January 10, 2012

  • Thank you Mrs. Nibbs

    Dear Mrs. Nibbs,

    I can't believe that it has really been just over 30 years and one month since we last sat together and talked about my future. It really doesn't seem that long ago to me but time has this strange way of screwing our memories around as we get older - the good times are fleeting and  meetings seem to last for days.

    Anyways, enough of worrying about the way time flies. Recently, thanks to the mystery of life that is six degrees of separation, our mutual friend, Jule Hankin, told me that you had decided to retire from teaching at the end of last year. I was quite shocked because I didn't think that you would be old enough to be giving the game away. I always thought you were only about 10 years older than me which would give you at least another 5 or so years or so chipping away at the impenetrable walls that are teenage minds.

    When I heard the news, I felt that I had to at least wish you well in your new life of ease but I also wanted to let you know what effect you had on my life. You may never have known that your efforts to teach me had any kind of effect on me, but hindsight is a most wonderful creature and when I look back over this past 30 years, you definitely had a  positive influence on me.

    I had the privilege of being taught English by you in 1980 & 1981. My initial thoughts on meeting you were that you were too thin and could really do with a bit of a feed, although if you were like that now, you would probably be classed as a super-model and be living the high life somewhere exotic. The other little thing that I found odd about you was that you wore a gold mens watch, analogue and wind-up. I asked you about that and you told me that for some reason, your body tended to suck the life out of ladies watches. Was I impressed by that?

    Yeah.

    I don't think that you saw your role as one to teach us English in the traditional meaning. As year 9 &10 students, we really should have been beyond all of that before getting to high school anyway and, most of us knew how to read (albeit excruciatingly slowly in some cases) and write (in my case, there were at least 2 letters in each line of writing that was legible).

    You will be happy to know that the advice you gave me about never ever using Cursive again has stuck with me all this time and I have been printing everything that I physically write.

    Rather, you were there to teach us how to appreciate the English language in its various forms from poetry to plays to novels. Even pop music came into play one term when you had us analyzing songs. I may have actually done well on that assignment so one out of a years worth isn't really that bad is it?

    The things that I realised that I had gotten from you was that love of literature and the English language. There is nothing I enjoy more than to being able to make time to devour a book. I am currently reading the collected works of Kurt Vonnegut but my real love is Stephen King but I will read anything given to me good, bad or indifferent. I have still not read anything of Shakespeare.

    I also took from you a small passion for putting words down on paper (or on a computer screen nowdays). When you consider the "essays" that I produced for assignments, you would probably think that writing anything would be the last thing that I would be interested in doing but I have discovered the beauty and power of words that you obviously saw and tried to pass onto me all those years ago. This is why I took up writing my various blogs.

    The last conversation we had was on December 4, 1980 just after I had been handed my school certificate. Unfortunately, you had been forced by me through my general apathy of that year to give me the final grade that I got but when I confronted you about it, you told me that you felt I had the potential to do better and that I should continue onto year 11. I guess you realised that I had sabotaged my own future and were willing to throw me a lifeline.

    Had I been able to return the next year, I would not have progressed to year 11 - I would have repeated year 10 and developed the potential you saw in me. I realised a number of years ago, if I had, I probably would have been more likely to go into teaching than where I am now. What would I have taught? Ironically, English (although that's probably the incorrect use of irony).

    I don't know if I have said what I wanted to say properly. It always sounds better in my head but once I start typing it and having to put it into some coherent order, things get lost somewhere. I just wanted to thank you for being one of the important people in my life who probably would not have known how much of a positive influence in it you were.

    So to you Mrs. Nibbs.... well I guess now that I am an adult, I can call you Jo-Anne. So to  you Jo-Anne, I say thank you for giving me that insight into what the English language could be and the joy of reading. It means that you did good.

    Happy retirement.

    Kevin Wilson