There’s this question that keeps on coming back during teacher training.
“Who was your favorite teacher, and why?”
Whenever this question pops up, I relate this story about my teacher of Dutch, Mrs L. I can’t remember exactly when during my secondary school days she was my teacher, but I’d been in her classroom for multiple years.
Mrs L. was not an ordinary teacher. It didn’t seem like she cared for ‘the rules’ too much. She gave pop quizzes once in a while and this was not the custom of my other teachers.
She also had this head of crazy gray hair, that was somewhat curly and standing up in every direction; slightly reminiscent of Einstein’s hairdo. But this wasn’t everything that was funny about her head. In fact, she seemed to be able to move some muscles on the top of her head which could make her hair move forward over her forehead for a couple of centimetres.
She read literature with us and read aloud to us, and we enjoyed it. She chose the most disgusting stories. I vaguely remember her reading a story by Jan Wolkers in which the protagonist relates how he killed his wife, diced her up in pieces and put her in the freezer and feeding her to the birds over the course of a few weeks. I believe the story was called Gevederde Vrienden (Feathered Friends).
Once, when one of my classmates was drawing on his desk in her classroom, she stood up and walked over to him, stood behind him and looked over his shoulder. She then proceeded to take away his book and gave him a gentle prod backwards. She bent over the table and spit on it and then proceeded wiping away his drawing with her sleeve. When she was back at her own desk, she started explaining that the enzymes in saliva are very good for cleaning things.
I have fond memories of this woman. Not, I guess, because she was a great teacher, but because she was different from anybody I knew. This made me realize that being different could be cool.
So that’s what I’ve taken away from my experiences with Mrs L. Just be yourself, and if that means being quirky, be quirky. If that means showing your students what interests you, show it to them. Because it’s something that interests you, you’ll be passionate and engaging about it. Sometimes that’s all that it takes.