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highlyeccentricI've had plenty of nice teachers, over the years. Dozens of good teachers. A handful of great teachers. And four absolutely awesome teachers- really excellent people, great teachers, the kind who actualy connect with their students, and who have, for one reason or another, changed the direction of my life for the better.
Mrs Catherine Coffee accellerated me into her year six class. We built cardboard box houses around our desks and did most of our work sprawled on the floor. I remember remarking to my mother that I didn't feel like I was doing anything in her class, but in hindsight I realise just how much I learned. These things included:
*How to assemble the creative ramblings of my brain into a short story. Mrs C's tutelage moved me from a dreamy kid to a Writing Person. I rarely write prose fiction anymore, but the creative power of words I would probably never have the same grasp of without her.
*The use of 'single quotation marks' instead of "double". Not sure why this was an important thing to learn, but I took it very seriously at the time
*that it was a good idea to read something other than Anne of Green Gables in my lifetime. I owe Mrs C my passion for fantasy- she went so far as to tear the cover off her own copy of Redwall, and have my parents leave it lying around my house, in order that I wouldn't be turned off by the big scary rat on the front cover. She introduced me to Victor Kelleher, and it was under this influence that I chose a Tamora Peirce book (though I don't think she had anything directly to do with it) from the Scholastic Book Club, and my fate as a fantasy nerd was set.
Mrs C is trained in Gifted & Talented teaching. Her class wasn't an OC class, but the same tricks were used. And really, why wouldn't you want to teach kids, even middle of the road kids, using all of their creative faculties? Mrs C put my mother in contact with the Gifted & Talented Association of NSW, and reading their magazine gave me a sense of not being alone. I picked up a serious concern for the eduction of gifted children, and for a long time I wanted to be a G&T teacher.
Mrs C went on to teach my year 7 extension english class, and to be something of a personal mentor to me until senior high school. She wieghed in with my mother to get me the internet, to allow me email access and then to get me MSN messenger. When Chris Mac said something seriously offensive to me on one occaision, about which I was unbelievably destraught, I went to her before I went to my mother. In senior years, the school instituted a teacher-student mentor program. Apparently we got to nominate mentors, which I don't remember, but if I did I nominated Mrs C. Unfortunately for all concerned, at about that point she Got Religion, in the pentecostal sense. If I went to her struggling with something, she asked about my prayer life. We got into arguments about my lack of enthusiasm for the conservative-pentecostal culture at school; at the point when she reproached me for not going to Hunter Harvest (a large but objectionable evangelical rally), i gave up. It was an unfortunate end to what had been a truly fantastic teacher-student relationship, and I'm sorry that I let the religious thing embitter me, but I was living in a state of war with the school religious culture, and coming from my erstwhile ally, it seemed a betrayal. I believe she has since returned to sensible churches and moved on from St Phillips.
Mrs Cilla Doyle spent the three last years of my high school career struggling against my by-then obsessive fantasy fiction obssession. Unfortunately for her, she tried to replace it with crime fiction, which i maintain is truly awful stuff. Aside from that, she was a true kindred spirit. She taught me for five of my seven HSC subjects, and academically speaking I was allowed my own head. When I decided I knew the RLST syllabus better than the teacher they had gotten in (true), that was ok, and the way was quietly smoothed over for me to do the course by assignment only, marked by Mrs D. She oversaw my X2 English major work and gave me the joy of studying Yeats.
It's hard to pinpoint how, exactly, Mrs D changed anything. I know I wouldn't have got through the HSC without her- her door was always open and I did, in fact, spend most of the year in her office, musing, crying, talking, or buying fundraising chocolates from her. I swapped books with her twelve year old son and randomly raided her office bookcase. She had come from a boy's school, and she had only sons. She was deeply invested in all of her students, but particularly the girls, and two or three of us more than the rest (I believe). I didn't learn any drastic new skill under her- my essay writing more or less popped into being in English, and in the histories it had more to do with my modern history teacher, Mr Ball. Studying Gothic Literature in year eleven taught me great stuff about description, which I put to good use in X2 English. Writing a poem a day for X2 was a great learning curve, but not directly Mrs D's fault.
What Mrs D did for me, in the last three years of high school, was to give me a hope. A sense that there was something bigger than high school and places and people farther and further than Port Stephens and Newcastle. I suspect- although I didn't realise at the time that that was what going on, so I have no clear memory- that without Mrs D's encouragement I would have never had the guts to go for Sydney Uni. I would have stayed in Newcastle, to stay with the one set of people I really wanted to be with- the Hunter Uniting Youth Fellowship. Mrs D assured me that everything would be better when I got to uni. That I would be out of the social rut I was in- a promise which I wasn't too confident in, since they said the same thing about high school and I'd hoped the same thing about acceleration, and niether of those had made any huge difference socially. More than that, though, she made me see further academically. I gave her an essay on Yeats once which came back with full marks and a note saying she'd have expected that from a university student. Rather than insisting I conform to the Board of Studies set essay format, she let me have my head and kept reminding me that there was more out there for my brain than the HSC. Her confidence in my X2 poetry extended beyond "you'll do well with this"- in fact, she knew i would fall down in places because of my lack of "reflection", but although she hassled me to improve all that, she made it clear that my work was good in its own right.
