How a teacher’s rebuke taught me to stop apologising
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Version 0 of 1. I can’t even remember his name. He was a student teacher on whom the second year of Lydgate middle was being inflicted. This would have been in 1975. Lydgate middle school had only just been built and was a four-winged construction of loose open spaces with only the occasional enclosed classroom. There often seemed to be observers around, even in those pre-Ofsted days. Now I could reconstruct the sorts of questions being raised about learning environments, open-plan spaces, flow and exchange. The school was an object of interest. Related: Teachers' bad behaviour – what are your worst school memories? | Open thread The student teacher gave the impression of being slightly older than the usual, and less giddily nervous. (Even nine-year-olds knew all about student teachers.) I think he had dense black hair, a very white face and a staring look as if out to sea, like a midshipman 10 hours into his watch. He took command immediately. The gift he gave me was a sentence – peremptory, decisive, and significant only to me. He would not have remembered saying it an hour later. I’ve never been at all good with my hands, and a craft lesson was not something I ever expected to be good at. A pottery lesson was spent making coil pots. I could see how it was done; everyone around me seemed to me doing all right; but mine was strangely collapsing. I gave up. Everyone else had made a jar; I had somehow made a flattish sort of thing with half-inch sides. An ashtray, possibly. We had to go and present it to our student teacher for advice or approval. I stood in the queue with a friend, chatting. “Mine’s awful,” I said sociably. “It’s just really bad.” I was only speaking to my friend, but the student teacher at the front of the queue had heard. “Well, then,” he said, “go back and do it again if it’s no good.” Childhood, I think, is filled with moments of horrible embarrassment. He was perfectly serious – so serious he didn’t expect to have to repeat himself. I extracted myself from the queue, went back to the workbench, and tried again. Of course it was still awful – I could never have made a pot. The sentence was a peremptory gift of insight, however, and afterwards I was saved from something that people take years or decades to discover. There is no point in denigrating what you make or what you do. When people say, “Oh, what I’ve done is awful,” what they are saying is, “I insist that you admire me.” The statement is disastrous. It demands a comment to the contrary, and yet it provides a basis for its own truth. I came to think that if you say, about something that you have just done, “Oh, it just isn’t very good,” as so many people do, your disavowal spreads backwards in time. When you set your hands to the clay, they wish to make it shrug, in disaster, so that you may convincingly shrug modestly about your poor efforts. Apologies get into the bones. The cook at a dinner table has put a dish on the table, saying in a customary way, “It’s terrible, I’m so sorry,” and one has had to think, “Yes, it is. And you made it like that.” Not to apologise is the truly modest attitude; to do whatever you can and present it with a smile and no further comment. Related: Yes, teachers ought to inspire, but they can't work in isolation| Will Hutton The first time I heard the precept “never apologise, never explain” was with a shock of decent truth. I don’t think it’s arrogant. Rather, I think it permits other people to think what they are going to think anyway. These days, I teach people how to write. Some of them come from places where they have been unable to do what they want, and have almost no confidence. The very first thing that I say to people in these circumstances is: “The rule is this: you must not apologise for your work at any point.” It liberates them. They always thought it was all right to come and say “This isn’t very good” – because what they have written is not very good, because they themselves don’t amount to much. Take that burden away from people and they can do anything. So I’m grateful for that gift. It certainly didn’t stop me from failing. It didn’t ensure that what I made would always be perfect. But someone who said “Don’t apologise; make something that you don’t need to apologise for” liberated my mind. It wasn’t compulsory, after all, to fail at something in order to be friends with others. The best approach to life is not to be cosy with the other doubters of self in a long and patient queue, wet clay collapsing in the spreading, hapless hands. Philip Hensher’s novels include The Mulberry Empire, The Northern Clemency and The Emperor Waltz |