Eccentric? Who ME?

I was happy the day I retired.

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 More because I had survived 35 years teaching English to teenagers, than the freedom that beckoned. At one time I would have thought SURVIVAL meant being lost in the desert eking out precious drops of water as one limped towards civilisation. But in my teaching world it meant getting to the end of the week, knowing I had enriched, by some miracle, a few kids' lives.

I was born LOVING WORDS.

I taught with the  express purpose of opening doors in young people's minds to the wealth of words with which they could express themselves. 

The ubiquitous, safe, boring word  NICE was banned from my classroom.

I'm possibly border line ADHD, undiagnosed thankfully because I went to school way back then. My point being that I feel for kids trapped motionless on chairs for most of the day. So when it came to teaching spelling (boring!) I would choose my new word for the week and get the children on their feet to learn and experience this delicious morsel that was going to make a DIFFERENCE in their lives.

Such was the word ECCENTRIC.

I was  teaching in the senior phase of a junior school. 

I demonstrated how we broke the word up into 'bite sized pieces' and included stamping and clapping and voila, we had a new word in the memory bank. They giggled as they watched this crazy woman act like a loony, but they got eagerly to their feet on my instruction and slowly at first we got the feel of this new word....

ECC (clap, clap, clap on each letter)  pause

ENT(repeat clap pattern) pause

RIC (repeat clap pattern)

Shout the whole word with a clap for each third of the word, fairly slowly......then, deep breath,

on final RIC, stamp and shout as hard as one can and throw one's arms in the air.

Whew......pause for breath and the laughter to die down. Yes control comes back and yes yes a new word is learned. 

I transferred to the local high school. At the beginning of the new school year I was walking down to my car at the end of the day laden with books in my 'homework'  bag. A group of young boys, dressed in their cricket whites, ready to play a match, were lounging around, waiting for their visiting opponents to arrive.

Suddenly a tall boy peeled himself off the wall which he was helping keep up straight, and leapt onto the path, halting me in my amazed tracks!

He drew himself up TALL ,assumed the position and without any trace of embarrassment, recited

ECC   ENT   RIC .......ECCENTRIC! ..... he clapped, he stamped, he shouted.

The rest of the team cheered.

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'I've not forgotten and never will M'am,' he said.......'describes you perfectly.'

It was one of those 'peak moments' in my life and I went home floating on air, smiling out loud, ready to tackle that mountain of essays in my bag, knowing that I had indeed made that difference in at least one young life.

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