Although, in common with just about every teacher since the Second World War trained in England and Wales, I was examined in the philosophy of education, I cannot claim to have been influenced by Rousseau, Spenser, Dewey or Montessori – at least as far as I can tell. As for educational psychology, I developed a healthy scepticism towards intelligence testing that was later borne out by the revelations of Spearman’s dubious research. By and large, I share the cynical view of many who have taken education courses that they are of little practical worth. Twelve weeks teaching practice and the advice of practicing teachers coupled with memories of my harassment of weak teachers in my tear away times served to get my career off to a sound empirical start. Within a year or two, I had formulated one or two maxims of my own. Foremost among these was the dictum, based on the quasi-Socratic notion that the road to failure is paved with teachers pretending to knowledge when faced with a question they could not honestly answer, “Don’t be afraid to admit you don’t know.” It’s more than likely that my recognition of this truism owes something to the fact that I had failed some O and A level exams. From this source too must come my second major given that any class of students is going to contain someone who is potentially smarter that oneself. I suspect that both these principles were subconsciously with me the first time I entered the fifth form classroom in De Aston School, Market Rasen in September 1954.

My pedagogical theory then seems to have been present from the very beginning, and so was my practice, though I was slower to acknowledge the formative influence of the biology teacher, Bernard Stevenson, in my schooldays at Kirkham Grammar School Lancashire. It was to be many years later before I came to realize that my style and classroom practice owed much to his love of the sound of English which led him to pronounce the technical vocabulary of his subject as if he were reciting Marlowe’s mighty lines – “the external morphology of an herbaceous flowering plant” was his first dramatically delivered utterance. He would also sprinkle his lessons with quotations from the Authorised Version and Shakespeare. Which is, I now think, the origin of my own love of quotation. When after several years of teaching I found myself telling my sixth form literature class that the words “appearance and reality” were written in letters of flame a mile high above the blackboard and that the answer to many a question regarding Shakespearean themes was located there, I heard again the accents and gestures of Bernard Stevenson making the same point with regard to biological concepts and the word “surface”.

Long before the realization of my debt to Bernard Stevenson, I was taught a valuable lesson by a member of the awkward squad at that small boys’ grammar school in rural Lincolnshire where I made my teaching debut. This lesson became my third criterion in my dealings with pupils. The school had a boarding house of fifty or so boys, many of whom were the sons of servicemen stationed in the airfields that dated back to the days of the great raids on Germany and occupied Europe during the Second World War. Among these boarders was a fine-looking, fair-haired stripling of fifteen, Tommy Anderson, who was generally acknowledged to be a bright lad. He was also a troublemaker. I remember him sitting towards the back of the class, across the aisle from a cheerful farmer’s son from the wolds who was as much a troublemaker as he was, but more open about it and therefore more easily dealt with. Tommy’s specialty was muttering smart-alec remarks so sotto voce that they were barely audible. His natural fluency ensured that his written work showed great promise, but it always had an offhand quality about it, as if to say, “I know what you want from me, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to oblige.” Apparently he managed in all his school subjects to get by with the minimum of effort. He might have made an ideal Jacobean malcontent, if I had broken with tradition and produced The White Devil or The Duchess of Malfi instead of the headmasterly prescribed Shakespearean play.

In those early days when educational texts were full of the polemics of nature versus nature, I was a strong partisan of education as a major determinant of individual and social change, being possessed by the idea that the New Jerusalem could be built through understanding, tolerance and the universal provision of opportunity. Animated by this spirit, I determined to pluck the brand Tommy Anderson from the burning. An occasion presented itself sometime towards the end of the first term of my first year. In addition to refereeing, umpiring and accompanying school teams to away games, one of the extra-mural duties of a master at De Aston School was the supervision of boarders’ prep from six o’clock to half past seven two or three nights a term. On one such night, I was walking down the corridor from the staff room when I met young Anderson. I cannot remember exactly what I said to him, but I must have made an offer to help him in some way, and perhaps suggested that he was always welcome to discuss any problems with me (the rumour was that his parents had just divorced). Whatever it was, it produced a caustic response from him: “I don’t need you to be my psychiatrist.” These words, which immediately revealed to me my own naïveté, became a guiding principle for the rest of my teaching career – until recently.

To be labeled a teacher’s pet was a terrible indictment when I was a schoolboy and though the vocabulary may change over time and place, the concept still carries with it the scorn of one’s peers. The corresponding sin on the part of the teacher is, of course, playing favourites. To avoid playing favourites the teacher has to recognize that liking some people and disliking others is as much a feature of the classroom as it is of any social situation. If you acknowledge this, you have a chance of discounting your personal feelings in the interest of fairness. Anderson’s remark reminded me strongly of this home truth. But it also went further than the mere avoidance of playing favourites.

By the time of the move towards comprehensive education, I had moved via the east Riding of Yorkshire to what would prove to be my last English employment in Suffolk. The problems that accompanied that radical shift in English education brought a corresponding shift in the traditional role of teachers, especially for those who came out of the grammar schools. Teachers centered in their academic disciplines were increasingly being asked to be counselors and social workers, and some teachers of English of the school of David Holbrook even went so far as to aspire to the role of psychiatrists! One example will show what I mean. In the early 1960s, the daughter of an elderly well-known man of letters was asked to write an essay with the title, “In Spite of, Not Because…” Needless to say, with the words of Tommy Anderson still ringing in my ears, I was not sympathetic to this example of Holbrookian pedagogy. Teachers of English were at that time especially prone to such practice, perhaps because their subject matter — literature and the teaching of writing — involves the affective as much as the analytic. Against this tendency I urged that teachers should leave the inner life of their students to those more competent to deal with it.