Cilla Doyle didn't give me ambition- i'd always had wild dreams. She gave me a sense of the future, which is even better.
(interestingly, she too did a Bachelor of Arts at Sydney Uni, and I suspect she did expect I would do a dip ed at the end of mine... but she never said that to me, for which I am grateful)
Associate Proffessor John H Pryor got me into medieval studies, by means of flattery. He is also eternally awesome, kind, very helpful to students, and until I met Awesome Teacher Number Four, the most exacting teacher I'd had. I still put more effort into 1500 words for him than I do 2500 for a regular course. He doesn't pander to the isms, ologies and fads which the history department adores so much. He doesn't fluff around with PowerPoint and he never underestimates the intelligence of his students. Bollocks to teachers who tell you from day dot the "themes" of the period- JP runs you through names, dates, politics, major social developments, and then lets you loose to actually research something. He is God and we will take down anyone who says otherwise. (we being his medieval studies groupies, under the leadership of Jenny Green)
Dr Melanie Heyworth is Awesome Teacher Number Four and my current hero in life. I'm not sure what to say about her, because I don't have the benefit of hindsight. It's all her fault I'm enamoured with Anglo-Saxons, as "Egotism Makes Me A Medievalist" mentioned. Her absolute love of the subject is infectious. I'm lucky in that we share a fondness for the more religious side of the canon- although who wouldn't love a course on Satan? And although the cast of grand(dad/ma) lecturers I've had has been almost without exception excellent, there's something about being taught be a young lecturer which I find greatly encouraging. Melanie also does a great job of humouring obsessive students like myself- I tend to email her at random with persnicketty grammatical questions, vaguely relevant things I found on the internet and instructions not to read my essay because it's the most boring thing I've ever written. She also went to some lengths to get me copies of obscure journal articles last semester (honestly! why doesn't Fisher carry the American Benedictine Review?).
Point is, when asked why I'm into these Anglo-Saxon types, I could try explaining about their wonderful poetry, their unique take on Christianity, their funky vocabulary and the weird things they did with onions, or I could just point the finger at Melanie.
Mrs Catherine Coffee accellerated me into her year six class. We built cardboard box houses around our desks and did most of our work sprawled on the floor. I remember remarking to my mother that I didn't feel like I was doing anything in her class, but in hindsight I realise just how much I learned. These things included:
*How to assemble the creative ramblings of my brain into a short story. Mrs C's tutelage moved me from a dreamy kid to a Writing Person. I rarely write prose fiction anymore, but the creative power of words I would probably never have the same grasp of without her.
*The use of 'single quotation marks' instead of "double". Not sure why this was an important thing to learn, but I took it very seriously at the time
*that it was a good idea to read something other than Anne of Green Gables in my lifetime. I owe Mrs C my passion for fantasy- she went so far as to tear the cover off her own copy of Redwall, and have my parents leave it lying around my house, in order that I wouldn't be turned off by the big scary rat on the front cover. She introduced me to Victor Kelleher, and it was under this influence that I chose a Tamora Peirce book (though I don't think she had anything directly to do with it) from the Scholastic Book Club, and my fate as a fantasy nerd was set.
Mrs C is trained in Gifted & Talented teaching. Her class wasn't an OC class, but the same tricks were used. And really, why wouldn't you want to teach kids, even middle of the road kids, using all of their creative faculties? Mrs C put my mother in contact with the Gifted & Talented Association of NSW, and reading their magazine gave me a sense of not being alone. I picked up a serious concern for the eduction of gifted children, and for a long time I wanted to be a G&T teacher.
Mrs C went on to teach my year 7 extension english class, and to be something of a personal mentor to me until senior high school. She wieghed in with my mother to get me the internet, to allow me email access and then to get me MSN messenger. When Chris Mac said something seriously offensive to me on one occaision, about which I was unbelievably destraught, I went to her before I went to my mother. In senior years, the school instituted a teacher-student mentor program. Apparently we got to nominate mentors, which I don't remember, but if I did I nominated Mrs C. Unfortunately for all concerned, at about that point she Got Religion, in the pentecostal sense. If I went to her struggling with something, she asked about my prayer life. We got into arguments about my lack of enthusiasm for the conservative-pentecostal culture at school; at the point when she reproached me for not going to Hunter Harvest (a large but objectionable evangelical rally), i gave up. It was an unfortunate end to what had been a truly fantastic teacher-student relationship, and I'm sorry that I let the religious thing embitter me, but I was living in a state of war with the school religious culture, and coming from my erstwhile ally, it seemed a betrayal. I believe she has since returned to sensible churches and moved on from St Phillips.
