Another Voice | 7 June 2008

There are no ‘good’ teachers: the teacher who is good for you may wreck another’s prospects

The funny thing is that I’m not sure I ever knew her Christian name. No doubt she had one, and for no reason at all I think it might have been Jean, but to us she was so much, and so completely, Mrs McLeod that as a boy I probably imagined her husband called her Mrs McLeod at breakfast. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I even knew about a husband — but her title was ‘Mrs’ and there was a daughter, so I suppose she must have had one.

And this was the woman whose name came straight into my head the other morning as I listened to Anne Atkins, on Thought for the Day on BBC Radio, suggesting that apart from immediate family, the person most of us would say had exercised the most influence over us in our impressionable years ‘was probably a schoolteacher’.