Miss Burns was very strict, wore floral frocks, had several wobbly chins and told us sad, gripping tales of young Indian boys and elephants' graveyards. Miss Sparks was extremely crisp and knew painful uses for her ruler. I feared Miss Burns and loved her. I feared Miss Sparks and loathed her. I was six.

Mr Byrne was serious, warm-hearted and told me he actually liked my work. Mr Bebbington cracked jokes all lesson, had a toy gun which he used to 'shoot down' noisy aeroplanes when they (regularly) passed overhead during class, and 'jokingly' referred to his students as "stupid boys". I remember Mr. Byrne with affection. I remember Mr. Bebbington with something akin to contempt. I was 13.

Mr. Mallender was extremely grumpy, put me on the spot often and showed me up (for the loafing student I was!) during seminars. I had another economics teacher (whose name, significantly, I can't remember) who spent each lesson dictating his notes while we copied them down verbatim. I respected Mr. Mallender. I can't even remember the face of the other man. I was 20.

These teachers, and the many others I have had during my life, have naturally marked me in some way, both as a person and as a teacher (not that there is a distinction between the two, of course!). At the beginning of RSA/UCLES-CTEFLA four-week courses, it is common practice for the tutor to ask the trainees to cast their minds back to teachers (of anything) they have had in their lives, to remember good and bad experiences with those teachers, and why they were good and bad. The aim is to begin to raise new teachers' awareness of how teaching techniques and styles can affect the learning process and to begin to get the teachers to see lessons from the students' perspective, often the biggest obstacle in teacher training.

But it would seem to me that this reflection on learning experiences past should not merely be a useful exercise for teachers in training. Wouldn't it be salutary if we could constantly view our teaching through the eyes of our students, informed by our own experiences as learners? I think it would.

Not, of course, that we can say that any one teacher we ever had was the perfect model (or maybe you can! - I don't know). But we can certainly take elements of our teachers with us into our classrooms, and leave at the door those elements that gave us grief or lessened our learning. Obviously, I'm not going to wear Miss Burns' floral frocks (at least not in class!) but I can try to engage the students' interest with things they're going to like (like her stories). If, like Mr. Byrne, I'm pleased with a student's work, I'm going to make sure they know it. And I'm not going to delude myself into thinking, like Mr. Bebbington, that laughter is necessarily learning, or even liking!

I've had many more teachers, and from each one I can take something, a 'do do' or a 'don't do', into my classes, fine-tuning the 'do dos' and the 'don't DOS as I go along and as I learn more about my students.

Twenty years from now, my current students will regard me in one of four ways, just as I remember my old teachers. They will have forgotten me, they will regard me with indifference, they will remember me negatively or they will remember me positively.

I know which situation I would prefer. I know which situation I should work for.