Teacher and Student

December 30, 2025
David Chandler
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I’d stacked all the tables and chairs, loaded the car with my art stuff, driven home and just put the key in the door when the ‘phone rang. On the other end of it was Merv (which wasn’t his real name, but that’s what we’ll call him). I’d left him only fifteen minutes earlier at the art class, so was a little suprised to hear from him. Perhaps he’d lost a paintbrush or a scarf or something.

“David,” he said, “I want my money back.”

“Why’s that, Merv?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “I thought you were going to teach me how to be an artist, but you haven’t, so I won’t be coming any more.”

Before I could reply, he quickly added, “I don’t want it all back. Just the money for the classes I won’t be attending.”

“And how many lessons have you been to, Merv?” I asked.

“Three,” he said, “But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you couldn’t teach me.”

“Merv,” I said, “You can have all your money back.”

‘RIP AK Horsey’ Beatrice Haines, installation with rubbings from old, school desktops, Black Swan Arts 2014

At the grammar school I attended, the first thing Mr Chesterfield did, as he sailed into the classroom with his black gown billowing behind him, was command every pupil sitting by a window to open it. A roomful of teenage boys was a challenge at any time of the day, but Mr Chesterfield had to get through a double lesson with us and we had just bolted down our school dinner. Without pause, he produced a piece of chalk from his gown and spun around to face the blackboard.

“Write this down!” he barked and in neat, cursive script, set about a summary of Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, that was as dauntingly epic as the poem itself; so epic, in fact, that he filled one side of the rolling blackboard, then filled the other, so that, like a chalky white snake eating its own tail, his last words joined up with his first. Then, with a flourish of the blackboard rubber and a flurry of chalk dust, he obliterated his first paragraph entirely and then his second and around the blackboard we went again. So hastily was the chalking and erasing done that artefacts from earlier words mingled with later ones, representing to my mind’s eye, a kind of palimpsest of my own exhausting battle with education.

Back in the day, this was teaching. I was an empty vessel and Mr Chesterfield was charged with filling me up (on this occasion with Matthew Arnold). And once I’d memorised a few of his stanzas and survived a written examination on the subject, I was awarded a B +. I may have learned a little about tragedy and irony from Mr Arnold, but if ever I dreamt of being a poet, that dream was shattered by Mr Chesterfield and his Ouroborus chalkings on that endless weekday afternoon in 1968.

In her introduction to Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook of 1925, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy writes:

Paul Klee the teacher could not help becoming a teacher in the original meaning of the term. The word “to teach” derives from the original Gothic “taiku-sign” (our word token). It is the mission of the teacher to observe what goes unnoticed by the multitude. He is an interpreter of signs. When Walter Gropius developed the curriculum of his German Bauhaus, he gave back to the word teacher its basic significance. Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, Moholy-Nagy, Schlemmer, Albers, who taught there, were interpreters of the visual as tokens of a fundamental optical and structural order that had been obscured by centuries of literary allegorism. In this community of guides, Paul Klee chose for himself the task of pointing out new ways of studying the signs of nature… The art student was to be more than a refined camera, trained to record the surface of the object. He must realise he is “child of this earth; yet also child of the Universe; issue of a star among stars.”

Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba’ Claude Lorraine 1648 ‘Dido Building Carthage’ JMW Turner 1815

‘Noonday Rest’ Jean-François Millet 1866 ‘Noon: Rest from Work’ Vincent Van Gogh 1890

There was a time when JMW Turner stopped filling himself up with Claude Lorraine and became JMW Turner and there was a time when Vincent Van Gogh stopped filling himself up with Jean-François Millet to become Vincent Van Gogh.

I didn’t tell Merv that it wasn’t my job to fill him up the way Mr Chesterfield did me. And I certainly didn’t tell him that he was ‘child of this earth,’ let alone ‘issue of a star among stars,’ but I did give him a full refund.