As our children start back to school, this is an appropriate time to remember the teachers.

We have all had teachers at one stage of our lives, whether in a formal school setting or not. And I guarantee we have all had one who inspired and one who did entirely the opposite.

I decided to become a journalist at the age of 11 when I discovered I couldn’t be a cowboy. I would have to be a cowgirl. This, you understand, was in the days before we were able to pick and choose our gender identity as seems to be the case now.

Anyway, it was my last year in primary school and my teacher was Mr Kemp. He was inspirational in every way and told us about journalism.

His encouragement and the realisation I might get to interview Elvis Presley turned me from Roy Rogers to Marjorie Proops. (Most readers will have to Google those name.)

Mr Kemp gave me my happiest year at school and, by default, probably the happiest year of my life.

I cried buckets when I left Bancroft Primary School and would have cried whole oceans had I known what lay ahead in the Assumption Convent boarding school in South Africa.

I am naming and shaming Sr Ignatius who probably doesn’t even remember me but who made my life a living hell. I recall vividly the time I decided, out of Christian charity, to let her see the Christmas presents I had bought my parents out of my pocket money.

Her reaction? She confiscated them for some imagined misdemeanour.

When I called her a thief and asked for the phone to call the police, she began hitting my head, neck and shoulders, with a sports shoe. That was nearly 60 years ago and maybe some day I will forgive her - but not today!

Teachers can’t move mountains but it seem they can move cars as Pam Douglas proved in 2014 when she managed to get an extended traffic exclusion zone to make her pupils safe.

And I can assure you, none of our nuns, or even Mr Kemp, for that matter, ever came to school dressed as Captain America!

Have a look at these photos. Are you in any of the photos? Is your favourite teacher here? Let us know who inspired you and how and, perhaps, who didn’t.