There were lots of good teachers at my old school. It seems to happen that we look back at teachers and various other figures who (generally speaking) tried to help us out when we were young, and realise that we didn’t appreciate them as much as we do now. That’s probably natural — it’s hard to realise you’re being offered a good deal until you’ve had the experience of being offered other ones, or not being offered them at all.

Despite that, there were a few teachers who, even at the time, we knew were something special. One of them was Mark Richardson, who is an English teacher at Beverley Grammar School, a state comprehensive near Hull. He had such a clear idea of what the point of studying English was that the question of its relevance or otherwise seemed barely to make sense. Literature wasn’t something that had to be mangled and picked at in order to connect to our lives. Instead, what we did in lessons was to talk about how the world was and what it was like to live in it; and it’s important to point out that children do that a lot anyway, possibly more than most people. Mark knew this and he knew that by its nature, literature is the most important and valuable guide there can be to that discussion.

There are a couple of links to share. The first is a video made by Mark about the recent history of the school through the eyes of its outgoing headmaster Chris Goodwin (who, from what I’ve seen of the documentary, merits a thousand blog posts of his own). The second is a resources blog for his lessons, which is excellent reading for everyone, perhaps especially people who no longer have, or have never had, the benefit of going to Mark’s lessons three times a week. Both have been doing the rounds on Facebook, circulated by the many people who saw the deal that Mark Richardson was offering them and knew it was special. Cheers.

Update — this video that I dug out from Mark’s blog (made by a friend of his working with kids from another school in Hull) is too good not to share: http://vimeo.com/15328356