''They won't remember much of what you teach them,'' I said, ''but they will remember you.''
And then I thought to myself, ''Oh gosh and golly, fool, you've been and gone and told the truth.''
I try not to trespass on the truth. It's famously nasty territory. And if all roads lead to the same terminus, why choose a route packed with beasts that bite?
How much easier and wiser it is to keep to the benign lands of agreed dishonesty, of courtesy and kind lies, of euphemism and cliche. They're well trodden, nicely signposted.
The Sunday supplements tell us where to stop along the way and what to feign an interest in and even what to say about it.
But sometimes I slip up, as I did with the line above this morning. I'd been asked to a school, a day or two before the bright new year began, to speak to the staff. Ridiculous, of course.
When I was teaching, I might have had something useful to say, but now that I'm not, I don't. It was my first visit to this school but I recognised it immediately.
From the reception desk to the wall art, from the photocopier to the smell of the floor polish, from the short cuts worn into the grass to the chipped coffee cups in the staffroom and the teaspoons of infinite variety and the catering size tin of instant coffee, I knew it all.
And there before me were the staff, as various as any staff, their holidays over, drawn in against their will to plan the year ahead. But the year ahead, like every year behind, will not be tamed by plans, however elaborate, however well meant.
''If you want to make God laugh,'' said my favourite Jewish philosopher, ''tell him your plans.''
Instead, the year will be got through, as every year is, by guess and god and good luck. Meanwhile, the staff had to listen to me. I wheeled out a bit of teacher flattery and a couple of stories, and I dusted off an ancient joke or two.
Everyone feels more kindly towards people who have made them laugh. And if they felt kindly towards me I would have achieved my ambition for the day. I did not think to say anything that mattered. As with life itself, I just wanted to get amiably through and by and gone.
I was sweating, partly because it was hot and partly because the suit I bought only two months ago has already shrunk at thigh and waist and breast and hugs me like a succubus.
And as I peered through my sweat, the image of the 70 teachers seated before me blurred and into my mind came the teachers who stood before me when I was a kid and tried to teach me stuff. Most must now be dead. But with what clarity I remember them. Not the lessons they taught but them, as people.
From Kevin Cobb, all squat enthusiasm and martial arts, to poor old Glegg, who meant well but whom we harried till he snapped.
From the gently brilliant but ineffectual Eb Harris to the psychopath who ran the art department _ thanks a lot for that! - the dubiously long fingered divinity teacher and the booming bow legged Dim Jim, the comical Bill Bone, the dandy Miles, the singing historian, the sonorous Dave Bunker who taught gymnastics cruelly and scratched his balls and ate cream buns as we ran round the muddy winter field, and of course I could go on.
And so could you. And that's my point. We remember our teachers, for good reasons or bad or both, their variety and their humanity, the range of them. They formed a cast of characters as diverse as anything in Shakespeare.
And with what clarity we saw to the core of them, their flawed and differing natures. We knew them, understood them, better than we know or understand most of the people we meet in later life. Kids mix, as a rule, with kids.
The only adults with whom they have protracted dealings, apart from parents, who don't count, are teachers. Those teachers can't undo the damage done by home or genes.
They can't mould character. But they can and do offer themselves as fodder for the growing mind, as exemplars of adulthood for the young to cut their critical teeth on.
And that, I suspect, to a greater degree than is ever admitted, is a very good thing and what schools are for. The teachers matter more than what they teach.
Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
