Teachers: the Bad and the Good. Part 1.
In post #2, when I threw in an untrue statement, I reminded myself of my history teacher when I was about 14. Now, history can be one dry subject, but Mr M’s lessons made the most parched desert feel like a verdant rainforest. Every single lesson over the course of one whole year consisted of dictation, dictation, and yes, you’ve guessed it, a bit more dictation. And he had the most monotonous drone imaginable. Rumour had it that scheduling requirements had forced him to step outside of his official role of teaching A-Level politics and teach us juniors all about the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions, so we inferred he was taking it out on us by doing it in the most mind-numbing way possible. I still remember his stuffy classroom with a cover of The Economist on the wall showing a caricature of Mikhail Gorbachev and the caption “Streetwise in the Kremlin”. The fact that I remember this mundane detail shows you how desperate I must have been for any kind of distraction.
So why would I ever remind myself of someone like that, let alone admit to it? Occasionally, maybe to prove to himself that he wasn’t a cross between a cassette player and a dehumidifier, Mr M would mumble things like “King Billy” instead of “King William”, or throw in something absurd, like “and there was much rejoicing by the merry wives of Windsor”, to see if we would write it down, thereby checking whether we were paying attention. Of course we all did because naturally none of us were.
Next door to the history classroom was where Mr H taught us Latin, another subject which lends itself towards academically arid conditions. But despite the proximity, the contrast couldn’t have been greater. In the first five minutes of every lesson, we had a warm-up quiz to translate vocabulary from Latin to English and vice versa. Mr H would say the word out loud, and the person who shot his hand up first would be given the chance to translate it and win a point. A running tally was kept throughout the term, and the top three scorers were awarded prizes in the last lesson (a generous quantity of sweets). You might think it trivial, but Mr H knew how to tap directly into the each boy’s most primal competitive instincts and his desire for sugar, and it’s a wonder no-one’s arm got dislocated in the process.
After an adrenaline-fuelled start like that, we were psyched up and ready for anything – even Latin.
A warm-up quiz or game is something I’ve borrowed and used at the start of many lessons, and it never fails.
