On the Loss of Teachers

It feels like I shouldn't name them like that in the title. It feels so uncovered. So I changed it.

It would have been fine to name them while they were alive. Or if not ok, something I could rationalise - but suddenly it feels like I'm trying to reanimate the dead by using their names.

But there they are.

Mr A - Year 7 History.

His classroom was a typical history classroom. His pointer of choice the 1 metre ruler, his medium: blackboard of course. He could've used whiteboard if he wanted it. But he didn't.

He loved the classic movies. Ben Hur, Cleopatra - he'd bring them up when we studied ancient societies, and tell us what was real, what was crap, how many horses were injured, how much they cost. And sometimes that would blend into a story about how he used to go to the school as a schoolboy. As if it were just a few weeks ago.

But that was near the start of his life. When he probably took those little satchel backpacks and had packed lunches and milk got delivered and teachers hit students and the school had a boarding house...but classrooms still got dusty on sunny afternoons. And he would've soaked it all up. Little Master A.

When I met him, he was in the last few years of his life, even if none of us knew it at the time.

He was quite large, and always had a cup of coffee. His voice was gravelly but very good to listen to. You'd never get bored listening to Mr A. He sometimes got angry, but that was probably because Year 7s are shits sometimes. Or maybe it was because he knew he was dying. I really don't know.

Ms M taught me what schadenfreude meant. I don't think it's because she had German heritage, that was just a coincidence. Ms M was very clever, and she always seemed very unwell too. (I wrote "but" in that sentence the first time I wrote it, and upon re-reading it seemed strange that her health should be some kind of negative qualifier to her ingelligence.)

She smoked lots, and was often away. As a Year 9 student who loved English I found it sad that she was so frequently absent and sick. I also found it sad that she didn't mark our assignments very quickly. I never got a poem I wrote about robotic train passengers back from her, and it disappointed me for a long while after.

I wanted to hear what she had to say about it. Because when she marked things (eventually), she actually commented on your work and said some things that made you realise that she was someone who really got language. And it made me sad, that she didn't mark that poem.

But you can't be sad about these things with friends, so we'd make jokes instead. She always used to say, when pressed for the return of work, "I've got your work, it's at home in a box somewhere". We would imagine impossible volumes of boxes, all stacked, teetering in her house, as she wades her way through a waist-deep pond of essays, short stories and ill-conceived acrostic poems.

I have the sudden image of my robotic passenger poem, sitting there somewhere in a mess in her house that nobody knows what to do with, marked and commented on by Mrs M, who is now dead. If that is the case, I will never know.

She retired before she died. Very shortly before. It must have been a strange moment - deciding to retire, because you know you will be dead soon. I find it hard to imagine being in that position.

And when she did retire, they ran a farewell section in the yearbook. It was the year I left, I guess. And I was struck by a moment of her, one of those marbles. It's a photo of her with a group of students from my school. She is maybe in her early thirties. She is slim, with frizzy hair, and is smiling in an open-mouthed laughing kind of way. The students around her are smiling too. The strangest part though, is that they are in casual clothes, in front of a curtain. I do not think it is at school. But I think they are her students. There's something I find very beautiful about the photo. Not just because everyone seems happy, but because the idea of the students having some kind of party (a bottle of Solo announces itself in the corner) with Ms M, and everyone there being happy, seems like a really great moment.

Ms M told the class once that when she first arrived at the school, there was a big problem with misogyny amongst the staff. She told us that it had caused her to have a nervous breakdown and triggered a bout of serious depression. I wonder if she felt that around the moments when that photo was taken. I wonder also when she started smoking.

The biography in the yearbook says that she worked at the Curriculum and Research Branch as the German Consultant for Victoria for a couple of years before becoming a teacher. I wonder when she last thought about the two years she worked there. I wonder if she thought about it before dying, and what kind of significance they played in her overall life.

I do not think she was married. I wonder whether she nearly was, and whether her life would have changed if things had worked out differently. She might be alive, teaching, or running an advertising firm in Berlin. Nobody knows.

Most of all, I feel sad that she died as an adult who should have been only a little past middle aged. I found an analysis of a text she wrote, looking at a piece of Australian gothic literature and the gender power relations described within it. It is about a lot of oppression and fear.

I think that Ms M felt this for some of her life. She told us she did. But I really hope that there were more moments like in that photo. Because that's the point of those moments. They're there, someone back however many years, and in whichever location. If you go there, you would find that moment when Ms M was happy. And so that's why I love the photo I have of her.

And why I'm determined to make sure that I have more of those moments in my life.

And finally, I reach this point.

I realise the things I knew and didn't know about Ms M. The things I will never know - what was her favourite dessert?

But I realise I knew more than I first thought, and in my way I did know Ms M. And so finally I can greet her death with more than the automatic sadness for a sickly English teacher. I can cry for her.