Forty years later, I can say thanks Mr O’Rourke, this one is for you

One of the more interesting effects of the Covid pandemic is the way it seems to have set people thinking about those who influenced their lives in some way, to the extent they want to reconnect even if they haven’t met for decades.

Chief among them appear to be teachers. On Twitter, author Matt Haig announced the publication of his latest novel, The Midnight Library, by tweeting: ‘When I was a teenager with low self-esteem, I nervously showed my English teacher Mrs Kerswell some of my fantasy stories and she told me I had to keep writing them. Thanks, Mrs Kerswell. This one is for you.’

Earlier this week, lawyer, writer and podcaster Raifa Rafiq told how she had found her own English teacher on Twitter and was pondering whether or not to get in touch for fear the teacher would not remember. ‘I’ve always wanted to find her and thank her because, gosh, I love her,’ she wrote, adding that the teacher had changed the course of her life.

The teacher, Jenny Thompson, actually saw this and made a pre-emptive move. ‘Let me message you first to say I loved you way more than you could ever have loved me — you changed MY life. I am so proud of who you are but it is also no surprise to me — you were born to change the game.’

There followed hundreds of messages from people naming the teachers who shaped their lives, the ones who turned them on not just to English but to maths and science and history, or even just to the simple joy of learning, of being inquisitive, of questioning everything and doing proper research.

We sadly now live in a world where opinion is deemed more important than fact, and if the fact doesn’t align with bias, it is rejected. Remember Michael Gove’s line before the Brexit referendum, when he said people in the UK ‘have had enough of experts’? That, of course, is utter nonsense, and there was a time when we looked up to experts and trusted peer-reviewed science.

And I wonder if that’s because when you had a good teacher, you thought of him or her as an expert, maybe the first you ever had personal contact with, and this relationship gave you the building blocks not just of education but of trust, too.

It probably will come as little surprise that my own inspirational teacher taught English. His name is Pacelli O’Rourke, and he took us to Inter Cert before we had a change of teacher for the Leaving, and I worshipped him.

Every time I wrote an essay, all I wanted was his approval and, unlike many teachers, he wrote detailed notes in the margins, telling me what he liked and what he didn’t.

At no stage did he try to impose a writing style on me, and he never once chided me for what in retrospect was a very active imagination that often took me on a very surreal journey even in an essay about something relatively bland.

Most importantly, his encouragement made me believe I could be a journalist, even when I doubted myself, because as a council house kid, I didn’t know any journalists and assumed it was a profession only for the middle classes.

He and the career guidance teacher, a Scotsman called Frank Boyle, pushed me to follow my dream: next June, I will have been working in newspapers for 40 incredibly satisfying years (don’t panic — I started out on work placement in the Sunday World at just 17, because we all left school much earlier back then!) that saw me travel the world to places my 14-year-old self never would have thought possible.

So, yes, good teachers are vital, the single most important adults in your life outside of your family, and when you get a good one, it is a blessing that can inspire you, mould you, and make you better.

I’m glad people are using these testing times to look back, and to appreciate what was given to us, and maybe even what we now can give in return.

I have long believed that investment in education is the single greatest driver of prosperity, and that lifting children out of disadvantage by arming them with the knowledge and the social skills to achieve their potential is, alongside proper healthcare, the most fundamental duty of the State.

I was very lucky to be influenced by a wonderful man. So, yes, Mr O’Rourke — this one is for you.