2020 Recap
At the end of the year, people typically look back on what has happened and make lists of favorite new movies, albums or books, but at the end of this train wreck of a year, I couldn’t really come up with anything worth saying that hasn’t been said a million times already so I decided to look back a bit further.
A lot further, in fact.
I don’t know exactly what triggered it, but I thought about my high school years a lot recently, so I decided to highlight some of my favorite teachers.
You often hear people complain that high school was a drag and that they didn’t like it but I always enjoyed it. I spent my high school years at a place called the St. Antonius College in the city of Gouda in Holland, just outside Rotterdam.
It was a midsized school back then, with about 700 students, housed in a 4 story building with 2 gyms, a large arts and crafts area and a cafeteria/gathering space (called ‘aula’ in Dutch). It was a pleasant place to go to school, despite it being on the edge of a dilapidated ghetto, full of burnt out and boarded up buildings and with a high crime rate. It was a fine school, however, and came highly recommended when it was time for me to decide which school to attend.
In my first year at the school, my history teacher was a young woman called Yvonne. I don’t exactly recall her last name, but I think it was Westhuizen. It’s not important because she invited her students to call her Yvonne, rather than ms. Westhuizen.
Yvonne was young, fresh out of the academy, in her mid 20s back then, which would put her in the direction of retirement age today. She had short hair, wore thick-rimmed glasses, and was always cheery.
Yvonne had a great way of teaching. She always told passionate stories about the important moments in history. Even at that young age, I already had a keen interest in history. I still do. I think it’s important to consider your time and place in history, and how it came to be that you are here, now, and what happened before you.
She would also make it as interactive as she could with the, by today’s standards, limited possibilities of the mid 80s.
When discussing the Napoleonic wars, she would walk around in one of those triangular hats, while pointing out the movement of troops and the most important battles on a large map of Europe.
When the subject was the French Revolution, she marched around the classroom holding a stick with a French tricolore on it and at the climax of her story, the storming of the Bastille, she raised it in the air, like in this famous painting, and proclaimed the French Republic.
(she kept her shirt on though)
During a class on one of the big battles in the waning days of the Roman Empire, she took one of those sticks that teachers use to point out things on the blackboard, jumped on her desk, and proceeded to visualize the battle by using it as a sword, describing how the Romans were run out of one of their strongholds by a marauding horde of barbarians, Asterix style, while scattering the items on her desk as the Gaules did the Romans in the cartoons.
After year one, unfortunately, the school board changed the rosters and we were delivered, for history lessons, to the care of a grumpy, geriatric man called Van der Meyden.
It’s not that the man didn’t know his stuff- he was a great scholar and a brilliant historian. He just wasn’t fit to be a high school teacher. The man would have been a valuable asset as a researcher or professor at any institute of higher learning, but for some reason he had ended up as a high school teacher. What was even stranger is that he lived in Amsterdam, some 50 miles away, which meant he had a gruelling 2 hour each way commute every day. Surely, he could have gotten a similar job in, or near, Amsterdam?
During class, he would often explode in fits of rage when he noticed, or even suspected, that someone wasn’t paying full attention. He would start shouting, pulling his hair, and often storm off into the hallway and return, minutes later, while mumbling what useless cretins we were.
We often bet each other cans of Coke, trying to guess when the moment would come when he would finally collapse from cardiac arrest, live on stage.
Looking back at it now, he showed remarkable similarities to Walter White from the Breaking Bad tv show.
Walter White, too, was brilliant in his field, a gifted chemist who could have made a 6 figure income working for a pharmaceutical company or university, but somehow ended up in a dead end high school teaching job.
I don’t know what came of him, he must be pushing a 100 years old by now, assuming he’s even still alive, but in any case, this was not about him, it was about Yvonne, who was a passionate teacher whom I remember fondly.
The second teacher I want to talk about, is my French teacher from my first year in high school. I’ve talked about her before here in this story
While other teachers moved around the different class rooms throughout the day, she had commended her own class room on the 4th floor that she made her own. She refused to teach anywhere else. The room looked like a Paris apartment. It was full of French flags, empty wine bottles and posters of the Eiffel Tower, Mont St. Michel and other French landmarks. She had taught herself how to write with both her left and right hands so that, if she was writing on the blackboard, she could span the entire width of the board without moving. She also loved traveling, mainly to French overseas territories like St. Martin and Martinique.
