My Mother became a first grade school teacher but graduated from college the same year that I graduated from high school. I had watched her study at the kitchen table far into the night, year after year.
I will never forget that day my Sunday school teacher couldn't answer a question that one of the other children asked. I told the teacher that the answer was in the footnote at the bottom of the page. As I recall, we were in the third grade and our Sunday school teacher just so happened to be a fifth grade teacher at our elementary school. My mother had told me about footnotes while she was studying one night. I could never get Mrs. Wiseman to understand what a footnote was. This happened in rural Georgia in the 1960's.
Many years later when I told my Mother about this, and she explained that many of the teachers at our school had been hired during WWII as replacement teachers with only a two year certificate. They had been grandfathered as untouchable afterward and were allowed to teach, with no follow on courses or certification, until they retired. I had a very poor start the first five years of my education. I was only able to turn that around after I got married and enlisted in the USAF. I haven't stopped my own self study since then.
My 5th grade teacher was a nice old lady, but wasn't a good teacher in most respects. Her husband had also been a teacher, and I had him as a substitute at least once, during a bad winter weather / flu spell in elementary school when the district was short on subs; at that time and for many years before and after, he was the elementary school principal, also happened to be a smart and superb teacher (and a veteran, hmm, must have been of WWI). In junior high I started to dislike school and actually never wanted to go to college, which I never finished, or liked, or did well in. See, I just ended a sentence with a preposition, and I'm sure I will continue to.