I love it on Desert Island Discs when a castaway mentions the schoolteacher who spotted them and suggested they might apply to university. A quiet word at the end of class, or to parents on parents’ day, can change a life.
And it’s usually not the relentlessly cheerful teachers who become our favourites. It’s the rigorous ones, sometimes melancholic by nature, who demand and expect high standards. Young people respond to that rigour and treasure it.
This is why it’s all the more poignant to read that Taylor Swift’s favourite schoolteacher, Kirk Schwabe, died of cancer on Swift’s wedding day last Friday, at the age of 69.
A ruddy-cheeked former Chicago police officer with a moustache, Schwabe taught criminal justice at Henderson High School in Nashville, Tennessee. Swift later said: “It was the most exciting class I ever took”.
As well as inspiring his students with methods for solving real-life crimes (what a great, non-soporific school subject!), Schwabe kept an eye on his musically gifted pupil, whose star-potential he’d spotted from day one.
He had a brisk word with the gang who were bullying her, putting an end to their vile campaign. From sorting out such small-scale schoolyard situations, it was a short hop to his quitting his job as a schoolteacher and becoming Swift’s full-time security guard in 2009, when her career took off.
Not many of us can claim that our favourite schoolteacher gave up teaching to become our security guard. But many of us certainly hope that, in their understated way, our favourite former teachers are quietly keeping an eye on us for as long as they, or we, live: “following our progress with keenest interest”, as they might have put it in our final school report.
I invited one of my former schoolteachers to my wedding: Mr Wright, who taught me German so well at Dover College that to this day I can recite the list of prepositions that take the dative. He didn’t die, fortunately, and could attend.
And I’m still in touch with three other favourite teachers: Mr Townsend (English at Dover College), and Mr Pragnell and Mr Dobbin (art history and English at The King’s School, Canterbury).
It would seem wrong, even now as an adult, to call them by their first names instead of “Mr”. The seemly student-teacher distance is maintained for life. All four achieved the feat of teaching their subject with real thoroughness, while simultaneously opening our eyes and ears to a vast hinterland of European culture. I thank them every day of my life.
In the 1970s and 1980s, teachers seemed to stay in post for decades. Now we live in a time of endless churn, as teachers constantly leave to go up the career ladder. This high turnover was the new form of “death of teachers” from which my own children suffered: not physical death, but sudden departure – which feels like a version of death, because the teacher vanishes off the face of the earth, and is usually replaced by someone much less good.
If you’ve been through either of those – the genuine death of your favourite teacher, or the grief of having to carry on at the school from which your favourite teacher has departed, you’ll empathise with Swift’s sadness at the news of Schwabe’s death.
But at least Schwabe died knowing she was grateful to him, and she knew that he treasured her in return. This teacher-pupil story should remind us all to tell our brilliant former teachers how much they meant to us – and to hope they might return the compliment.