Today Is “World Teachers’ Day”

As some of you may know, today is designated by UNESCO as World Teachers’ Day and this got me to thinking about some of the teachers who were influential during my own education.

Obviously many individuals and groups play an important role in the education of any one person, but every now and again one of them stands stands out as really making a difference in someones life.

For me it is my High School Computer Studies teacher. My High School was St. Wilfrid’s in Blackburn, Lancashire, not a wealthy or well resourced school by any stretch.

During the mid 80s when I was attending the school computers that could be used by individuals were still a pretty new concept, and the availability of skills that could teach students anything about them was probably a tough challenge for any school.

My school (St. Wilfrid’s Church of England High School in Blackburn, Lancashire) stepped up though, with the limited resources available, and a small number of existing teachers who had an interest in the field became the part time computer studies department.

My computer studies teacher was a chap by the name of Mr. Abell (Roger Abell, I later came to learn). Previously I had known him as a Physical Education teacher, a class that those who know me can probably guess that I didn’t have much interest in, and as a result the relationship with my new teacher kicked off with a pretty rough start given my lack of interest in things he had previously tried to teach me.

Outside of school I loved tinkering with computers, an uncle of mine worked for IBM at the time and turned up on the occasional weekend with early XTs and the like, I would write simple games and other programmes in Basic, I’m not sure I fully understood what I was doing, but I enjoyed it all the same.

What Roger Abell did for me was to bring my passion for tinkering together with the knowledge that he had obviously gone out of his way to gather around this emerging field. He taught me about Boolean logic, binary math, the role of the micro-processor, early development language skills and so on.

Most importantly, he gave me a grounding in computer science that I still draw on today, managing to give me a new level of understanding of the tinkering that I enjoyed so much along with a set of skills that I still use some twenty years later.

So Roger, I owe you a great deal for the commitment that you showed to a very complex and young field, and for the skills and the time that you put forwards in working with your students. I’m pretty sure I was a very frustrating student, but I was listening!

For all of that I am very grateful! Thank you.