Teachers play a pivotal role in student learning and development. From being vulnerable and naive, children grow up to become confident and pragmatic adults.

The classroom of teenagers ignored me, talking loudly with their backs turned towards me.

“They aren’t going to listen to you,” taunted Fear in my ear.

There was a momentary silence in the teens' conversation.

My experience of teaching has mainly been as a teacher in a classroom with foreign language students where English is the second or foreign language. It has always been a challenge but immensely rewarding to follow the development of my students’ language skills from beginner to advanced.

They were fighting in the corridor. And they were both bigger than I was. Sixteen years old, full of testosterone and with minimal self-control.

As the teacher asked the children to sit in a circle at the end of the lesson, I expected that she was about to share her thoughts on how those little buildings should have been made.

As I climbed the steps to the stage, I heard the back-slapping, testosterone brawl of the eighty or so young men who had been cajoled into the auditorium by their teachers.