Mrs Cilla Doyle spent the three last years of my high school career struggling against my by-then obsessive fantasy fiction obssession. Unfortunately for her, she tried to replace it with crime fiction, which i maintain is truly awful stuff. Aside from that, she was a true kindred spirit. She taught me for five of my seven HSC subjects, and academically speaking I was allowed my own head. When I decided I knew the RLST syllabus better than the teacher they had gotten in (true), that was ok, and the way was quietly smoothed over for me to do the course by assignment only, marked by Mrs D. She oversaw my X2 English major work and gave me the joy of studying Yeats.
It's hard to pinpoint how, exactly, Mrs D changed anything. I know I wouldn't have got through the HSC without her- her door was always open and I did, in fact, spend most of the year in her office, musing, crying, talking, or buying fundraising chocolates from her. I swapped books with her twelve year old son and randomly raided her office bookcase. She had come from a boy's school, and she had only sons. She was deeply invested in all of her students, but particularly the girls, and two or three of us more than the rest (I believe). I didn't learn any drastic new skill under her- my essay writing more or less popped into being in English, and in the histories it had more to do with my modern history teacher, Mr Ball. Studying Gothic Literature in year eleven taught me great stuff about description, which I put to good use in X2 English. Writing a poem a day for X2 was a great learning curve, but not directly Mrs D's fault.
What Mrs D did for me, in the last three years of high school, was to give me a hope. A sense that there was something bigger than high school and places and people farther and further than Port Stephens and Newcastle. I suspect- although I didn't realise at the time that that was what going on, so I have no clear memory- that without Mrs D's encouragement I would have never had the guts to go for Sydney Uni. I would have stayed in Newcastle, to stay with the one set of people I really wanted to be with- the Hunter Uniting Youth Fellowship. Mrs D assured me that everything would be better when I got to uni. That I would be out of the social rut I was in- a promise which I wasn't too confident in, since they said the same thing about high school and I'd hoped the same thing about acceleration, and niether of those had made any huge difference socially. More than that, though, she made me see further academically. I gave her an essay on Yeats once which came back with full marks and a note saying she'd have expected that from a university student. Rather than insisting I conform to the Board of Studies set essay format, she let me have my head and kept reminding me that there was more out there for my brain than the HSC. Her confidence in my X2 poetry extended beyond "you'll do well with this"- in fact, she knew i would fall down in places because of my lack of "reflection", but although she hassled me to improve all that, she made it clear that my work was good in its own right.
Cilla Doyle didn't give me ambition- i'd always had wild dreams. She gave me a sense of the future, which is even better.
(interestingly, she too did a Bachelor of Arts at Sydney Uni, and I suspect she did expect I would do a dip ed at the end of mine... but she never said that to me, for which I am grateful)
Associate Proffessor John H Pryor got me into medieval studies, by means of flattery. He is also eternally awesome, kind, very helpful to students, and until I met Awesome Teacher Number Four, the most exacting teacher I'd had. I still put more effort into 1500 words for him than I do 2500 for a regular course. He doesn't pander to the isms, ologies and fads which the history department adores so much. He doesn't fluff around with PowerPoint and he never underestimates the intelligence of his students. Bollocks to teachers who tell you from day dot the "themes" of the period- JP runs you through names, dates, politics, major social developments, and then lets you loose to actually research something. He is God and we will take down anyone who says otherwise. (we being his medieval studies groupies, under the leadership of Jenny Green)
Dr Melanie Heyworth is Awesome Teacher Number Four and my current hero in life. I'm not sure what to say about her, because I don't have the benefit of hindsight. It's all her fault I'm enamoured with Anglo-Saxons, as "Egotism Makes Me A Medievalist" mentioned. Her absolute love of the subject is infectious. I'm lucky in that we share a fondness for the more religious side of the canon- although who wouldn't love a course on Satan? And although the cast of grand(dad/ma) lecturers I've had has been almost without exception excellent, there's something about being taught be a young lecturer which I find greatly encouraging. Melanie also does a great job of humouring obsessive students like myself- I tend to email her at random with persnicketty grammatical questions, vaguely relevant things I found on the internet and instructions not to read my essay because it's the most boring thing I've ever written. She also went to some lengths to get me copies of obscure journal articles last semester (honestly! why doesn't Fisher carry the American Benedictine Review?).
Point is, when asked why I'm into these Anglo-Saxon types, I could try explaining about their wonderful poetry, their unique take on Christianity, their funky vocabulary and the weird things they did with onions, or I could just point the finger at Melanie.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-19 04:37 pm (UTC)