After a teaching career spanning six decades, you’d think Maggie Finlayson would be ready to put her feet up.
Instead, the P&J grabbed a chat with the Glenelg teacher in the middle of sheep clipping on her croft. Clearly, this is a lady who takes life by the horns.
“Actually that’s true, I’m always covered in bruises,” Maggie laughs. “I clip the sheep myself but leave the rams to my husband, as they can knock me over. I’m always busy, there’s always so much to do.”
Added to Maggie’s list is planting a new apple tree in her orchard – a touching retirement gift from local parents. In fact, Maggie has been pretty well spoiled. The school gave her a generous garden voucher and her very own shepherd’s crook, personalised with her name.
“I told them no presents,” says Maggie, who retired as a teacher at Glenelg Primary School near Kyle last month. Instead, she had requested a little ceilidh in the village hall. She got that too.
“The kids all sang me a special song, and there were lots of former pupils there, piping and singing in a band,” says Maggie. “The kids made it. We danced all night. It was just fabulous.”
Maggie and her chicks
It’s clear how much this community means to Maggie, and she to it.
Maggie started her career back in 1974 at Lochyside Junior School in Fort William. She was just 19 when she first set foot in a classroom, and 16 on her first placement. It was a freer, less regulated time.
“I started in the infant department with 33 kids in the class,” she recalls. “You could do what you liked back then, and we had an amazing time going out on walks and all sorts of adventures. The kids were so good. They were my little chicks.”
That joy in teaching was still present right up to her retirement in June. Maggie finished her career aa a teacher at Glenelg Primary, having seen generations of kids grow up.
“I had many kids tell me I also taught their mum or dad,” she says. “If my old school in Lochaber still existed, I’d no doubt have been teaching grandchildren too!”
Changed times
Maggie says Glenelg is “a great little school” and she’ll miss it terribly. “The children are so lovely,” she says. “I often found myself having to leave the classroom and get my straight face back on, because they’re so funny.”
For example, Maggie says a P1 pupil recently approached her to tell on a classmate who had ‘swore’. Shocked, Maggie asked the pupil what the boy had said to her.
With great indignation, the little girl answered: “He said, ‘So?'”
These little interactions clearly make Maggie’s day, but this wasn’t always the case. Maggie says approaches to education have changed dramatically since the 1970s.
“Nowadays we listen to a child’s voice, to what they have to say, and that takes a lot of time,” she says. “In the past, you’d give them a row and that would be it done and dusted.
“It’s different. Society’s different now and children cope with different things.”
Old ideas, new jargon
However, the Glenelg teacher believes the fundamentals remain the same. “In education there’s something new practically every month,” she says. “Nothing really changes, they just dress it up in different jargon.”
For her part, Maggie loves to learn new things, but has little patience for telling your granny how to suck eggs. She talks about a “wonderful” music programme at school, called the Kodály method, which focuses on the social and cultural side of music.
A young Kodály tutor used to visit the school and Maggie said her sessions were brilliant. But one day, the tutor told Maggie about a great new approach to music. She started to sing do-re-mi with accompanying hand movements.
“My jaw hit the floor,” recalls Maggie. “I learned that when I was four years old – more than 50 years ago – and here’s this lassie enthusing about it like she discovered it! I thought, I’ve seen everything now.”
She’s never pulled a sickie
This no-nonsense attitude has served Maggie well. Through a career spanning six decades, she has not taken a single sick day.
So is she incredibly healthy, or incredibly tough?
“Just tough I think,” she says. “I have a good talk to myself and just get on with it.”
One day early in her career, Maggie was working as a supply teacher, while seven months pregnant with twins. She missed the ferry from Fort William to Achaphubuil and panicked that she’d not make it to school.
Instead, her husband came to the rescue. “Luckily at that time he was working on a fishing boat, so he came in and gave me a lift over the loch,” she says. “I had to climb up into this fishing boat and then he launched his wee RIB inflatable to row me ashore at the other side.
“Well, I was seven months pregnant with twins, so I was huge! I thought ‘This thing will capsize and I’ll sink’. All to get to work. I would not miss a day.
“Teaching was really the most fantastic job. The best job.”
Maggie’s four boys are all grown up now. She doesn’t have grandchildren of her own yet but says she will make do with her sheep, lambs and hens – plus one “terrible” sheepdog.
“I’ve never met a dog like her,” says Maggie. “She’s from working stock but she has her own agenda. Most days, it feels like she’s training me. So really, I’m still in education.”
More from the Schools & Family team
£13 million overhaul creates more than 700 new nursery places in Highlands
Bucksburn Academy: Temporary classrooms to be installed at over-capacity school
Rain shelved your plans? Here’s our pick of rainy day activities in the north and north-east
Conversation