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I don’t think I received a poor education, but I definitely didn’t receive a good one either. It is difficult to look back now at my times at school and try to be impartial and see things from the teacher’s perspective – at the time of course, the teachers often seemed to me to be either downright nasty and hostile or else just light years out of touch, but with hindsight I can see at least some method in their madness. Some of them were just crap teachers though.

At Rutherford we did still have the remnants of some of the old grammar school teachers (Rutherford had been a grammar school back in the day before they let scruffs like me in) and some of the older teachers had come through that system.

I remember an old Physics teacher called Mr. Moss who seemed to be very much of the old school – literally. He spoke in a particularly posh voice and always put me in mind of a retired Major or something. I just remember him being at a loss at what had become of his wonderful school – now bespoiled by all of these oiks.

Our head teacher was Miss Kirkby and she seemed aloof and distant to me. The only time I ever spoke to her was in her office in the 6th form I believe. I think I’d won some prize or other (by default really as class sizes were very small) and I got three seconds flat of her time and no sincerity whatsoever. She was another who seemed from another era and set in her ways. It’s remarkable to think that she ran the school – she was a real absentee landlord as far as I could tell. She reminded me of a little bird for some reason. I think she met the Head Boy and Head Girl (elected as Stephen Hood and Lynn Allan in my time there) and I’m not sure what went on there, but I’m guessing it was nothing either of them will recollect. One needlessly petty thing she did do was refuse to sanction our application to go onto Blockbusters! It had to be signed by her and she refused – I was forever robbed of a chance to do a Gold Run. I’m trying to remember who I applied to go on the show with, but memory fails me (I’d guess Pieter Foster or Jeff White depending on when it was).

So who were the outright bad teachers? I have to be careful not to libel anyone here I suppose, but a certain Maths teacher whose nickname was ‘The Bald Eagle’ Mr. Foster had methods of teaching that were completely mystifying to me (and a lot of others in the class). I went from being pretty good at Maths in 1st year to being clueless by the 3rd year. When our class switched to Mr. Espiner in 4th year I think he was amazed by how poorly we had been taught and he managed to drag a few of us through our O-level.  If it had not been for his intervention then I would definitely have failed.

I also remember a games teacher called Mr. Burke was almost universally unpopular. He used to really wind a lot of the boys up. I remember during games that he would insist on stopping play during football all the time and pick holes in our ‘tactics’ with gems like “stop, look what you are all doing! you are all just chasing the ball around” – wise words indeed. Like most of the games teachers, he was a rugby man. Sadly for him, most of the boys thought rugby was shit and just wanted to play football.

I’ll save most of my ire for a music teacher called Mr. Higgins. He seemed pretty old but was probably late 40s, early 50s at the time and was very distant. I think he sometimes played organ at Durham Cathedral. Anyway,  you know these days when you see footage of kids in school being engaged in music lessons and doing all kinds of interesting and fun things? Well our music lessons were nothing like that at all. We did nothing. I mean – nothing. He taught us precisely nothing in 3 years. I think the first lesson we had with him he asked if anyone could play piano and Darren Wainwright said he could and I do believe he was about the only one that old Higgins took any notice of. I can actually remember copying music down from a stave on the blackboard into our music books without being told what it was, how it sounded or why the hell we were doing it in the first place. Pointless. I love music – always have and always will. I play instruments and none of that was helped or nurtutred in any way at school by Mr. Higgins.

At least Mr. O’ Brien in 6th form did enable us to form a band and use the music block to practice in. I’m sure we made some truly shocking noises, but at least he did his job properly and compensated for Higgins.