You can tell immediately which was my best teacher.
When I became a teacher myself I tried to emulate his careful attention to detail.
It was not difficult to get back into the swing of school; most, if not all, of the boys in my class were the same as had been with me in the year before.
And several of the teachers also carried on into the Fourth Form year. We had the same people for English, Latin, Maths and Science.
I don't even remember the new Social Studies master, "Lucy" Lucena. But George Marshall, our new French teacher, made a lasting impression: his enthusiasm for French, and other languages, rubbed off, and that was why I took French as one of my major subjects at University.
I can still remember many of his little idiosyncrasies: tiny pieces of paper, which he called "bus-tickets" on which we did a quick 5-question vocab test every day, several mnemonics which I still use to help with pronunciation or gender.
You can see from his comment on my report that he was on the ball: amid a team of old-fashioned "Very good"s, he wrote something helpful and encouraging.
And he hadn't even finished his studies, which were presumably carried on in the evenings, as many teachers still did in those days.
Not only was he a good teacher of French, he also took a real interest in his pupils, and one Saturday took some of the class on a tramp from Waitakere railway station to the west coast and back - quite a long walk at our age, but one that started a long enthusiasm for tramping.
And a couple of years later he offered to teach an after-school class in German, which I attended for twelve months. His coaching was good enough to enable me to win a Goethe Society prize for oral German at the end of that year, and to study the first-year German course at university a couple of years later.
George Marshall was one of the two really first-rate teachers I found at AGS.
No comments:
Post a Comment