I expect some cherished colleagues have seen this piece in DT, following on Michael Gove’s apology to his former French teacher.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/9628673/Dear-sir-weve-all-got-a-lot-to-be-sorry-about.html
It got me wondering whether I owed any apologies to any of my old teachers. There was Mrs M, the maths teacher, who never managed to convince me there was any point in learning geometry theorems by heart. I was glad that someone had discovered that the sum of the angles of any triangle make two right angles and I hoped they’d had good weather for it, but what had it to do with me? Faced with a circle and a triangle and some odd lines, I never could work out what theorem to apply. I know my ability to score 100% in algebra and arithmetic drove the lady wild, since those were the days when 100% in algebra and 10% in geometry did not lead to Higher (this being Scotland) maths. “No problem” I said. “I won’t sit Higher.” No, I don’t feel like apologising, Mrs M, since you couldn’t enthuse me.
Then there was Miss M, the RE teacher who only saw us once a week and didn’t bother to learn the names of all the girls in the class. Instead she simply picked those whose names she did know – me, because she knew my parents – to answer all questions. Came the day when she bounced into the classroom waving a hot-off-the-press copy of the New English Bible and invited us all to choose a passage we would like to hear from the new version. “Right, lady, you asked for this!” So I chose one of the passages that reads “Tom begat Dick, and Dick begat Harry, and Harry begat … Miss M looked at me coldly, said that it was much the same, and thereafter stopped asking me. No apology there either – a teacher must learn the names of her pupils.
Perhaps some cherished colleagues do feel there are some teachers they “done wrong”. Perhaps my lack of penitence comes from over 20 years of teaching myself.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Hello Sheona, I saw the article and felt that it would make an excellent topic for the Chariot, something which everybody would have an opinion about. I certainly have some thoughts about my old teachers. Some were excellent and some appalling. One I would almost describe as wicked. I don’t have time now, but maybe later I will add some of my memories a bit later.
I look forward to reading that, Sipu.
Sheona, I had a similar block with biology as an 11-year-old. Stuff about jurassics and ammonites all presented by ‘Slug’ Hughes. He should have apologised to me for gross boredom.
Apologise, I really don’t think so. What a truly bizarre idea. It’s entirely reasonable to at that age to detest one’s teachers.
Well, I did think one or two were almost human.
Apologies or typos. I’m using a lap top and I really hate the keyboard.
(Ara, I found I had to turn off the touch-pad and use a mouse to avoid problems when typing on my laptop. I have a cordless mouse. It made a huge difference. )
Well done, LW!
Sorry, the second part of that comment is on the wrong post…
I’d like a couple of teachers to apologise to me. Well one in particular.
Thanks Nym.
I’ve just engaged cordless mouse but keyboard really does throw me. My desk is under dust sheets, and I have the laptop on a coffee table. Back to normal in a few days, hopefully.
Decorators are hell, but it will look good when its finished.
I agree with ara, no apologies.
In the upper sixth we had our own library with armchairs and magazines. I was sitting minding my own business reading Punch.
In comes this dreadful creature that taught the second year, the most kindly description was a dyke with BO!
She shouldn’t have even been in there, bustling about with no business to attend to. Up she comes and tells me to get on with my work.
I’m afraid I let her have it with both barrels, quite loud enough for every one to hear. On reflection, the Parthian shot of telling her she smelt and was a sexual deviant was perhaps not one of my brightest ideas!!!
Needless to say, there ensued an interview with the headmistress who demanded I apologised, I refused and was flung out of the school. I wanted an apology from her for smelling up the senior library! (That went down like a lead balloon!)
This was about three weeks before the A Level exams. My mother refused to allow me to not sit the exams, so I was banished to home to revise and only allowed to return to sit the exams and I did not have to attend for the rest of the term. Wonderful, I got to revise properly and attained straight As and after the exams managed to get a job until October to make some money for University. Needless to say all others were extremely jealous of me dodging parents day, sports day and all sorts of tedious make work that they find after exams for school leavers.
Thus I left school, there was an interesting postscript to this. There was an extremely valuable prize to the top mark in A level Geography. It was an ancient prize there and the sponsor had set it in stone legally that it went to the top mark irrespective of any other considerations. I was the only person in the school to get an A grade, they HAD to give it to me rather than the head girl who had a B. (Much gnashing of teeth I heard later) I made a point of travelling up from Uni to collect it. Arrived late deliberately, walked up the auditorium when called, collected the prize without comment, turned on my heel and positively stalked down the auditorium, past my seat, straight out of the door and back to the railway station without bothering to speak to a soul.
