Let the kids look out the window

As a young trainee teacher I was fortunate enough to do parts of my apprenticeship with a number of quietly inspirational classroom teachers. I was reminded of one of these figures while on a ferry ride down the Bosphorus Straits recently.

Istanbul is that most singular of cities, impossible to imagine other than exactly where it stands in wedlock between Europe and Asia. Thrice capital of Middle Earth and like all great imperial cities, it sets off echoes of others in its world heritage league. Tunis, Tripoli, Cairo, Beirut, Athens all carry an Ottoman stamp first posted out through the Sea of Marmara. Gaze down old Stamboul's steep streets and across its waters to Maiden's Island and there is a glimpse of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. Cross the Golden Horn by the Galata Bridge and the Rialto comes to mind. Let the eye wander along the prosperous wooded waterfront beneath the Bosphorus Bridge and Sydney Harbour becomes the comparison. Perched on the wharfside boulevard in the village of Istinye, the fishermen on Havana's Malecon would feel at home.

Taking in all these heady and fanciful comparisons from the ferry deck, we slipped past a string of Ottoman villas each with its wrought iron lace-fronted landing stage lapped by the swirling waters of the Straits. In the last of these grand reminders of a gilded age, the top storey shutters were thrown back and we were passing close enough to see the reflection of light off water dancing on the pressed ceiling of a large schoolroom. Framed in the picture window looking out over the water, was the back of a single figure I took to be the teacher. Just visible above their desk tops were rows of bobbing children's heads, craning to see beyond and behind their teacher's bulk.

I was transported back to my teacher trainee days in that loveliest of cities, Cape Town. I remembered arriving for a week's stint in a secondary school situated high on a hillside above one of the city's Atlantic-facing suburbs. The classroom to which I had been assigned commanded a particularly fine view out over Table Bay, beyond the Docks where the Dutch had landed in 1652 and away towards Robben Island, at that stage still Nelson Mandela's place of long incarceration.

The first thing I noticed as I began to prepare for my history lesson was that the teacher's desk was placed to one side away from the window with all the students' desks facing out over the Bay. Alarm bells began to ring in my eager young instructional mind. Under no circumstances did I want my students to be distracted from the vital content of my lesson. I began to swing the desks around to ensure that they all faced the blank wall on the mountain side of the classroom.

"What on earth are you doing?" The softly challenging voice belonged to the teacher who had been asked to oversee my fledgling efforts that morning. I muttered something about not wanting the kids to be looking out the window when they should be concentrating on their studies.

"But their history is all there - and their future - straight out of that window - your job is to help them make sense of what they can see right in front of them without standing in their way."

I learned more from that short exchange than most of the rest of my year's training put together and it all came flooding back as I waved at the inquisitive, cheerful faces in the school beside the Straits where Jason once sailed in search of the Golden Fleece.