To make it just a bit more complicated, in French, there are 17 exceptions to this rule, where the adjective comes before the noun, like it does in English and German.
So here was ms. Veenhuizen’s challenge: how do you make 12 year old kids remember all these exceptions?
Bon Beau Joli
Next up, I want to talk about Flip.
Flip was a geography teacher, that was his day job, but the school couldn’t offer him a full time geography position. This was because the full time geography teacher positions were taken up by a women called Angelique Jansen, who looked like a hippie (dyed hair, wildly colored clothes, big earrings) but was actually a quite serious teacher, and a tall, flamboyant gay man, sporting an impressive handlebar moustache, called Aad. He would always dress extravagantly, showing up in class wearing something like purple flare bell bottom jeans, a bright shirt with pineapples on it and a sheepskin lined denim jacket. He chain smoked his way through life and was never without his packet of tobacco. He always reminded me of a sort of Freddy-Mercury-turned-highschool-teacher. He was also the only teacher to ever give me a grade over the maximum possible score of 10/10. When we had a test on the states in the USA, I correctly identified all the states in the test and then, being the nerd that I am, I added the state capital for each state, which amused him to such an extent that he scored me 10.5/10.
But this is not about him, this is about Flip.
The school, unable to offer a full time geography teacher position, came to the solution of making Flip our teacher in “Maatschappijleer”. Now this is sort of hard to translate into English, but it was basically an hour every week where we discussed subjects like cultural diversity, problems in society, religion and other fluff subjects that didn’t quite fit in elsewhere in the curriculum.
Flip was a fun guy. He always had a smile on his face and his classes were always interesting. We’d discuss a subject like ethnic restaurants in the city, or the diversity of the people in our school, or anything else that came up. It was always enjoyable and you could rest easy in the knowledge that you would always get a passing grade. Everybody loved Flip and Flip loved everybody. One part of each week’s class involved one of the students standing in front of the blackboard, writing down a statement and then leading a debate where the statement was discussed. This could be anything, from “eating peanut butter destroys the rainforest” to “the government should spend more on social housing” or whatever else people came up with.
The point was not whether you agreed with the statement or not, the point was to practice debate and group discussion.
It was always fun. Flip would occasionally wade into the discussion but mostly left us to it.
One time, the debate leader was a kid called Anto, who was originally from Suriname and the only black kid in our class. I don’t remember exactly now what his statement was, and it’s not important, but at the end of each debate, we would take a vote as to who agreed with the statement at hand, and who disagreed. These votes were normally quite split, ending in 13-10 or 16-9 or whatever, but on this day, somehow, everyone disagreed with whatever Anto had written and his statement was defeated by 23-0 or something like that. Only Anto himself agreed with what he had come up with.
After the debate, Flip quipped “Well Anto, you are a minority in more ways than one”
This would probably get you into a disciplinary hearing nowadays but back in the 80s everybody had a laugh about it, including Anto himself.
Besides teaching, Flip had another passion: ice skating. And, unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending.
Back then, Holland still regularly had harsh winters with sub zero temperatures, which caused lakes and rivers to freeze over, enabling skaters to head out and enjoy skating on natural ice. The problem with natural ice is that it is fickle and sometimes just gives way and sinks back into the water without there being any discernible reason as to why this happens. This would cause a breach in the surface, which is obviously very dangerous. This is called a “wak” in Dutch.
Local authorities always sent out people to identify waks and mark them with signs and warning tape to make sure that nobody would end up in one.
One weekend, Flip was out skating on a remote lake, somewhere in the North of the country, rounded a bend and skated into a wak that had not yet been marked by the local council. As often happens in incidents like this, the suddenty of the accident and the frozen state he suddenly found himself in, caused him (like many others in this situation) to lose his composure and sense of direction while he met an untimely and gruesome end as he slowly froze and drowned under the ice.
His friends, not having heard from him for days, eventually warned the local authorities who sent out a search party which, after poking around the area for a few days, finally located Flip’s frozen and lifeless body under the ice. It’s a sad and horrible end to the life of one of the nicest teachers I ever had. Even writing this, It still brings tears to my eyes.
To end this section on a positive note, I can report that his friends and family started a charity run event in his honor and every year generate money for good causes, so I'll raise my glass to Flip and hope he is having a good time in The Big Pub In The Sky.
