‘Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la Mar…’
Antonio Machado
To teach or not to teach? That is no longer the question…
I am honoured to have been asked by David to contribute to ‘Other Peoples Flowers’ on his website, so please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jeff Teasdale and I have known David for many years, although exactly when our paths first crossed is a mystery lost in time to both of us. It was probably initially on one of the teachers’ courses that Cheshire LEA (Local Education Authority) was so good at providing in the 1970s and which took place in very special places like Cheshire’s Canolfan Conwy Centre on Anglesey/Ynys Môn or at Bangor University. In such environments, away from the hurly burly of the classroom, left behind in the exhaust(ed) Friday night fumes of what is now the westward-bound A55, the environment for stimulus in the creative subjects was established, and was supported by a sympathetic and very human Director of Education, John Tomlinson. In those halcyon days we also had independent people called Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools (HMIs), who were knowledgeable, generous with their time, and helpful, and certainly not intimidating as their successors seem to be today. Such background support to our work in the classroom with students was – and remains so – essential to the well-being of education, both for its teachers and its children. Sadly little of that ethos exists anywhere in this country now, and I think David would agree that our years then and ‘in the thick of it’, were possibly the best years ever to have been working in education, and especially in places like Cheshire.
Prior to that though, I had had no aspirations to become a teacher. With the award of a degree in Fine Art delayed at Newcastle University because of the promise of becoming 1969’s Hatton Scholarship Student for the next year, the rug was pulled from under me in May by, of all funding bodies, Cheshire Education Committee itself. This was the first time a local authority had reneged on their fund-matching a promise since 1929. So, with my plans in ruins around me like Giotto’s earthquake-ravaged chapel in Assisi, and after an intervening job on a building site in Alderney, I went for an interview to teach English in Sweden, this to at least be with my girlfriend who had, being an essential part of the Newcastle Plan, by then reluctantly moved back home. The interview went very well, until I discovered the job was in an iron-ore mining town in Lapland, whereas she lived in the deep south of Sweden. In fact, it would have been easier commuting to see her from Manchester than from the mines in the Land of the Summer Midnight Sun – and its corresponding Winter Midday Moon. So, my teaching career did not lyrically begin in Lapland.
It did begin however – potentially somewhere somewhat less lyrical – in Wythenshawe. On the way back from that interview I had passed by the offices of Manchester Education Committee, which ironically had agreed to fund the Hatton Scholarship in my place to a friend. Elaine and I had unknowingly lived only five miles apart while at school, she on the Manchester side of the River Mersey in East Didsbury, and me on the other side in Cheshire. That’s how random one’s future apparently was: decided on the whim of a bureaucrat working at a desk in the dark recesses of a County Hall. Walking towards the Education Offices, I had reasoned that if I could get a job teaching English in Sweden, I could get one teaching it in England. By the time I was at the reception desk, the English had been replaced by Art in my head, so I asked to see the Art Inspector, John Waddington, for whom I had done some paintings for a local college bistro whilst at Sixth Form. What followed was what he described as being… “… The most bizarre job interview I have ever been involved in…”… Essentially, while I was drinking tea in his office he was on the phone to a head teacher in a school, and the first question over the desk was… “He asks if you can play football?”… Affirmative… “He now asks if you can be in Wythenshawe by three o’clock?”… Again, affirmative… “Well, congratulations Jeff, you’ve got a job. You’re playing on the staff team at 3.30 and teaching art tomorrow morning”… John lent me ten quid for a pair of boots and some apparently ‘”essential shin pads’” – this was a “needle match” against the school first team and ‘”here would be scores to settle”. So, I jumped on a bus to Wythenshawe, danced over some vicious scything tackles with ease out on the left wing only inches from a baying-for-blood school audience uncontained behind a slack rope, and I was teaching art at nine o’clock the next morning.
Within two minutes of starting work for the four weeks involved in a job that I had only intended to take in order to earn a bit of cash to pay my fare to southern Sweden (probably one-way and going there for good), I found I was engaged in something that I wanted to spend the rest of my working life doing. I loved every minute of it. After four weeks at Brookway High School, I became John Waddington’s ‘Emergency Supply Art Teacher’, working in spa towns like Ancoats, Beswick, Ardwick and Levenshulme – in fact, any place I could easily get a bus to by eight in the morning with my ‘art teaching kit’. I razor-honed my craft very rapidly, having a sense of humour being the most effective tool in my arsenal.
After two years back in Wythenshawe – why would I want to teach art anywhere else? – I began teaching in Cheshire, and eventually met David properly, two schools later, in a project called TVEI, and although enthusiasm-sapping as ‘Technical and Vocational Education Initiative’ may sound, it just meant that the creative risk-taking that had been the roller-coaster bedrock of my career to date, could rise to another and county-wide level.
It’s all in my book… chapters of which will be eventually appearing in my new and under-development website.
In the meantime, what follows are a few snippets – a small bouquet of flowers from the equivalent in size of RHS Bridgwater – of what will be on there.
- PDF 2. An extract from ‘Messages in Bottles’
- PDF 3. Building a wall_ a creative journey
- PDF 4. Pentre Gwyddel Interlude
- PDF 5. From ‘Scandinavian Sagas’_ A hike up the Sami Holy Mountain
The rest will appear on my new website, currently under re-construction for this purpose…
… and David will let you know when that is ready.
In the meantime….
This is where it begins…
‘…The bearer of these gifts is a young man called Michelangelo… Treat him with kindness and he will produce work which will make the whole world gaze in wonder…’
We exist in two worlds; that world which exists for all of us whether we, as individuals, exist or not and in this image is represented by the Tuscan landscape in front of the student.
The second world is that which exists only for us, in this case the painting between that landscape and us, the viewer, and over which she, the young artist, is layering her own patch of personal and internal sunlight…
…and which is totally unique to her.
By David Selzer