Describe a man who has positively impacted your life.
This prompt gave me some immediate thoughts. First of all, the person who has most positively impacted my life is my wife. Second, I much prefer the company of women to that of men and always have. Third, for every person who might be positively impacted there will be another who is either negatively impacted or not impacted at all.
For most children, your main impact will be from your parents and so you would look at the your Father. Now, I know how difficult the job of doing your best to influence your children is. When you have more than one child, you realise that you do not have a uniform impact on those young people you help to raise. I have the full range of effect on mine from negligible to significant. That is down to the fact that every child has their own nature and that is so much more important than nurture. A different mindset will lead to a different result and your impact will be positive at some points in your child’s life and negative at others.
All of those factors come into play for me as a teacher. As I got older I had to make much more effort to relate to my students and to influence them positively. My impact on them started to diminish significantly in my last few years of teaching, and I felt like I was losing my touch. I know that my influence on most of my students in that time was neutral or negative, but the occasional positive impacts kept me going. Then, last summer I had an almost uniformly positive effect on my entire class. What did that teach me? Well, first of all, it taught me that with the ‘right’ students I could still do it, but second it taught me that with the ‘right’ teacher a number of the students I couldn’t reach would have been positively impacted. The same goes for being a role model in any situation.
My advice? Quite simply to do your best and hopefully that will be enough. If it isn’t, well at least you tried.
Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?
I was thinking about this prompt and looking back on December 17 in years past. Let’s start with last year.
I was on a boat sailing towards the Great Barrier Reef in Australia on December 17 2024. I definitely didn’t have that on my radar the previous year! It was a possibility that we would go to Australia for my cousin’s 80th birthday on Christmas Day, but I didn’t have a trip to the reef on the plans.
Going back 22 years, we were in Australia once again. The previous year I had been in the first year of an expected two year stay in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, I was in a school with a very unpleasant line manager who didn’t want anything to do with an English teacher who needed support so she decided to go completely the opposite way. Leaving there, however, was actually a great catalyst to my career. 21 years ago I had just finished my Masters degree in Australia, a degree I didn’t even know I was going to do a year earlier! I got a Distinction and that gave me the opportunity to end up teaching at university in the UK.
31 years ago I was in Kidderminster in Worcestershire working at the Town Hall dealing with everything to do with that venue. It was one of my favourite jobs ever, but I was only working there because no one would give me a job as an Economics and Business Studies. I had just applied for a job in Japan on the JET Programme, but that was a ridiculous roll of the dice. No way was I going to get a job there was I? A year later I was looking forward to my first Christmas abroad!
Finally, 38 years ago today, I was preparing to see a former colleague of mine at my local pub. A year earlier I was unemployed and struggling to find another job. I went to the job centre just after Christmas and found a job with the Unemployment Benefit Office! Anyway, I was happy to be meeting up with Janet again and it turned out to be a good decision. In September we celebrated our 35th anniversary!
So there you have it. Life will always throw you unexpected situations. It’s up to you to deal with them.
What skills or lessons have you learned recently?
When I finished working in London in June I went pretty much straight into the online teaching environment for another two months. This meant some changes to my morning routine based around my commute. It wasn’t that much of an issue because I had to get used to a whole new routine and this kept me fully focused.
Since finishing in September, the aim has been to find a new routine. This has become a much more difficult task than I expected. One of my issues, I think, is that I have tried to introduce a new routine very quickly rather than letting it develop organically. The fact that I have tried to introduce so many different things to work on at once is undoubtedly my main problem. Some of the things I have introduced like the daily blog writing and doing my Duolingo during the day when my mind is theoretically sharper have taken a hold. One of the things I have lost along the way is the regular waking up time. When I was working full time I was waking up at about 5.50 to 6 every day including weekends. This, I think, has had a bigger effect than I expected. With later waking up times I don’t have the same opportunity to start my day with reading. I had an hour of reading time in the morning on the train to work and another hour in the late afternoon or early evening on the way home. In the last month I have completed two books, an unheard of lull by my standards! Why has it been reading that has gone from my routine? To be honest I don’t know. Perhaps it was a situational as well as a time bound routine. So, I have decided to let my reading find it’s own natural place within my routine, wherever that may be and at whatever level it may be. Perhaps in reading as well as other aspects I have been making perfect the enemy of good. Where I can’t find a regular place in my schedule I am often finding no place in my schedule.
