M’s the Word: Teach your children well

If you can read this, thank a teacher

By Malcolm Allison on Jun 27, 2011

I am not the best driver in the world.

I have no sense of direction, so I get lost a lot, and I think I suffer the occasional loss of concentration, which never results in anything too dangerous but serves to keep other road users on their toes.

So on one occasion, I was coasting towards the back of a bus when I read the lines ‘If you can read this, thank a teacher' and I smiled as I slammed on the brakes and jolted to an untidy halt three feet from his bumper.

I thought about that as I said goodbye to my wife after the weekend.

She was just taking a taxi to the airport on her way back home.

We met at a teaching college. I failed to get a teaching job, despite completing more than 50 applications, whereas she climbed the ranks and now runs a large school.

We try not to talk about work, but at least when we do hers is a hobby for me and mine is something similar for her.

While she was here, Berlin ran a ‘museum night' during which entry to all the city's museums could be bought for 15 euros.

After dinner, we walked round to the Natural History Museum and became re-acquainted with the dinosaurs and the woolly mammoth.

We watched some dancers re-enacting a battle with the mammoth and her professional mind remarked that children are fascinated by dinosaurs; it is one of the best vehicles for getting boys to learn vocabulary.

I remembered sitting in the front row, watching swarthy Mr. Graham, who looked a bit like he might have fitted well into the crowd.

He was the form teacher as well as the French teacher, and I remember how he snarled at my friend for having long hair: Mais je parle Francais. 

Prostitution is supposed to be the oldest profession, but I think that is wrong.

When a woman started to scrape the ground to plant seeds, while the men were clubbing a mammoth, it was the beginning of the end of the hunter age and the beginning of the farmer age.

But it was not that woman with her fist full of student food that caused the revolution.

It was her friend who watched, gathered the other women around, and showed them how to do it.

And when James Watt fired up the steam engine, it was not him but the small group who ran the engineering shop and taught their friends who pushed past the farmers.

The transitions between ages would not have been achieved without teachers.  

So although the original change agent was the innovator, nothing would have happened without the intervention of the one who taught the others.

If she had left it to the originator, we would still be watching the death throes of the mammoth.

And we would be the ones the other side of the glass in the museum-so teach your children well.