First year and last year

‘Where is physics hall?” asked one of three female students as I was returning to my office in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, one afternoon in mid-September. They were going to register for the PDE, they told me, as, instead of explaining the way, I accompanied them towards the hall. The professional diploma in education, I discovered, was the title for the old higher diploma in education. I did the Dip myself way back, I said, and told them that here now we had a teacher (me) on the point of retiring after nearly 40 years’ teaching talking to three young trainee teachers starting out on their career. Had I any words of wisdom, one asked.

I thought hard, but only had time to say something very general. I wished them happiness and success in their lives as teachers, and so we parted.

How like yesterday it felt, I mused afterwards, my own Dip year. There I was, in another physics hall in Earlsfort Terrace, one of a few hundred students listening to lectures describing the characteristics and skills of the effective teacher, leaving me anxiously wondering how well I matched the description. And where was I going to end up with my not very marketable subjects of English and French?

But how things turn out! On March 5th,1974, my late mother saw an ad in this paper for a teacher of English and French in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and pointed it out to me. I applied, was interviewed (without any inquisitorial questions, I might add), accepted the offer which came and, at the end of September 2013, retired after what I hope my employer and those I had the honour and pleasure of teaching will consider years of satisfactory service.

The students I taught were those starting their studies for the priesthood with a two-year diploma course in philosophy and arts (ie, my English and French). When I started, I had classes of between 30 to 40 seminarians. In recent years, numbers had fallen to single figures. But while the number of students decreased, their age increased, even keeping pace, in some rare cases, with my own. What teacher wouldn’t love to have a small number of mature, very pleasant students like that? Yes, I was lucky. I never felt myself getting old, or retirement, through fatigue, creeping up on me.

Thousands of young people started their studies in September in colleges all over Ireland – including Maynooth, both university and seminary. Their parents will be hopeful and at times anxious for them, as my mother, a struggling widow at the time, was for her two eldest, my twin brother and me, when we started in UCD in 1966. Each student is pursuing and deepening his or her interest and aptitude, all the time clinging to the hope that in the end a job will come. When I needed one, for instance, it came from the most unlikely of sources, the seminary of Maynooth. A miracle of timing, I often think. Literature of the kind I was interested in and taught simply explores these questions of (providential?) timing and other metaphysical topics to do with what Flannery O’Connor called “the mystery of our condition on earth”.

I miss meeting the first years and giving them the motto for their course. TS Eliot in Four Quartets talks about "having had twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres, / Trying to learn to use words". That was our motto: trying to learn to use words. I say to myself now, after winding up my affairs there, that for twice-20 years in St Patrick's College, Maynooth, I, with my students, tried to do that. As for those years being "largely wasted" or not, I will hold to what Eliot goes on to say: "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business".

Whether lay or clerical, in Maynooth or elsewhere, I wish all young people well, trainee teachers included, as they start out in these very uncertain times on the road to qualification and their life's work. In the last act of Chekhov's Three Sisters, the military doctor, one year from retirement himself, is about to leave with his regiment. Before he goes, he invokes a blessing on the sisters (two of them teachers) whom he has seen growing up: "Fly away, my dears, fly away, and God be with you". And with all our young people today.