My husband and I live in the south of France. We are now long retired and enjoying it, but every now and again past memories intrude on the present, especially those with no closure. It happens to us all and leaves an incomplete hollow feeling of helplessness and inadequacy.

I had always regarded myself as a good teacher who related well to pupils of all abilities and ages. However, the most amazing, engaging and relevant series of lessons I ever observed was taught by a mature student teacher with a Ph.D. in mathematics who earned his living as a taxi driver. That was in the early nineteen nineties, and to my shame I can’t recall his name.

I was the head of science at an inner city Roman Catholic 11-16 secondary school at the time, and he was an unabashed atheist who was interested in religion in an abstract way. The lessons I’m referring to combined physics way beyond GCSE, mathematics, computing, art, poetry and religious studies.

The class was a difficult year eleven top set who had an Easter religious studies project to produce as part of their GCSE course work. He’d been given the class because their usual science teacher was off sick for six months with stress, and he’d expressed interest in taking a science class. All the staff expected him to survive the class, for he was of robust personality, but none expected him to manage the class. That he would have them in the palm of his hand was not even considered by any one.

With his background and qualifications I knew he would be able to teach any science to well beyond GCSE, so I’d explained what I would like him to teach: the elementary physics of alternating current electricity.

Without collaborating with anyone, he’d written a program in BASIC using trigonometric functions, that produced a pair of Lissajous figures on screen that could be printed off. The figures were a pair of symbolic fishes that he’d related via a modern day interpretation of the parable of the feeding of the five thousand that was entirely explicable to teenagers.

He had the figures repeatedly cycle, randomly different on each cycle but still a pair of fishes, on the large screen for the class to watch. He was a born story teller and the class loved his tales which he told in language and idiom they understood immediately.

He booked a computer suite for three weeks, demonstrated his program running and told them what the required end product was. He taught the class how to load BASIC and the program template, made them aware of the variables they could alter without compromising the concept and how to print off their work. The class were mesmerised and eager to custom program their own figures to combine with their artwork and poems as a front cover for their projects.

The class, in groups of their own choosing and of whatever size they wanted which constantly changed as they helped each other, were as eager to consult the information on Lissajous figures which were based on two alternating currents at right angles to each other, the bibles for which he’d provided relevant chapter and verse information for them to use, the booklets on BASIC syntax and the tables of mathematical functions he’d provided, as they were to use the computers for which he’d provided information regards colouring their output. Computers were somewhat primitive then by today’s standards.

It was way beyond GCSE and unbelievably challenging, yet I never again saw so much, from so many different disciplines, taught so quickly and so easily with a class so excitedly eager to learn. A class that most, including myself, dreaded teaching.

He thought nothing of it. To him it was just a series of lessons he’d produced in order to pass an assignment. An element of his teaching practice required him to demonstrate the incorporation of an element of spirituality in his teaching which he told me most student teachers of mathematics found challenging.

It was obvious to the class that he enjoyed their company and considered they could learn anything they wanted to. He told me that he considered his challenge was to make his lessons interesting enough to make the class want to learn the material, and often that meant taking lessons beyond the pedestrian limitations of the syllabus because it was his belief that, despite what all the theory said, no-one could make unwilling children learn anything.

He left the area not long after qualifying, and I still wonder where teaching took him, or whether he left the profession. Now of course he will be retired too.