Being a teacher isn’t like building a bridge, more like driving a train
I taught as me, as Cam Wyllie, Waz, Willy, Cammy Chameleon, Slim and finally Mr Wyllie, and I do not think that whatever skills I developed would be easily imitated by others. As a senior teacher I watched lots of great lessons being taught by teachers of every subject, and never once thought that they were teaching like I taught; I was often left openmouthed in admiration of the skills on display, skills which I completely lacked. I have never, ever, done a Powerpoint presentation.
However, one great universal truth for all of us in teaching is that, almost without exception, no one day, no one lesson, matters that much. The brain surgeon sneezes with the scalpel in his hand – not good. The lawyer adds a zero in a will – not good. The minister of religion forgets the name of the deceased; the electrician rewires badly; the policeman restrains someone too forcibly... in teaching, the benefits, or the damage, come over an extended period. If you are feeling unwell one day, the kids can sit and read; if you lose a set of essays it doesn’t really matter (having said that, on Princes Street one day, a man came up to me and asked for his Hobbit essay back, which I had failed to return 22 years earlier).
Of course, the impact of a good teacher – or a bad one – is huge over a longer period of time and, very occasionally, a teacher will say something or teach a particular lesson that a young person will always remember. But mainly it is a long hard slog by teacher and student together. No one day, no one lesson.
Teaching is not like building a bridge, which you can then admire in your dotage. It’s more like driving a train back and forth from Edinburgh to Glasgow for 40 years and then retiring, except that the passengers, some fleetingly, and sometimes forever, remember the driver’s name.
My life has not been much of a geographical journey as I have always lived and worked in lovely Edinburgh. It is a journey of people, young, old, dead, exuberantly alive, and it is a journey of which I do not regret a single moment.