"Don't you realise that these young women have more important things in their lives than English homework?" I have always been grateful to that brilliantly imaginative mathematician and form teacher, Mike Ollerton, for opening my eyes to that obvious truth twenty-five years ago, when I was worrying myself sick about such trivialities as unfinished course work. He helped me to build a more relaxed and adult relationship with my year 11 class and their work was all the more imaginative and expressive for coming when they were ready.

Teachers today deserve a great deal of sympathy. They are under relentless pressure to satisfy the demands of examiners and to impress inspectors, and that pressure can cause them to lose their sense of proportion and humanity as I did, with less excuse, all those years ago. It is not surprising if they rate their students according to their readiness to conform to rules and grotesquely exaggerate the importance of getting on at school.

Fortunately, independently minded young men and women will always make fools of their teachers and achieve the miracles they are capable of in their own good time despite all the coercion. Frankie Dunnery was Trouble for my English Department, and he still can't spell, but he is a world class musician and song-writer and is now studying for his MA in Psychology. Our daughter, Janet, was refused permission to study German at 13 - no good at languages because she used to talk in her French classes! - but she recently spent a year lecturing in Heidelberg University as visiting Professor of Arabic.

Forty-five years ago I was teaching an FE class in Leeds. The students had not done brilliantly at school, and most did not want to be there, but I needed the extra money. Then one young man wrote an essay, on The River Aire, which made me sit up and think, "This guy has a mind to be respected." I lost touch with him but last week his name, Lewis Minkin, suddenly flashed across my mind and I did a web search. Up came this Professor of Politics at Leeds University, author of "The Contentious Alliance: Trade Unions & the Labour Party", co-author with Tony Blair of a paper on The Renewal of the Labour Party, who later phoned me to ask, "Do you remember the essay I wrote on The River Aire?". As co-author of the report, "All Our Futures: Creative & Cultural Education" he argues that creativity is something we need to develop in all our children, not merely an artistic elite, and defines imagination, with beautiful simplicity, as arising "by making unusual connections, seeing analogies and relationships between objects that have not previously been related."

Eleven years ago I was trying to get a little four year old girl off to sleep. She had been shocked by a rather bloody episode of "The Last of the Mohicans" and said, simply, "The Indians get hurt worse than the soldiers because they don't wear jerseys." The thought had hit her that it was unfair that some people get hurt worse than others and that the injustice had something to do with the clothes they wear. Shakespeare had the same idea:

"Plate sin with gold

What is the connection between this ragbag of memories in an old man's mind? Perhaps it is simply that our hope for the future lies with the children who talk or look out of windows when they should be listening to the teacher.