Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

I’m just over halfway through this month’s series of postings, and I found myself flagging today. Not sure why. According to many of the UK’s newspapers, today is “Blue Monday”, the most depressed day of the year, (how can they tell?) but I’m certainly not feeling down.  I’m on my third, of four, people who have held some significance in making me who I am.  I was finding it hard to come up with the third (the fourth, I already had). I have a few great friends, lifelong friends, and there have been times when they have come into their own in their support and encouragement, and even occasionally enlightenment, but I’m going to cast back to my schooling and select one of the teachers.

It’s feels a little predictable to single out a former teacher in such a category, but I’m going to persist because at the time he was my teacher, I don’t think I had any idea of the influence he was having in the formation of me. His name was Ron Southey and he taught French at Sir Roger Manwoods Grammar School in Sandwich, Kent.  He had quite a fierce reputation in the school, but not as a tyrant (but enough to make those in the lower years more than a tad nervous on their first day in his third year class).

I suppose at the time it would have been a miracle for us to have admired him as well as respect him. Such foresight does not exist in the young. He certainly commanded obedience, though never by show of power or hysteria. He was meticulous, proper and… patient. Not only that, he knew how you were doing, and how you were struggling, and he sought to give you the right hint and the right encouragement (if you wanted it) so that you could understand. His lessons were ordered, they started and ended on time, and you were always fully engaged in them (even when, on the very rare occasion, you could bait him into talking about something else). 

It wasn’t until after I had finished at that school (French ‘O’ level just about secured) and went on to visit other classroom environments that I saw that he deserved a lot of respect for playing the long game with us. I think he would plant ideas in his teaching that he knew would only come to mature in us (if they matured at all) much later. What’s more, he was one of the very few educators I have met who took an interest in what was happening to you outside his classroom.  What else? He had, I recall, a playful interest in his subject (though it must have been hard work repeating the same curriculum year after year).

As I write this, a quick Google search has come up with a Manwoods website with one of those impossibly long black and white assembled school photos, from 1961, and there he is, even then looking unlike the other masters (many of whom, with horror, I recognise). I didn’t start going to that school until about 15 years after this photo was taken, so I’m looking at a time when people stuck at their jobs, or vocations, for life.

Aside from not being afriad to play the long game in a world (of training and education) where the demand is to be instant, what I can thank Ron Southey for is the determination to be human and retain a sense of humour even in a formal learning space. Especially in a formal learning space!