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October 11th 2006 07:36
Well, a teacher of mine died on Sunday. He was Professor of Classics at Sydney, and his particular expertise was Greek tragedy. He was in Newcastle, visiting his wife’s family, when he began to feel chest pains. They took him to a hospital for tests, and he passed away there of a heart attack. And so it goes; I imagine anyone who dies of a heart attack dies pretty much the same way.
His wife, children, and grandchildren survive him.
The last I’d seen him was towards the end of 2000, probably October or November. I met him while he was on his way to a train station, and he asked me if I was going to the Latin Summer Camp in January. I wasn’t, but I told him maybe, then I kept walking. I never felt comfortable talking to him out of class.
I always felt, and still do feel, like a fake. I was a bad student. I didn’t study. I won scholarships, but almost failed exams. I had to get special permission from him to continue in honours in fourth year, and I dropped out of honours halfway.
And when I dropped, he asked me to have a chat with him. I dreaded chatting with him, of course; and he’d been asking me to chat with him, at various times, for the past three years. And the first question he asked was whether everything was all right at home. It’s testimony to how dedicated a teacher he was that he took a pastoral interest in his students, honestly cared about them, and set aside time from his teaching duties, and his personal life, and writing books and articles, and his involvement with countless committees, charitable and academic, and his hundreds of responsibilities as head of the department and promoter of classics, to talk to pupils one-on-one. No other uni lecturer I’ve ever known went out of their way to make appointments with students.
He even called me up when I was unwell or missing classes.
He was a very good man; a paragon of Catholic values.
His particular talent, for which I most remember him, and which in future years will unfairly come to be all the memory I hold of him, was an astounding ability to get a class interested, and to get a class thinking. I’ve seen him lecture in a lot of different contexts -- to the public generally, to high schools, to small and large groups of uni students, to academics. And he always brought to his talks an infectious enthusiasm, and an infectious intellectual fascination.
His talent for teaching extended from the lecture hall to the classroom. He frighteningly made sure everyone expressed their opinion; he always focussed on conveying the value of a text, rather than mechanically reciting themes and interpretations and features; and he possessed the gift to draw something of interest from the stupidest student remark. Other classics lecturers could give you mountains of information and viewpoints and bibliography to wade through; but I tend to think that we left with more from his classes, where we focussed on the text, where we discussed rather than listened.
The shock is the suddenness, as it always is, and the rearrangement of things you took for granted. Out of the midst of life, engaged in a hundred things, to simply be gone. And, of course, he’s not gone yet; it hasn’t sunk in. I’m still going to be preparing myself for an awkward accidental meeting whenever I near that train station, and I’m still going to want to impress him, to be other than a failure.
I think he led a happy life; I don’t think he’d have much, if anything, to regret.
His wife, children, and grandchildren survive him.
The last I’d seen him was towards the end of 2000, probably October or November. I met him while he was on his way to a train station, and he asked me if I was going to the Latin Summer Camp in January. I wasn’t, but I told him maybe, then I kept walking. I never felt comfortable talking to him out of class.
I always felt, and still do feel, like a fake. I was a bad student. I didn’t study. I won scholarships, but almost failed exams. I had to get special permission from him to continue in honours in fourth year, and I dropped out of honours halfway.
And when I dropped, he asked me to have a chat with him. I dreaded chatting with him, of course; and he’d been asking me to chat with him, at various times, for the past three years. And the first question he asked was whether everything was all right at home. It’s testimony to how dedicated a teacher he was that he took a pastoral interest in his students, honestly cared about them, and set aside time from his teaching duties, and his personal life, and writing books and articles, and his involvement with countless committees, charitable and academic, and his hundreds of responsibilities as head of the department and promoter of classics, to talk to pupils one-on-one. No other uni lecturer I’ve ever known went out of their way to make appointments with students.
He even called me up when I was unwell or missing classes.
He was a very good man; a paragon of Catholic values.
His particular talent, for which I most remember him, and which in future years will unfairly come to be all the memory I hold of him, was an astounding ability to get a class interested, and to get a class thinking. I’ve seen him lecture in a lot of different contexts -- to the public generally, to high schools, to small and large groups of uni students, to academics. And he always brought to his talks an infectious enthusiasm, and an infectious intellectual fascination.
His talent for teaching extended from the lecture hall to the classroom. He frighteningly made sure everyone expressed their opinion; he always focussed on conveying the value of a text, rather than mechanically reciting themes and interpretations and features; and he possessed the gift to draw something of interest from the stupidest student remark. Other classics lecturers could give you mountains of information and viewpoints and bibliography to wade through; but I tend to think that we left with more from his classes, where we focussed on the text, where we discussed rather than listened.
The shock is the suddenness, as it always is, and the rearrangement of things you took for granted. Out of the midst of life, engaged in a hundred things, to simply be gone. And, of course, he’s not gone yet; it hasn’t sunk in. I’m still going to be preparing myself for an awkward accidental meeting whenever I near that train station, and I’m still going to want to impress him, to be other than a failure.
I think he led a happy life; I don’t think he’d have much, if anything, to regret.
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Comment by Justin
Keep up the good work. =)