David Richardson

[David Richardson]

I work now as a teacher of English at Högskolan i Kalmar, a university college in southern Sweden (something like a polytechnic in the old system in the UK).

I've worked as a teacher nearly continuously since 1972, when I took a gap year to work as an unpaid assistant unqualified teacher in Bradford, working with the children of immigrants. I trained at Goldsmiths', worked three years in Dartford and then took off into the big wide world.

I've worked in Sweden, Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Angola and Trinidad and Tobago in various jobs and on various assignments. Nowadays I specialise in distance education, which makes me a regular user of information technology (the kind that comes as computers, rather than the kind that's pencils and paper). The bottom line for me, though, is still something that my deputy head in Dartford once said to me when he thrust me in to cover 4th year Chemistry. "But I don't know anything about Chemistry," I said. "David, you don't teach subjects, you teach children" was his reply. You can see how old-fashioned he was, referring to 4th year hooligans as 'children', but the sentiment was right!