How To Save A Life 🎶 

(For the teachers) 

Most of you will probably have heard the popular song ‘How To Save A Life’, written by The Fray in 2005. The song won many awards and also featured on the hospital drama series, Grey’s Anatomy. What you may not know is that the writer and frontman, Isaac Slade, is a personal friend of our family and actually spent time living with us for part of one summer in Scotland. It is reported that the lyrics to this song stem from his experience as a mentor working at a camp for troubled teens and his endeavour to steer and support someone through tough times. 

As I’ve been reflecting on parts of my younger life lately and also on my life’s subsequent direction, I come back to a pivotal point. A pivotal person. My primary school teacher in P.5 who was integral in shaping the trajectory of my life. 

I started school In Hertfordshire when I was four years old. We lived down south for two or three years. So my school life began at the Sacred Heart Convent in Hitchen. We weren’t Catholic – the school accepted pupils from all faiths or none. I remember wearing my little brown felt hat and blazer and white gloves as part of the uniform in winter and then a brown and white striped dress in the summer term. The teachers were nuns and I do recall their extreme strictness. When I was five I got in trouble for something minor once and felt that the level of discipline meted out to me was as if I’d murdered someone! That was my ‘little self’ interpretation anyway. It made me feel so bad about myself, and like I would never be able to be accepted by God again. (Thankfully that turned out not to be true- but that’s another story). To put it in context, we were playing mummies and daddies at playtime and I had tapped someone on the backside as they had been a naughty little boy. I expect I was just modelling what I had known as a consequence of being disobedient at home. Nothing more sinister than that. Anyway, that’s my lasting memory of that first school experience. 

We then moved north and I went to Cults primary school for two years. Another change. This time the uniform was green. The main stumbling block there was my ‘English’ accent. Aberdeen was not as cosmopolitan in those days. I got on fairly well and made friends relatively easily, mainly with boys for some reason. 

Then another house move meant I had to change school yet again. Not an easy thing – everything and everyone was new to me for a third time in 5 years. This time I was enrolled into P.5 at Craighill primary school in Kincorth. But this was where I flourished thanks to an amazing, vibrant, newly qualified young teacher. I can honestly say she changed the course of my whole life. 

We began each day with an exercise such as observing the sky (the cloud shapes, colours etc) and then writing about what we saw and how it made us feel. Possibly an exercise in free self expression, even though we didn’t know it. We ended each day with the teacher reading us a story as we rested our heads on the desks. Doctor Doolittle was a favourite. As was Treasure Island. The class projects she dreamt up were so imaginative. We studied Africa and also Australia during the few years together. There was nothing conventional about the way we learned about these continents tho. She made them come alive. They were immersive experiences. We made scrolls with burnt edges, giving the maps an authentic detailed look, reimagining how Captain James Cook navigated his way on the Pacific Ocean. We learned African songs and words. Those were wonderful years. We had class outings- one was a very early morning (6am) visit to the Aberdeen Fish Market and Museum that she’d arranged through various contacts she had. We watched the bartering and felt the slimy fish in their boxes and practiced weaving the rough nets. We interviewed fishermen and wrote up our scribbled notes once back at school. I found a love of creative writing and poetry during those years too. She really cared about her pupils and seemed to invest her life into nurturing us. She gave so much of herself to us. I was fortunate in the respect that she even continued to encourage me and another friend through secondary school by recommending books to read and just generally being interested in our progress. Her husband was a secondary school English teacher which helped. I remember her giving me a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus and also Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and 1984 by George Orwell. This was in 1975- well before Big Brother was known as a TV reality show! Her intent was to keep us reading and discovering the richness of language and imagination. She helped us get ahead of the curve and was an amazing mentor well after I left her care in primary school. 

Fast forward 30 years to 2005 and I had the surprise and delight of meeting her again. This time as her doctor! She told me how proud of me she was and that she still had kept some of my old class jotters from 1970. That brought a tear to my eye. I was able to thank her for the massive influence she had been in my life. It was a lovely reunion. 

I heard a story recently where a school class exercise was to complete the sentence;

‘ I wish my teacher knew…’ Some very interesting, illuminating and sometimes heartbreaking answers came forth. Not sure if that kind of thing would be allowed nowadays but I think many dedicated teachers do sense and know what may be going on unspoken in a child’s life. 

Teachers play such an important role in the lives of their pupils that reaches far beyond the subject-matter taught. So much is about the energy and life they give to the material but also in their power to instil self-confidence and self-worth into their pupils. At times they may even be the only source of encouragement and, dare I say, expression of nurturing love in a little person’s world. Let’s value and respect the wonderful job they do. In this troubled world they can literally help to save a life.