Why every pupil needs oddball teachers like my opera-singing maths master

HOW we used to collapse into puerile sniggers when Dr Sanger, the irascible Austrian head of modern languages at Westminster School in the late Sixties, would yell at any boy who stumbled into his classroom during a lesson: ‘Get out! Get out! Can’t you see I’m having a period?’

He was always coming out with such gems, which we would gleefully repeat to each other behind his back, in our best attempts at his Viennese accent.

At the time, we thought we were laughing at him, rather than with him. But with the wisdom of my 62 years, I realise his double- entendres were almost certainly deliberate and the joke was really on us.

An accomplished linguist, he was quite as aware as his smut-loving teenage pupils of the various meanings of the English word ‘period’. He delivered his Sangerisms on purpose to amuse us, and so to keep our attention.

After all, if we were listening out for a phrase we could store up for our Dr Sanger impressions later on, the chances were that we might also pick up something about the subject he was teaching. Generally, the trick worked.

Another such cultivated eccentric at Westminster was my late and much-lamented English master, Jim Cogan, who addressed us in a language all of his own.

Where more conventional teachers might ask us to hand in our homework and concentrate, Mr Cogan would say: ‘Slide your scripts down the aisle, lads, and pin back those lugholes.’

Thus he, too, kept our attention in lessons, as we were all ears for peculiar phrases to parrot and mock after school.

Then there was Theo Zinn, the veteran head of classics, a great shaggy-haired bear of a man who spoke fluent Latin and Ancient Greek (and also, as I was to learn only after his death last year, Russian, Hebrew and Japanese).

As his obituarist movingly put it: ‘Small boys just out of prep school, accustomed to think of Latin as a higher species of crossword puzzle, on hearing Theo’s mesmerically theatrical renditions of chunks of the Aeneid or Horace’s invocation of Mount Soracte, understood for the first time this was great literature.’

Certainly, Theo’s infectious love of Latin poetry had that effect on me. But by any standards, he was a strange chap.

I still carry a vivid mental picture of him, with tears streaming down his cheeks as he recited from memory the passage from Virgil’s Aeneid Book II in which Pyrrhus drags Priam, King of Troy, trembling and slipping in a pool of his own son’s blood, to his gory death on the altar of Zeus.

Would I have remembered Priam’s fate, almost 50 years on, if it hadn’t been for Theo’s tears? No chance.

Most schools boast one or two oddball teachers, whose quirks stick in their pupils’ minds for the rest of their days. But I reckon that those I attended had more than their fair share. I think of the maths master who used to sing snatches of Italian opera while he was writing equations on the blackboard. And the ancient teacher who dressed every day in striped trousers and spats, as if fashions hadn’t moved on since the death of Edward VII.

Come to think of it, the late headmaster of Westminster, John Carleton — universally known and, indeed, referred to by himself as ‘Coot’ — was pretty odd, too. He used to swap city suits for country tweeds whenever he ventured north of Hyde Park, believing such areas as Islington were out of town.

Now, I’m not denying for a minute that the great academic success of schools such as mine, with their ruinously expensive fees, is attributable in large measure to their strict selection policies and the privileged backgrounds of most pupils.

But it has often struck me that Westminster’s place at the top of the exam league tables may have had a lot to do with the rich assortment of weirdos on the staff.

This brings me, at last, to my point. For one man who also believes eccentricity and a touch of theatricality can be valuable assets in the profession is the Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw.

This week, he told a leadership conference at fee-paying Bedales in Hampshire that ‘ broken’ state schools needed more teachers who were ‘flamboyant, colourful and, yes, downright strange’.

He went on: ‘We need extraordinary people. We need our awkward squad. The independent sector has always had them — our state system needs more of them.’

Himself a former grammar school pupil, he said that three of the best teachers who had ever taught him ‘put on an act’ to get children to respect them.

‘All three of these teachers were very different people. But they were all as tough as hell.

‘They all exuded authority and they all had a fierce moral conviction that all children, especially the poorest, deserved the best education — and woe betide anyone who got between them and that mission.’

Of course, there are still plenty of teachers in the state sector who fit Sir Michael’s description. I think in particular of a highly theatrical, inspirational woman who taught our sons at their state primary.

At the parents’ evening when I first met her, I asked her if she thought our then ten-year-old’s spelling was all right.

‘All right?’ she gasped, with all the surprise, disgust and incredulity of Dame Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell delivering that famous line in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest: ‘A handbag????’

‘His spelling is terrible!’ she said. ‘It’s atrocious! It’s a disgrace!’

I could have thrown my arms around her and hugged her. I’d long been appalled by the boy’s spelling, but every teacher I’d asked until then had told me it was average for his age and nothing to worry about.

Indeed, before this young woman took him in hand, his homework used to be returned with none of his mistakes corrected, while the only mark made by his teacher would be a smiley face in red ink at the bottom of his work.

This new teacher changed all that, laboriously underlining every mistake he made and listing the correct spellings at the bottom of each page for him to copy and learn.

I reckon it owes much to her, and to her theatrical performances in the classroom, that he is now an excellent speller — and aged 29, he is a state school English teacher himself.

But if Sir Michael is correct and eccentrics are, indeed, too few and far between in the state sector, we needn’t look far for the reasons.

One must be the spread of political correctness, with its insistence that all must have prizes and teachers should at all costs avoid hurting pupils’ feelings.

Indeed, I wonder how long David Cameron’s favourite schoolmaster at Eton would have survived in today’s state sector. Described as an engaging eccentric, history teacher Michael Kidson was famous for his insults to pupils.

For example, he dismissed a Scottish boy as a ‘Hebridean cave-dweller’, while telling a young Etonian of Welsh extraction: ‘I make every allowance for your nationality, but this is really not good enough.’

How would that have gone down with today’s PC brigade?

He was pretty scathing about young Cameron, too, describing the future Prime Minister’s top grade in his history A-level as ‘among the most inexplicable events in modern history’.

But the lion’s share of the blame for killing off oddball teachers must surely lie with successive governments and their increasingly bureaucratic demands of the profession.

With all the boxes they must tick on the national curriculum, and all the tests they must teach to, how are today’s teachers expected to find time to pass on their private enthusiasms and inspire those in their charge?

If we treat the profession like a branch of the civil service, is it any wonder if the colour is draining from our classrooms?

Eccentric

Scathing