I am beginning to feel like a fraud. I don’t have all the answers…. I use this to air my ideas and occasionally panic when I don’t have a response to an answering comment.
This is hard. I feel inadequate. I get sidetracked and wonder into territories where I am easily ambushed and shown to lack any real understanding or involvement in issues… yet I embrace the conversation. It tests, makes me think, enables me to consider, reconsider, evaluate and evolve. It educates me.
It educates me!
I’m missing something… educates me… what is the answer I seek? How do I pass this on? Can I adapt that visually? Engage? Provoke? Prompt? Stimulate? Entice..?
I keep coming back to worthy.
I’ve been reconsidering my secondary education. London school. 3000 pupils. I’ve already mentioned my Art teacher who was so memorable I can’t remember his name…
But there is one teacher who stood out…
A group of us used to move his Mini Coupe by lifting it and bouncing it down the road a bit… says where I was with my education. Not proud… English was his thing. He made it exciting, gave it drama. He would read to us from “To Kill a Mockingbird”, animate it and bring it alive; entrance us with his storytelling. We had a good rapport with him. He enjoyed banter. But it’s so easy to overstep the mark – to showoff in front of ones peers.
We clearly caused anxiety when we moved his car. Groups of youths can intimidate. He would have wanted to catch us… yet we thought in our naivety that he would have shared in and enjoyed the joke.
I think he knew it was us… No, I know he knew it was us… he never let on; just waited patiently… we became his prey… you have to admire and respect that in the man.
One by one he got us…
My misdemeanor was to arrogantly greet him one morning; “Mornin Major!” Was enough… he had me. No longer banter, I had flouted his good nature once to often… lunch detention until further notice…!
“What? That’s not fair. You can’t do that!”
Irony.
But that was the beauty of the man. It wasn’t a punishment in the conventional sense. For months he set me questions that at first I was reluctant to engage with, but his persistence, his ability to find the right push-button, involved me to such an extent I was sorry when he said I no longer had to turn up. It was individual tuition, a love of a subject and care for ones pupils that he taught. Every piece of work was marked and returned for correcting, fresh question attached, new task linked to previous. My English matured. I’d look forward to the punishment. I was entered early for O’level, and passed.
He never raised his voice to us. Never caned us. Never judged us. He took the opportunity, for me, to further my understanding, encourage my creativity through foreign language and enabled me to compete with my peers on a level playing field. He taught me to think, question, argue, pursue, revisit, accept, enjoy… Had he done this during lessons, no way would I have been complicit. He knew. Wise man.
Exemplar.
Am I worthy of him?
