When I was at Wymondham High, one of my most hilarious and memorable teachers was someone I will call Miss M.

Miss M was an unmissable presence in the school. The most likely place you would meet her was the corridors. There was a rule forbidding students from going inside the school buildings during break times, and it was her job to reinforce this for one particular corridor where her classroom was. If you were unlucky enough to find yourself in that corridor during a break or lunch, it’s fair to say she would be barking at you to get out.

Apart from this unenviable duty, however, she wasn’t an unkind person. In fact, her biggest personality trait was her sense of humour. She was never afraid of having banter with other teachers in front of pupils. She always cracked wise and spoke her mind. And when I once bumped into her on a dog walk, she was familiar, snarky, and a pretty good laugh.

She wasn’t the straightforward ‘nice’ teacher. She was often the opposite. But she was also a character, and most conversations with her would end with you walking away in fits of giggles.

She only actually taught me by the time I was an A-Level student. And there, during A-Levels, began one of my most bizarre and brilliant experiences across my whole time in the school system.

See, Miss M was very involved in the students’ various opinions on things. We were a pretty high-level class and would often chat amongst ourselves instead of doing the actual work. But instead of telling us to shut up and get on with it (or maybe as well as that), she would listen in to what we were talking about. And she would chime in with her views, taking no prisoners in the process.

The first major debate I remember having with her was about the best way to keep organised during revision season. A classmate had innocently asked me how I organised my revision ringbinders, and when I was halfway through explaining it, an eavesdropping Miss M marched over and said, “you’re both ridiculous.”

I can’t remember now what she was objecting to or what she proposed instead. But she felt so strongly about it that she was still lecturing me a good five/ten minutes after the class was over and everyone else had gone.

This was not the only time she made it clear when she thought people were “ridiculous”. She told me once that one of my exam answers “made her want to die”. She frequently parodied our ludicrous errors in front of the class, in ways that were simultaneously mortifying and hilarious. She even stopped midsentence to tell one poor student, “will you stop sneezing?”

The thing about her was that even when you were the butt of the joke, her delivery was so inescapably laugh-out-loud funny that you couldn’t help but go along with it. And her snarky humour was always borne from a genuinely altruistic desire to help the students improve. My work improved tenfold under her tuition. She also shared her famous brownie recipe with me when she heard I was terrible at baking. My friends love me for my homemade brownies to this day.

And then came her politics – which were so unbelievably on-point and hilarious that you couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say next. She had an uncanny ability to cut through the crap of any hot cultural topic. Her speeches on various controversial issues made us split our sides laughing.

This also applied to Bake Off, especially during the 2021 season. After the first episode, I persuaded her to take Giuseppe off her sweepstake and replace him with Maggie. Maggie had seemed promising at first, only to be swiftly eliminated for forgetting to put flour in her desserts. Giuseppe went on to win. Miss M never let me live it down.

The end result was a teacher who may not have been a teddy bear, but was altruistic, generous, big-hearted, and extremely funny. Someone who made it clear she would march through hell to get our work up to scratch, and who did so very successfully. Someone who would lend you her recipes when you confessed your culinary shortcomings, and who could be extremely complimentary and touching when you had earned it.

I salute her. She was fantastic.

Didn't catch last month's anonymous teacher? Read about her here.