How my Primary School teacher stopped me from smoking

Written by Gerard on Tuesday 17 November 2009

Seamus was a substitute teacher who taught our class in the last year of primary school. We kind of called him Seamus behind his back because he lived just down the road from us, and that's what the parents called him.

I remember we'd been doing some lessons about the dangers of smoking. It was the usual stuff - rancid, rotting lungs that had been damaged by years of smoke filling them. Do you remember those specimens? The little microscopic bits of lung that were blackened and corroded? Yuck.

But one morning Seamus took the anti-smoking campaign to an entirely new level - he strutted into the classroom and produced a packet of cigarettes. Making quite a display of the next part, he took a cigarette out of the pack and lit it up. The constant background noise of the classroom died away as everybody realised the teacher was smoking in the class!

His puffing didn't last long, though. He took a massive inhale of a cigarette, put it down on the desk and from nowhere produced a white handkerchief. He covered his mouth with the handkerchief and exhaled through it. When he held it up for the class to see, the pristine white cloth was now stained a yellowish colour.

The point was, if just one puff of a cigarette could produce such a visible stain, what would be the cumulative effect over 10 or 20 years? And suddenly the question hit me - how long had my parents been smoking for? Since their teens, for sure. Hell, how much damage had they already done?

I distinctly remember that day being the point where I became aware of cigarette smoke. I know that sounds funny to say, but it suddenly started to bug me when they smoked in enclosed spaces like the car or the living room. The sight of an ashtray was enough to thoroughly disgust me. And aside from the odd drag of a herbal cigarette during my university years, I've avoided smoking more or less entirely.

The most important part for me was avoiding smoking during the 'peer pressure' years. I kind of promised to myself that if I could make it through school without getting hooked (as many of my other friends did), then I'd be happy. And as it turned out, I never did. And I put it all down to that one unorthodox anti-smoking session. Thanks, Seamus.

Photo by eusezio