I know that children can be cruel and unfair if it comes to describe their teachers. In particular, if they had to suffer from their teaching methods. On the other hand, kids are capable of turning a blind eye on the crankiness of some educators when they love them, however inefficient they may be. Whom we never forget, is the first teacher we may have fallen in love with. Many of them, however, if they were boring, sank into oblivion as soon as one has got rid of the school. Anyway, there were moments in the lives of most schoolchildren, where a school was more an instrument of torture than anything else. For me, as a little boy in a German school, whose parents had just moved from a big city to a smaller town, the new school turned out to be a bit of a challenge. Our French teacher was close to retirement. His French was weird. My grandmother's French was perfect. I had to suffer a lot since French seemed to me rather a punishment. The Latin teacher was a sort of a linguistic bureaucrat, both teachers were easy to forget after having moved on to another school three years later.
What is more difficult to ever forget, is our then teacher of English, Doctor Lepp. He had a mad glint in his eyes, and was dressed like a caricature of an elderly gentleman. He would never call you by your name and all we did during the three years was reading pages over pages of Lewis Carroll's fairy tale Alice in Wonderland. Phrase by phrase this oeuvre had to be translated, day by day. There was no possibility to discuss the usefulness of this. The novel begins - if I remember well - with Alice falling through a rabbit hole into a strange world and having all sorts of adventures. At some stage, the Cat says so rightly: We're all mad here. And Alice herself was mad too. Quote: Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen and four times seven is --- oh, dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate. Some call this the best example of literary nonsense, others, for instance Migraine researchers, even suggest that the author himself was actually a Migraineur. No wonder that this version of headaches got the name of AWS which stands for Alice in Wonderland Syndrom.
Needless to say, that after Dr. Lepp, who's madness was obvious, I had a beautiful lady teacher who had studied English in Great Britain. She was friendly, intelligent and - for a young boy - an ideal object to fall in love with. Although we had Fräulein Dahl only for a short while as a teacher, we learned proper English in record time. I forgot most of this still popular fairy tale and never found the energy to reread it. Nowadays, one can easily download Alice in Wonderland without falling through a rabbit hole. And Dr. Lepp's own sufferings as a Migraine patient must be over by now.
What is more difficult to ever forget, is our then teacher of English, Doctor Lepp. He had a mad glint in his eyes, and was dressed like a caricature of an elderly gentleman. He would never call you by your name and all we did during the three years was reading pages over pages of Lewis Carroll's fairy tale Alice in Wonderland. Phrase by phrase this oeuvre had to be translated, day by day. There was no possibility to discuss the usefulness of this. The novel begins - if I remember well - with Alice falling through a rabbit hole into a strange world and having all sorts of adventures. At some stage, the Cat says so rightly: We're all mad here. And Alice herself was mad too. Quote: Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen and four times seven is --- oh, dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate. Some call this the best example of literary nonsense, others, for instance Migraine researchers, even suggest that the author himself was actually a Migraineur. No wonder that this version of headaches got the name of AWS which stands for Alice in Wonderland Syndrom.
Needless to say, that after Dr. Lepp, who's madness was obvious, I had a beautiful lady teacher who had studied English in Great Britain. She was friendly, intelligent and - for a young boy - an ideal object to fall in love with. Although we had Fräulein Dahl only for a short while as a teacher, we learned proper English in record time. I forgot most of this still popular fairy tale and never found the energy to reread it. Nowadays, one can easily download Alice in Wonderland without falling through a rabbit hole. And Dr. Lepp's own sufferings as a Migraine patient must be over by now.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen