Miss! Miss!: Confessions of a West Country Teacher

As head of a special education unit attached to Robinswood Junior School, Gloucester, Una Dowding faced many challenges. Where parents and other teachers had perhaps given up in despair, Una had to find a way of overcoming emotional, behavioural and learning difficulties to allow the children under her care to grow into useful and happy members of society. Una looks back over her career, remembering her former pupils with great fondness and recalling many bewildering and humorous incidents, and the successes that made teaching so satisfying and rewarding. As a member of the Cotswold Writers' Circle, Una is an accomplished poet. A small selection of her poetry is included.

Review :
Every teacher must, of necessity, be able to write - but not every teacher has the creative talent to be a writer. So it was with a degree of apprehension that I agreed to review Una Dowding's book 'Miss! Miss!' subtitled intriguingly the Confessions of a West Country teacher. I need not have worried. Here is a teacher, wordsmith and poet all rolled into one. Una - who lives in Gloucester - has penned a page-turning memoir based on her thirty years of teaching in schools in and around the city during which she coped with the keen, the reluctant, the capable and the challenged. Her reminiscences are at one and the same time witty and sad, poignant and thought-provoking but always making for compulsive reading. While she began her career in a mainstream school at Dymock, Una's innate compassion for pupils with emotional, behavioural and learning difficulties gradually moved her focus towards special education - particularly those who found reading difficult. This was hardly a surprise since Una herself is dyslexic and could empathise with those facing the same obstacle to learning which she herself had had to overcome years earlier. After serving an 'apprenticeship' with special pupils at various city schools Una became head of a special education unit at Robinswood Junior School. Here, as elsewhere, Una was faced with children who thought of themselves and had been branded by others, as failures. Helping children work to their full potential required patience, imagination, perseverance and determination, all of which Una seems to have had in abundance. But it wasn't all one way. Una's touching and often humorous stories tell how her pupils often enriched her own life with a sense of satisfaction and joy (although sometimes tinged with sadness). It's a fascinating read set against a constantly changing social, economic and educational background. However it's the vivid way in which Una recounts her experiences with pupils, parents and teachers which capture and hold the reader. Whilst trying to spare Una's blushes, it's also the story of a gifted teacher who has done a remarkable job and made a world of difference to those entrusted to her care. JOHN LOVELL 'Miss! Miss!' is an engaging and wise account of Una Dowding's life and teaching career told with love, compassion and understanding. In this collection, interspersed with selections from her poetry, she recalls incidents throughout her life, as student, teacher and mother living in the county of Gloucestershire. Una Dowding, having herself as a child struggled with and overcome difficulties in learning to read because of dyslexia, a problem not generally recognised by teachers in her own school days, regales us with recollected incidents, sometimes touchingly funny or tear-jerkingly sad which demonstrate a deep understanding of the need in others to learn from an early age. One particularly sad account was of an emotionally troubled child who was often locked out of the house at night-time by the mother. Several humorous incidents demonstrate how a deep need to learn was recognised and encouraged, for instance, in the Polish child, who scorned primary reading books but was determined to read a very adult account of The Sinking of the Titanic from cover to cover. 'Miss! Miss! certainly deserves to be read from cover to cover. A book not just for teachers and parents but for all readers who enjoy a worthwhile read based upon true-life experiences enriched with humour and compassion. Eugenie Summerfield (Children's writer and novelist) 'This remarkable and fascinating memoir is reminiscent of Miss Read and Alison Uttley's 'The Country Child'. I loved it.' Katie Fforde