Visceral learning

It's almost the end of the school holidays, and the thoughts of even this retired teacher turn, once more, to education. Is it my coming to the end of a job which involved setting exams for standardised testing? I don't know. But in conversation the other day I found myself stating the three most important facets of my own education - most important in that they are foundational to the me that is me now, today, the person who recognises her own strengths and is confident in the use of them and in the acknowledging of weakness in other areas.

9 yr old blethers

I learned to read long before I started school. I can remember the look of a particular book of numbers and letters to which I was devoted - and the setting of my memory makes me three years old, as my mother was in the nursing home giving birth to the sister who is three years younger than me. I can recall all too readily the excruciating boredom of listening to other children in my Primary One class struggling to read aloud to the teacher, of hating one poor girl because of her hesitant voice and the long silences between words ... syllables ... Her name was Carol. What I don't remember is being made to learn letters and words. They seem to have come to me in the daily business of living, and there was certainly no pain or resentment involved. And  by the age of seven I was reading Treasure Island.

For the last twenty years or so, I have known about poetry. That sounds very prosaic, at once sweeping and vague. But I mean I know how poetry works, why it works; I have learned how the right word in the right place can stir emotion in the reader, how a sudden shining image can transform a piece of writing - or a sermon, come to that - and I have explored these exciting possibilities in my own writing. And how did this come about? I certainly wasn't like this as a young teacher, let alone as a student at school or university. What brought about the epiphany?

I think it can only be described as a visceral need to know. Poetry, as my father's wonderful note on the subject began, poetry, like all the arts, is useless. There is no practical need for it - so it's not like basic reading skills. Somewhere along the road, however, teaching Larkin's poetry to seniors, I suddenly got it. And I have this picture of myself, on either a holiday or recovery from a sickie, sitting at the table in our dining room with three books open in front of me - the Selected Letters, Andrew Motion's A Writer's Life,  and Larkin's Collected Poems. For perhaps the first time in my life I was behaving like a real student, reading, comparing, contextualising, making notes - and all for my own enjoyment. There was no reason for this depth of study in terms of the teaching I had to do, but for the fifteen years or so after this event I was aware of the added depth, the insights I was able to share, the asides that would bring a poem to life for someone else. I did the same with the work of R.S.Thomas, buying slim volumes eagerly as they came out, even copying a whole collection laboriously by hand into a notebook when I realised it was out of print. I studied his style as it changed over the years, his subject matter, his autobiographical writings; I read both the unauthorised biography by Justin Wintle and the much more perceptive one by Byron Rogers. Two summers ago I visited two of R.S.'s parishes, and bought another small collection I'd never encountered. Two weeks ago, I re-read some of his work and was able to find the words to write another poem of my own. No purpose here, only enrichment and excitement.

The third leg of this self-motivated learning props up what I am doing at this very moment. From the day when I decided that I wanted to touch-type while my second-born infant had his afternoon nap, I was on the road to being what I am probably best known for now. I asked a friend who taught Business Studies if there was a good way to learn this skill; he gave me an old school text-book to prop up beside my portable typewriter and I started - two fingers, two hands, three fingers .... Then came the day, years later and back teaching,  when I sacked most of the pupils who could use Adobe Pagemaker and had to learn desktop publishing for myself, and my latest forays involve YouTube videos and Google+ hangouts. You could argue that there was a degree of practical necessity in there - the magazine would have died the death had I not learned to format it - but there was no compulsion for me to run it at all. It was fun, though.

And that last sentence sums the whole thing up. It was fun. It is fun. Nowadays, I'll not stick with anything that doesn't engage and absorb me. The idea of sitting for hours on uncomfortable bench seats at cramped desks listening to boring teachers talking about quadratic equations appalls me. (When did you last use a quadratic equation?) What a dreadful penance to impose on the innocent young. What did it do for me? Even in the English class I found a way to opt out and became expert at reading under the desk, where I would stash a pack of Mintolas to sweeten the experience (soft enough to swallow whole to avoid detection). Now, if we'd been exploring our own passions, I could have told you all about the vicissitudes of first century Rome - for that was an enthusiasm of my mid-teens.

And that too was fun.

An old friend rediscovered

Have you ever spent years, on and off, looking for something, becoming convinced that a malevolent guest has nicked it, or that you somehow never had it in your house in the first place, and then discovered it lurking in plain view on the bookshelf where it ought to have been all along? No. Must just be me then. The book in the picture has eluded me for ages, and now there it lies. And why would you care, do I hear you ask? Therein lies my tale - or part of it anyway.

I grew up reading this book, this very edition. It's old (published in 1937), the cloth and card cover is frayed and faded, the pages yellowing at the edges. It has a Glasgow Corporation Education Department stamp in it, but I never took it from a school - it must have been one of the many books brought home by my father to meet my insatiable demands for reading material in the days when I was always ill (and therefore stuck in bed) and devoured print voraciously. My most vivid memory is of lying propped up on one arm in bed in the tiny maid's room where I used to sleep (see post about winter, below) early on a Sunday morning, reading this and eating Pontefract Cakes. (I know - liquorice before breakfast. But it pins it down as a Sunday, for I was only allowed to buy sweets on a Saturday) The room in which I was reading means I was not yet 10 years old, for we moved house when I was 10.

So here I am, reading Conan Doyle's Sir Nigel and its prequel, The White Company (set in the period after Sir Nigel but written first) not once, but several times, in my childhood. My relatively early childhood - probably eight at the first reading. I remember that I found Sir Nigel an easier read, but that may have been the size of the print - my copy of The White Company belonged to my mother, and was printed in 1930. But having just found it, I'm reading Sir Nigel again - and marvelling. For a start, I realise how much historical knowledge I picked up from these books - and the reader isn't spared the details, or the long description, or the mediaeval ballad sung by the hero. But the main boggle is reserved for the language. Here's a wee sample:

"I am no subject of yours, proud Abbot!" he cried at last. "My house has ever been vavasor to the king. I deny the power of you and your court to lay sentence upon me. Punish these your own monks, who whimper at your frown, but do not dare to lay your hand upon him who fears you not, for he is a free man, and the peer of any save only the king himself."

No wonder I grew up with a grasp of English that I never found in my pupils. "These your own monks"! Wow! And the complexity of the syntax - and I never questioned, never faltered, for I was caught up in the story and had already fallen for Nigel - and I'm only on page 54. And randomly, from page 307, I find the sentence: "Then it was he that I heard behind us". Not much chance of mixing up subjects and objects and the anomaly of the verb "to be" after that lot, was there?

I could go on, but life calls. I must just point out that what sent me looking for this was a summer holiday in the early '90s, in Benodet on the coast of Brittany. A wet day sent us driving inland in search of the sun. We found it - in Josselin. And the name tweaked at my memory, and sent me to the Michelin guide. Sure enough, the monument to the Bataille des Trentes - if you've looked up the first link, to Wikipedia, you'll find out about this - was close by. Actually it took some finding, being stuck between two bits of motorway down a narrow lane, but it was there, and I had never really known it was real. We looked, we came home, and I went hunting the book. I couldn't find it. I don't know why or how it has returned to my shelves, but I am glad to see it.

Right glad, in fact - the language is getting to me.