Education and Learning

The teacher I want to talk about is my secondary school maths teacher — we all called her Miss B, because her full surname was a bit of a mouthful. She taught me for two years, when I was about fourteen and fifteen, which was exactly the point when I'd decided I was simply bad at maths and there was no point trying. What made her different was the way she treated mistakes. Most teachers would mark something wrong and move on, but she'd put your error up on the board — anonymously — and the whole class would work out together where the thinking had gone off track. It sounds terrifying, but she made it feel completely safe, almost like solving a puzzle. She also refused to accept 'I can't do it'. You were only allowed to say 'I can't do it yet', which sounds like a tiny thing, but when you're fifteen it genuinely changes how you see yourself. By the end of that second year I'd gone from dreading her lessons to looking forward to them. Her influence has gone way beyond maths, to be honest. I didn't end up in a mathematical field, but I stopped being scared of looking stupid, and that's shaped almost everything since — putting my hand up in lectures, asking the obvious questions in my first job, even learning to drive later than most people. Whenever I hit something difficult now, I can still hear her saying 'yet'. I think the real mark of a great teacher is that you carry their voice around years later, and hers is the voice I carry.