What should I have I learnt from this? That it takes longer than a few months to completely shift your life from one basis to another. That trying to control the mindset is good at some level, but that trying to go beyond that leads to the wheels coming off a bit. That I should take the small wins and build around them. That I should be open to change and work with it rather than against it.
What will I learn from this? Who knows! I am already looking at 2026 and thinking about what I want to introduce or reintroduce into my life. Perhaps I can take a more considered approach and allow things to develop more naturally. Perhaps I can learn to be happy with the small wins I mentioned and build around them. Perhaps I will get to February exhausted by the mental effort of trying to introduce a whole raft of changes! The human mind, particularly my human mind, is a very funny thing. Watch this space!!
What cities do you want to visit?
I have been incredibly lucky in my life to have visited and lived in some amazing cities. Some of my favourites are Sydney, which I have mentioned more than once, Nara in Japan with the breath taking Giant Buddha and very recently Salzburg with its magical Christmas Market. My wife has a wish list of about 20 places that she wants to visit (!) but I have just a few and they are up in the Scandinavian region.
Tromsø in Norway and Reykjavik in Iceland are apparently the best places to base yourself if you want to see the Northern Lights. That would count as one of my biggest remaining ambitions as I have wanted to see them for as long as I can remember. Having the chance to visit a city I know nothing about would definitely be a bonus.
Sweden is a country I want to visit, and I have two places on my list there. First is Stockholm, because I just ABBA visit a particular museum! Once I have finished exploring that city I would move on to Malmo to see the location of one of my favourite ever series, the Swedish/Danish border police thriller Bron (The Bridge). From Malmo, you can cross the titular bridge to Copenhagen, another city that is high on my list and has been since I heard the song ‘Wonderful Copenhagen’ by Danny Kaye on Junior Choice!
Finally, I would love to visit Torshavn in the Faroe Islands, which is a place I have wanted to visit since I met someone from the Faroe Islands about four decades ago! To say it’s a bit out of the way is putting it mildly. It’s perhaps one of the most exposed and rugged cities anywhere, but it would be an incredible adventure.
The title of this post comes from the Billy Joel song from the amazing ‘The Nylon Curtain’ album. Check it out.
Tell us one thing you hope people say about you.
One thing I have learnt over the years is that other people’s opinions of you are likely to be restricted by the context in which they meet you. If they meet you professionally they will see the professional side of you. If they meet you socially they will see the social side of you, assuming you have one! If they read something you have written they will see a curated version of you. So, in many ways you are controlling what they might say about you, and therefore their comments are actually a reflection of what you have chosen to share with them.
Why do I say it’s a strange question? Well, what would you do with that opinion? Agree with it, disagree with it or ignore it are your three options. In any of those cases the impact of what they think is simply going to be short term. It doesn’t matter at any deep level what people say about you. Years ago I had a number of friends, as nearly all of us do in our younger days. Now, very few of them probably give me a single thought. Their opinions were very important to me at the time, but the fact that they have no interest in me now shows that those opinions were irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. I have had students who really enjoyed my teaching and students who hated it, more the latter than the former in my last couple of years of full time teaching. They saw me in lessons and made their judgement on me based on two hours a week. They may have made some valid points, but that would have been more by accident than insight. Even my colleagues only saw a curated part of my personality, however long they worked with me. Their opinions would carry more weight, but I would be either unwilling or unable to change anything based on that.
People’s views of you are simply that, their views, and I feel that only my wife sees the full me, so hers is the only view that really counts. I don’t have to ask what she thinks, because she will tell me, and I know that she will do so out of love. If you listen to anyone else’s view other than those closest to you, you are barking up the wrong tree.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 