The final teacher I want to talk about was my favorite teacher in high school (and in any school for that matter). It was my Dutch literature teacher, mr. Harry Bolscher.
In year one, our Dutch literature teacher was a grave and serious man called Loet Jansen. He had been at the school longer than anyone could remember and he had even been at the school when my mother attended it in the early 1960s. He had made his way up to Vice Principle but still did a bit of actual teaching.
Now don’t get me wrong, he was a good teacher and his lessons were enjoyable, it was just that he was always very serious about everything. In the year that he was our teacher, I think I saw him smile twice.
From year 2 though, through to the point were I left, my Dutch literature teacher was Mr. Bolscher.
Mr. Bolscher was always properly dressed- button down shirt, waist coat, and a sports jacket (though often with jeans). He had a bald head and a meticulously kempt neck beard, decades before hipsters adopted the look.
He was passionate about Dutch literature and would speak about it with great enthusiasm. Often he would put a chair in front of the blackboard, sit down and read long passages from his favorite books. He was a great orator as well as a great teacher.
In warmer months, he would often take us into a nearby park, sit us down on the grass and address the crowd, standing in front with a book on his arm, resembling Plato in ancient Greece. His classes were always a pleasure.
My mother taught me how to read at age 3, and instilled in me a love of reading that lasts til this day. I read everything there is to read. I read a book a week. I read every magazine, newspaper and piece of paper that has text on it. I read the menus of restaurants I walk past, beer can labels, the back of cereal boxes and signs on the side of buildings. If it has letters on it, you have my attention.
If my mother engineered my love of reading, then mr. Bolscher only escalated it. One of the reasons I started writing myself is partly down to mr. Bolscher. I was always doing stuff related to publishing. When I was 8 years old, I was creating my own cartoons. They were terrible but I still enjoyed doing it. In highschool, I was an editor for the school paper for 3 years (we won Best School Paper in the city each year), and when the internet became a thing, I started writing blogs soon after.
Before we reach the conclusion of this story, there is one more story about mr. Bolscher I want to share with you.
He was always known as a staunch bachelor. Nobody, according to the gossip we heard through the grapevine, had ever been known to spot mr. Bolscher with a girlfriend. This changed when he was in his late 30s and suddenly was seen walking around town hand in hand with a woman.
They were married soon after and a short while after that, their first child was underway. It turned out to be a beautiful baby girl. About a year later, child number two was underway. This also turned out to be a girl.
As mr. Bolscher wanted to have a son too, he and his wife decided to go for it one more time. 9 months later, mrs. Bolscher gave birth. To triplets. And they were all girls.
So now mr. Bolscher had 5 girls. I lost track of him, and all my other high school teachers but one, after that. The only teacher I stayed in touch with was my year 2 German Teacher, because he was the father of a very good friend of mine. Unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago.
And this concludes my story about my favorite teachers.
As an afterthought, it is funny to consider that, despite me always having a great time at the school, and thinking back about it fondly, I never actually graduated there.
The reason for this was that, being a typical stubborn teenager, in year 5, I refused to put in any effort and preferred to spend my days sitting by the lake, drinking beer and getting stoned. (High school in Holland is 6 years).
When I came back to year 5 after the summer break, I expected to be cruising, which I was, more or less. At the end of my second attempt at year 5 though, the weather improved and the call of sitting by the lake with a case of beer again proved too powerful. I still would have passed but I somehow managed to miscalculate my grade point average for German by 0.05 points. This meant that my end-of-year score dropped from 5/10 to 4/10 by a hair-thin margin. This in turn meant I had failed year 5 for the second time which meant automatic expulsion. Looking back at it now, this seems really weird because, to this day, I speak fluent German. Languages have always been my forte.
The next year, I enrolled in a school for adult education, which offered the opportunity to adults without a high school education and drop-outs like me to finish their education by rolling year 5 and 6 into one. They said that if you wanted to attend class, you were welcome and if you didn’t, then you could stay home.
I passed easily and because this school was very small and didn’t really have the facilities to stage a large graduation ceremony, they agreed with my old school that that year’s graduation night would be hosted there.
So in the end, I still received my high school diploma at the St. Antonius College, albeit a diploma issued by a different school.
I couldn’t really think of a more satisfying end to this story so I’ll stop here.
Enjoy your weekend.
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