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From first to fourth grade, my class had the same teacher. Her name was Solbritt and I believe we were her first actual job as a teacher. She was friendly and all-around positive, and the whole class liked her. She got married, and actually invited us to her wedding. I think it might have been the first wedding I actually went to in my life, at least the first I can remember. Then towards the end of fourth grade or so, she got pregnant. So we knew we'd have a new teacher after the summer. Turns out, that did not end up being "a" new teacher. The school never managed to find anyone to take on our fifth grade class on a permanent basis, so that whole school year was kind of chaotic when it came to that. I think the best it ever stabilized to was two teachers who'd have us different days of the week, though there might have been one who actually were our full-time teacher towards the end. When we finished sixth grade, as was tradition our class wrote a song (or, new lyrics to an existing song) about the years we had spent there with shoutouts to all our teachers to perform at the "graduation", and while we mentioned at least two notable ones we outright stated we didn't even remember all the teachers we got to try out during that fifth year. Then came sixth grade and with it Maj, who we definitely came to consider as the saviour of the class after all that bullshit the previous year. While I have the (potentially not correct) impression that class consensus back then was that Solbritt had been our best teacher, I'm pretty sure I thought already at the time that it actually was Maj. Looking back at it, I'm absolutely sure it was. So here's to you, Maj, you saved our class. We had a good main teacher for the class I was in in 7th-9th grade, but the most most specific teacher I can point out from that time is more like one of my least favourite teachers I've ever had, so I'm gonna skip that. Then, in the third and final year of the following three years of school (which we here in Sweden call "Gymnasium"), came the Japanese teacher who we called Takakusagi-sensei (because, well, that was his last name). Back in those days people couldn't be expected to have their own laptops, but the school I went to was one where they'd loan you one for the three years you'd spend there, so there were a number of us nerds who went there. We'd play Counter-strike on local wireless LAN. This was where I met the one school friend I still am in touch with, and we'd talk anime and manga and he'd get me episodes of stuff because at the time I still had 56k modem at home while he had a 2mbit line. So anyway, with all of us nerds there, a number of us lobbied for Japanese classes, and we eventually got it in the third year. This meant that those Japanese classes had students from all three years, and they were even outside of "regular" hours - we'd have them three times a week, two of them was before the rest of the classes started and one after all other regular classes had finished. But we liked it, in no small part to our teacher, who was an all around great guy in general. He had created the study materials we used himself, since he hadn't found any he liked. We'd frequently have the task of coming up with short skits including what we had learned recently, to perform in front of the class. It was great fun, and those classes pretty much single-handedly was what made me decide to choose Japanese as the thing to study at university, after dropping my previous plan of becoming a civil engineer because oh my god I could not deal with all that math. While my university path changed a number of times before I finally landed a master's degree in something, it's why I moved to the city I live in now, and my uni studies were mostly in the same fields of languages and linguistics (even if my eventual MD wasn't entirely within that, it still involved a lot of writing and speaking). While I always liked reading, and learned English faster than most of my class for which I credit video games, I think those Japanese studies, especially thanks to Mr. T (pun intended), was when I truly became a language nerd. So here's to him too, I think he definitely was the most formative teacher of all I've ever had.
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Apr 4, 2023 11:07
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| # ¿ Apr 16, 2024 15:41 |
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