were there to maintain law and order. So, as primary school children, we can all remember vividly those eternal playground days of chasing each other for no apparent reason, playing Tag by catching each other and then tapping each other on their shoulders. The girls were always playing Kiss Chase or skipping because gender stereotyping was years away.

But then teachers came into our lives and were always there for us, constantly available for a word after lessons. They'd sit us down in private when the rest of the kids had run out of the gates and were desperate to get home for games of football in the park with our classroom mates. Kids were always hungry for knowledge whereas others regarded school as a painful imposition that just had to be endured and tolerated. So teachers would be our confidants, the ones who would always listen to all of our childhood grievances and long term problems. 

Most of our primary school learning was conducted in either long corridors with classrooms inside or huge huts outside and although the memories may be totally unreliable, we can still visualise it all with a certain amount of accuracy. Within minutes and hours of our first lessons, you could still hear the incessant clattering and pounding of footsteps, five or six year old children running down the passageway while every so often the teachers yelled out severe reprimands to those kids who just continued to run and laugh. You had to stop because if you didn't, the punishment would be a hundred lines after school in an empty classroom.

Teachers were those individuals who set vitally important standards, morals, values and, above all discipline. They stood there in all weathers, whistling every so often in the playground and bawling out strict orders above all the pandemonium  around them. They shout at their pupils with ferocious conviction since they just want them to succeed in life and get on in adolescence. But we were just oblivious to the adult world because school was a meeting place for fun, sharing football Panini football stickers and swapping magazines called Jackie for the girls and Shoot magazine for the boys. 

Most of us tend to think of teachers as horrible and condescending individuals who just lecture you and humiliate kids because sir and miss simply don't understand us.  They make all manner of belittling and facetious comments about you because you were the one who kept flicking pieces of paper at the other kids or using an elastic band that would normally miss its intended target. Teachers are supposed to be instilling the groundwork for further education in later years but, at the time, kids have no boundaries.

Then there is the dawning realisation that teachers are the most patient and understanding of any person, apart from your loving parents who  love you and care for you. They have a very specific role in our lives, always influential, always compassionate and hoping that one day you'll be grateful for everything they've tried to give back to both you and the rest of society.

Long gone, of course teachers and headmasters would confidently march into your classroom, wearing a a black cloak with a mortar board, a university cap on their heads and the infamous stick. The old St Trinian's films from the archives of film history are still engraved on our minds.  St Trinian's of course was just slapstick comedy and nothing more really. The kids would always be up to mischief, plotting something unsavoury and then poking merciless fun at those they may see to  them as terribly threatening authoritarians.

Nowadays teachers are still underpaid, undervalued and almost dismissed as mean spirited, heartless members of their noble calling. The kids are the ones who leave behind them huge piles of books consisting of questions that have to be ticked as right or not as be it the case. Teachers are the ones who usually confronted with mountains of exercise books that never seem to come to an end. But teaching is, essentially a vocation, a natural calling, a profession to be acknowledged as something to be proud of.

Above all the madness and deafening noise, you can still hear a despairing voice in a chemistry lesson from way back when.  You can still see a helpless and struggling Asian gentleman who just wanted to be heard and not simply disregarded as some battering ram. Here was a man who was being mercilessly beaten over the head with loud jeering and sneering of the most cruel kind. But teachers are worth far more than relentless verbal punishment laced with insults and hurtful jibes.

But for some of us primary school was all about a certain husband and wife team who guided us to our first promised land of academic virtuosity, the first building blocks towards a bright sunset of an educational paradise, the foundation stone of our early lives. We still remember Mr and Mrs Cole because they were somehow inseparable and that was comforting to us at the time because we admired them for that reason alone. Mrs Cole used to take us for country dancing lessons on Friday afternoon. She was a maternal, a beacon of stability to us because our mums and dads had given us those first guiding hands and the world was a treacherous assault course. 

And then, finally there was our masterful primary school headmaster. Ken Aston had been a distinguished World Cup football referee at the 1962 World Cup in Chile and then was present at the 1966 World Cup in England as a pacifist. Aston, in the now infamous Battle of Santiago where the players of Chile and Italy quite clearly intended to kill each other given half a chance, raced over towards the scene of the crime and pointed towards the players tunnel. The match was immediately called off and before you could blink, feuding players from both sides sheepishly walked off the pitch. It had now degenerated into a playground scuffle, fists were flying, but Aston,  like a ruthless sergeant major, stood for no nonsense and the players were back in the dressing room in no time at all.  

So there you have it Ladies and Gentlemen. It's World Teachers Day and please try to pay attention when you're being spoken to. You don't have to do detention nor write 1,000 lines about firing pea shooters at each other when sir or miss are trying to teach you about phonetics, pronunciation, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, numbers, division and long division. It'll stand you in good stead later on in life and besides, we'll thank them profusely later on in life. Oh and my wonderful son Sam and lovely daughter in law Lucy are brilliant teachers and they love what they do. Enjoy World Teachers Day because you may learn something.