Hurrah, she has finally done it. Ten years ago, Lucy Kellaway told me — in hushed tones as though it were a guilty secret — that she dreamt of being a maths teacher. The occasion was my decision to leave the Financial Times to teach English. I am delighted that now she too has decided to take the plunge. I made my career change earlier — in my 40s — but I do not regret it, and I have every confidence that Lucy won’t either.

Lucy was not the only one to confess such yearnings: quite a few journalists, I discovered, hankered after a life in front of an interactive white board and wished they could be as “brave” as me. But Lucy was particularly sincere and thoughtful. Her mother, Deborah Kellaway, had been an inspirational head of English at Camden School for Girls — the actor Emma Thompson named her My Best Teacher in a column for the Times Educational Supplement. Lucy gave me some advice about what made her mother so adored: “She was open to the girls’ ideas. She made them feel clever and original.”

It was advice I took to heart and it turned out to be easy to follow. One of the most rewarding things about teaching is that teenagers really do make original and thought-provoking observations. Mind you, this might be more of a phenomenon when you are teaching Charlotte Bront? rather than Lucy’s beloved trigonometry.