Never been back since, never left a forwarding address.
Interestingly my sister told me last week on the phone that the place has gone and they have built houses on it, good! Retrospectively I never fitted in, far too independent, rural and with differing interests, the parents made it happen because my sister went there. I wonder why parents always try to force their children into the same moulds when they just don’t suit?
Ara, I found the mouse does not stop the touch pad being sensitive and you actually have to disengage the touch pad as well… then you’ll see a bug difference.
I’m almost there, Nym. I’m now in the kitchen, on a stool with the wretched device on the breakfast bar and have sorted out the mouse and also connected my usual keyboard. It’s not quite perfect but it will do for a few days, or until I end up slopping muesli or tea over the whole thing.
By rights I should apologise to most, if not all of them.
What a bloody nuisance I was as a kid. Poor Scuffey (Mr Archer) tried to teach us art, one day he broke my nose, something two years of Welsh schoolboy rugby had not achieved (I was holding a wooden drawing board vertically on my knees and smirking behind it to my mate Frank). Scuffey hit me on the back of the head and my nose broke on the edge of the board, blood everywhere. How we laughed, I was stuffed with cotton wool by the nurse and when I got home I got lots of sympathy. My mother said “Well you probably deserved it” and my dad said “The way you behave it’s lucky he didn’t break your effing neck”
Yes, Mr. Voake (English Lit.) I confess it was me as the ringleader of a gang of rugby players who put your Volkswagen Beetle on the Annexe roof (flat thankfully).
To Colonel Webb (headmaster, of course) I will now explain why your tobacco crop was ruined in 1960, the liberal application of weedkiller killed it before it could kill you (which may well have been our original intent).
Exception: To Tom Jones (his real name) fifth form Physics, who wrote on my report “Does not try” — I was first in the class (as always ) with 98%, thanks Tom, for the truth, as always.
Well, CO and LW! I see now why you live in the grand ole US of A!
I see no reason to apologise to any of my ex-teachers. I’d like an apology from my Applied Maths teacher who spent every lesson describing the failings of her washing machine – I failed A Level Applied Maths and I’d like an apology from my Pure Maths teacher who told me that I’d fail A Level Pure Maths – I got the highest grade of anyone that year…
I would, however, like to thank my headmistress who did not try to break the spirit of the nine year old who said that she would not do something and refused to back down – and continued to do do so until she left school at 18. She was an amazing woman who always listened to my side of the story and gave me an honourable way out. When my home life was disintegrating, she even offered to let me live with her for the final six months of my A Levels.
When I phoned some seven years after leaving school to ask for a reference to go back to College, I asked if she remembered me… “Ah yes!”, she said, “The little orange head… come to lunch”.
If I were to be asked to name the two most important influences in my life – she would be number two.
Janus: The original thirteen were mostly established as sometimes strange social experiments in misguided attempts to deal with the criminal ingenuity of the underclass of the sceptered isle. This process continued on a voluntary basis until well into the 1970’s.
I am relieved to see that I am not the only Charioteer who feels no need to make any apology to any of their teachers.
Christina, I hate to tell you that I used to infuriate my Geography teacher by lack of attention to detail. My rivers usually went up one side of a mountain range and down the other, and I never could get the dots showing towns the correct size.
LW, congratulations not only on your moving poem but on getting that Beetle up on a roof.
Sheona, your Geography sounds like my Latin, non existent!
Five years and I never got much further than the opening line of Caesar’s Gallic Wars!
I’m confused as to the meaning of ‘the original thriteen’. Help!
CO, all you needed to know was that Cæsar put the frogs firmly in their place, never to re-emerge.
Janus, I think LW is referring to the thirteen British colonies established on American soil. One of them, Georgia, was specifically designed for Oglethorpe’s debtors. An interesting story –
http://colonialancestors.com/ga/oglethorpe.htm
As regards Caesar and Gaul, perhaps the frogs should have “adsum iam forte” too. The term “Gaulois” is now being used as a derogatory name for “les français de souche” by immigrants from North and subsaharan Africa.
Ah, Georgia. Savannah, GA to be precise. No lawyers! My kind of town.
As for Caesar’s Gallic Wars, I distinctly remember killing 16 midges as I sat out side the Beit Hall, studying for my Latin O’levels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Beit#The_Beit_Trust_and_other_donations