Me and Mrs Jones: What my teacher really taught me

How much do you remember about your English lessons when you were a pupil? The majority of my lessons I remember as a blur, an amalgamation of lessons over time. It’s strange the small details I do remember, the obscure quotations from texts such as the Merchant of Venice or Macbeth, the distinct feeling of hatred I felt towards Gerald in An Inspector Calls (and presumably because of this, I can remember clearly who read out his part in class). In amongst these recollections is the memory of my Standard Grade (Scottish equivalent of GCSE) teacher, Mrs Jones. I don’t think I would ever have called Mrs Jones my favourite teacher at the time, but now, as a teacher myself looking back, I see that Mrs Jones has shaped my teacher identity more than I perhaps consciously realise.

What Mrs Jones taught me about being a good English teacher 

Mrs Jones never gave the impression that she particularly liked us. There is no one that could give a pithy burn like Mrs Jones. She was quick, concise and devastating with her comments, in a moment she could cut down your 14 year old arrogance in a way that never felt personal or unjustified. This, I now know as a teacher myself is an important, implicit behaviour management technique, a way of putting pupils in their place with grace and humour but more importantly with the edge that lets the class know that they have met their match. Do I always emulate this? No… sadly not, I don’t think I could ever quite reach the Mrs Jones level. Yet, I do think this ‘English teacher wit’ is an important part of a good English teacher’s identity.

As a pupil I was not aware of the idea of someone having ‘high expectations of us’, yet, as a teacher looking back, Mrs Jones embodied this. To us, we always thought she was harsh. We felt she marked our work more harshly than other teachers. She wanted more of us when we gave a lazy answer. Now whilst these things did not make you a popular teacher, when I think about it, it made me work harder to gain her respect.

Who cares?

Now, despite giving the impression that she did not particularly like any of her pupils there are two instances that really stick out to me that shows that Mrs Jones cared a lot. When I was 14 my great grandmother died in very tragic circumstances; she suffered a heart attack after a local teenager threw a stone through the window of her retirement home. In a strange twist of fate, a few weeks after this, we were reading a short story where the events mirrored this in an uncanny way. After reading the story Mrs Jones pointed out a case in that happened locally which showed that this sort of thing happened in real life. I imagine the point she was trying to get across was that as teenagers, our actions have consequences, which is clearly an important message. Yet, for me this was not ‘a story’ in the local press, it was my great grandmother. It was the end of the lesson and I burst into (what I felt) were discrete tears. I don’t even remember telling my friends afterwards what was wrong (although I possibly did). I composed myself and went to my next lesson. Later that day I was in Graphic Communication and Mrs Jones came to the door and asked to speak to me. She had come to apologise for the lesson, she hadn’t been aware that the woman she was referring to was my great grandmother. I have no idea how she found this out but it made a world of difference to me that she came to find me to explain and check I was ok. That’s the thing about English, we deal with subjects have the ability to shock, to upset, to touch us in a powerful way and this always needs to be done with sensitivity… but it needs to be done. Despite my personal reaction and connection to those events, I believe that if the story and the connection she made between it and my great grandmother’s case touched someone else, made them think about their actions in future, it was all worth it.

The second thing is a small point but one I see in a different way now I’m a teacher myself. Now, perhaps I shouldn’t mention this given my job, but I have always struggled with spelling. Clearly Mrs Jones had picked up on the disparity between my general ability in English and my ability to spell. One day after lesson she held me back and gave me a pocket spell checker. Given what I know about teaching now, I imagine that spell checker was purchased with her own money and it is indicative of the kindness that the best teachers seem to have.

So despite the pithy putdowns and harsh marking, Mrs Jones clearly did care. She didn’t need to be our ‘friend’ or be soft on us, but she showed she cared when it mattered.

My best English lesson

At the start of this blog I mentioned how I could not remember discrete lessons, however that is not entirely true… I remember one lesson very vividly. It was the 12^th of September 2001. I know the date because it was the day after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre. Sadly, we have become desensitised to terrorist attacks, for our pupils now terrorism is part of life, but the 9/11 attack was truly shocking and in hindsight seemed to change everything. I remember coming home from school on the day it happened and seeing my mum enraptured in front of the TV as I passed the patio doors to our family room. I remember watching the plane smash into the side of the building on the small TV screen and not quite realising what I was watching, whether it was real or not.

The next day in English we didn’t carry on the lesson from before. We did something different. Mrs Jones had photocopied an opinion piece from one of the newspapers. I remember it was a defiant open letter to the terrorists. Our task was to read through it and then use the lines from the article to create our own poem.

It was powerful.

It is the only English lesson I distinctly remember and the reason for this is that Mrs Jones recognised the significance of this event in history, its raw topicality, the need for us to process what had happened through language. Mrs Jones clearly recognised the need to sometimes take time out from the SOW, the mid term plan, the exam preparation and focus on what is important: The way in which language shapes our understanding of the world.

Mrs Jones taught me two important lessons that day, one as a child and one as an English teacher. She taught me the need for English to be reflexive to the world around us and to use English as a tool to understand and shape the word around us.

I said at the beginning of this blog that I would not have considered Mrs Jones my favourite teacher but in hindsight she was my best teacher and has shaped me as an English teacher more than she could have possibly imagined. It is with great regret that I didn’t say ‘thank you’ at the time and I hope that one day she might know the profound impact she has had on my teacher identity.