However, my sense that teachers ought to stick to what the agent noun implies – teaching, the imparting of knowledge and the development of skills – is not so doctrinaire as to overlook the fact that successful teaching involves personal relationships and that in the course of teaching the teacher is dealing with the whole range of human personality, and therefore needs to be sensitive to individual differences and difficulties. Over the years I have known one or two students who came to me in moments of personal crisis such as a bereavement or an unlooked for pregnancy. In each case, I was surprised at the confidence and had certainly not sought it. Nor would I claim that I had any expertise beyond the common ability to lend a sympathetic ear and offer advice based on my experience of coping with stress in my own life. I think of these instances as arising out of the day-to-day interactions of the classroom or other school activities such as drama and choral singing. What it is that induces a young person to turn to this teacher rather than that one is something I am not interested in investigating, but when I think of myself as a student rather than a teacher (and I have been fortunate enough to have been a formal student three times in my mature years), I know that the teachers I might have confided in were precisely those who were outstanding in what they did professionally. Such master teachers acquire disciples without trying. Two master teachers for me were Bernard Stevenson in my middle teens and Russ Hart of the English Department of the University of Massachusetts in my late fifties. The latter’s seminar on life writing made the same impact on me as Bernard Stevenson’s classes on evolution and genetics for non-scientific sixth-formers had made.

It is time to turn from distinguished teachers to distinguished students, for it is they who present a challenge to the principle of not playing favourites and make it difficult to keep the relationship purely professional. The problem exists more at the tertiary than the secondary level of education, as I have found out in the last fifteen years’ teaching in American colleges and universities.

The intensive nature of the American college system with its night classes and summer sessions attracts a considerable number of mature students, and it these that often prove to be the best and most interesting students and therefore the ones posing most threats to the objectivity of the teacher. In 1991 in the first semester of my work at the University of Southern Indiana I encountered such a mature student in my English 101 (Rhetoric and Composition: Critical Thinking) night-class. She was a woman in her late forties with children of her own at university. She came from a rural German-American community that had grown up around an opencast coalmine and, until being made redundant earlier in the year, she herself had been a miner. This fact alone was sufficient to arouse my interest. According to her own account, she had done but poorly in high school. The first essay she turned in was the work of a natural (so much for my championing of nurture!). I made one or two minor corrections of punctuation and spelling and wrote a suitably laudatory comment. When she read my comments she was astounded and stayed after class to tell me that her English teacher of many years ago had more or less said that she couldn’t write. During the course of the semester she would write essays that revealed herself to be well-informed about the world in general and well aware of the narrow prejudiced world of her own family and community. She was someone who could have become a friend. But night-class ends at a quarter to nine and she, like many another student, had a drive of more than forty miles home, so my professional integrity remained intact.

It has been otherwise in the case of Ken Webern. I first became aware of Ken three years ago when he enrolled in my Humanities 212 (The Western Tradition in the Humanities: the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century) class. This required course often presents the teacher with a roomful of students who would rather be elsewhere, but in this class I realised that there was at least one student who would get something out of it. Ken is a powerful presence, well over six feet, bulky, yet with the gait of a natural athlete, which is what he had been in his youth. He has intimidated younger teachers, but he found my Englishness congenial and responded enthusiastically to canonical texts. Since then he has taken two other courses with me, most recently, an interdisciplinary seminar on the First World War and its consequences.

I have given this course three times now, but this is the first time that the class has contained so many mature students — five out of sixteen, of whom three, including Ken, had served in combat units in Vietnam. One of the Vietnam vets is, like Ken, a natural writer. He is also orally fluent and an extrovert. A mature talented female student of the same generation as the vets was active in the anti-war protests of the sixties and early seventies. Despite the presence of good twenty-something-year old students in the class and my own efforts to encourage everyone to participate, it was inevitable that the older students dominated discussion. As may be imagined the presence of the vets in such a course made the experience memorable for me. Their identification with the soldiers of that war of my father’s generation meant that they responded with sympathy and understanding to the television documentary, literature, films and art I used in the course.

Several members of the liberal arts faculty knew the vets and so I was well informed as to their ability, as well as their personal problems. I had, of course, known Ken from previous classes. The twice-weekly class ended just before lunch. After the ten minutes or so of dealing with individual students’ questions, I would step into the corridor to find Ken in animated conversation with one of the students. He would ask me half-apologetically if I was having lunch and if so could he discuss some aspect of the work with me. Occasionally, the two other vets would join us, but usually I would lunch with Ken alone. Sooner or later the talk would turn towards his experience of the horrors of landing a helicopter on a mountain LZ (landing zone) under fire, of the fear of the dawn and the need to postpone its coming in methodical drinking. And so I learned of the drinking problem, which was in danger of destroying his marriage and which drove him to a planned suicide and ultimately to the realization that he needed psychiatric counseling. As he described how even now, thirty years later, he dreaded going to bed for with sleep came the ever-recurring nightmares, he reminded me of Edmund Blunden’s remark made in his seventies that no night came without his hearing the guns of Flanders. Not that all our conversation turned on war. We shared experiences of our early lives and noted how we both found that Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode struck similar chords and then, in response to his growing passion for the poetry of Sassoon and Owen, I broke all my own rules by giving him a copy of my favourite edition of Owen’s poetry. Worse, I suggested that I give him a reading list of non-war literature, on the theme of childhood, perhaps.

Thus it was that I realized I had made a friend of a student while — and this is the telling point — he was still a student and that Tommy Anderson might somewhere be sardonically observing my feeble efforts to play the healer.