Jaki Moody
A teacher who made a difference
The teacher who made a difference to me was Mr James, who taught me when I was in Year 5 and 6 at the village primary school in the late 1960s. Having the same teacher for two consecutive years could have been a disaster for some children, but not if that teacher was Mr. James.
I had always had books to read at home, and belonged to the local library as well as an additional library in the nearest town, but my choices were not challenged either by what I was introduced to at school, or by what had been read to me at home. All that changed in Year 5 and 6!
We listened to a poetry programme on the radio each week, sometimes following the written texts and always talking about what we had heard and learning poetry to recite. I can still recite poetry learned then, so in many ways those poems and their writers have been my friends for almost as long as I can remember. We read playscripts, taking on a role and sometimes performing to each other within our own class.
Every day I looked forward to the next episode in the class novel Mr. James was reading to us. Sometimes we read round the class, but I preferred it when his voice took me to a different place and sometimes a different time, as when he read us Ian Serraillier’s Silver Sword. I can still feel the frisson, a mixture of excitement and terror, that each event in the story evoked. I think I modelled the way I read to children in classes I have taught, and to my own sons, on the way he read to us, stopping at a cliff-hanger so we were desperate for story time the next day to arrive.
One year Mr James wrote on my report, ‘Jacqueline spends much of her time with her head inside her desk, where she usually has a book secreted’.
Mmm, now I wonder who we could blame for that then?!
