The teachers who taught more than just a lesson
I liked school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though, because we had double English. Double English meant 80 minutes of books, plays, and poetry in Mr Floyd’s classroom, in the old school building of Ashton. It was the best part of my school week.
I remember Mr Floyd teaching us A Midsummer Night’s Dream for our Junior Certificate and thinking ‘This Shakespeare’s alright’. I don’t think any of us had realised, until then, that Shakespeare could be funny.
For our Leaving Cert, it was the less cheery stuff of Macbeth, but Mr Floyd made those characters — 11th century Scottish kings and soldiers — seem real, too. He encouraged reluctant, red-faced teenagers to stand at the top of the classroom and act out the parts. It worked, so much so that I can still recite Lady Macbeth’s ‘out damn spot’ monologue in its entirety.
Mr Floyd was different. He had a posh, English accent. He wore silk cravats, tweed blazers, and corduroy trousers. He had hung a framed Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon album on the wall above his desk.
He spoke to us like we were adults. If we didn’t hand in our homework on time, he shrugged and reminded us that no one would chase us for assignments in college.
I was in awe of his encyclopedic knowledge, but it was the way he taught that made us sit up and listen.
He took poems, like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’, which seemed incomprehensible to a teenager who cared only for Nirvana lyrics, and made it comprehensible.
He trusted that, even though most days we were more interested in passing notes, feigning cool and hiding cigarettes from our parents, we were also hungry for serious stuff.
I will never forget the day he arrived into class bearing photocopies of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. ‘Stasis in darkness’, we read. It was love at first line and Plath has been a literary hero of mine ever since.
Even when he was sticking to the curriculum, Mr Floyd had a way of making it relevant, whether it was the desert island of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies or the glittering world of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Above all, it was his passion for Irish poetry that really rubbed off. I have re-read Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’ hundreds of time since school, but still recall the first time a poem made me sad. Patrick Kavanagh wasn’t going to the dance in Billy Brennan’s barn, and, like every 16-year-old who feels left out from time to time, that hit me hard.
Another class started with a reading of Louis MacNeice’s ‘Prayer before Birth’, before we were charged with writing down our own hopes for an unborn child. We worked silently for 40 minutes. When the bell went, there was the usual crush to get out the door, but we all left discussing what we wrote.
Later, in not so happy times, when I was struggling through a masters in Anglo-Irish literature, I went back to my sixth-class poetry book, destroyed with notes and over-enthusiastic highlighting, and it reminded me why I was in college. Like so many experiences in life, I didn’t get the meaning straight away, but now I see that, for a not-so-bright dyslexic kid, woeful with maths but with a love of English, Mr Floyd’s teaching gave me confidence.
Even when I encountered difficult texts, beyond my understanding, I saw them as a challenge and never once felt the same horror as when I opened my maths book on the chapter called ‘Indices’. Little did I know that my enjoyment of reading, and ability to write, would later became my means of working and supporting myself.
Recently, I returned to my old school in Cork. The posters of Yeats and Beckett are still on the wall, along with the pictures of all of my class in the school plays Mr Floyd directed. Those plays must have taken a huge amount of his personal time (and tested his patience to the limits), but they gave us a taste of what it was like to achieve something from nothing.
Mr Floyd is still there, too, tearing through books to find a quote, a poem, a passage to amuse or interest, just like he was when I was his student.
Being the obnoxious teenager that I was, I never appreciated, at the time, that he taught me much more than how to pass an exam and I doubt, back then, that I ever said thank you. Better late than never.
I went to a school in the north side of Dublin called St Mary’s Holy Faith Secondary in Killester, and one of the teachers who really stuck out for me was Mr Mulcahy.
He taught me geography, which I didn’t know much about going into secondary school. The subject just opened up the world to me.
I was also close with him because he used to volunteer his own time to do the school musical every year. He directed it and I auditioned for a role in Calamity Jane and that’s when I first took an interest in drama.
He was a good teacher because we all got great results, but he also had a lot of time for us, even as a man in an all female environment.
Later I did a teaching course in drama in the UK because of that positive experience I had with Mr Mulcahy.
I look back on my years in secondary school and think it really shaped what I became.
He was unlike any other teacher in the school.
He was very punctual so you never arrived late to his class, he was very strict but he brought us on trips, and did projects and little experiments with us.
In the geography room he would never just read from the book, he’d make you stand up and act something out whether it was about rivers or NGOs.
He was forward thinking, he made learning interactive and fun, but at the same time you’d never mess in his class. Later he encouraged us to do charity work so he was so much more than a teacher, he prepared you for life after school. I’d love to find out where he is now and say thank you.
* Andrea Hayes presents the current series of Animal A&E, Thursdays at 7.30pm on TV3
I was in Clonakilty Community College and Eamonn McGrath was a very dedicated English teacher there. He moved to Clonakilty in 1963 and taught there until he retired. He was an author himself and he recognised in his own quiet, subtle way, my interest in literature and he allowed that interest to flower.
He wasn’t a happy clappy type of teacher, but he treated me like an individual and I wasn’t used to that. In school I was used to being treated like a statistic, something to be got over, but he made me feel valued.
His own deep knowledge and love of literature was encouraging to me. Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium was a poem that he and I loved and we recited it in class. He was so knowledgeable about Yeats and he had a mystique about him because he was part of Irish literature.
His books dealt with subjects that were taboo even in the ’80s and ’90s and he was writing in the ’60s and ’70s. He was a progressive type of guy. If he had been writing about things we weren’t all supposed to shut up about, I think he would have progressed much further in his career but he put the truth and art above his own personal advantage.
He was a great artist and there is nothing more inspiring really. He showed that you could be learned and a rebel and that had a lot of attraction for me. I had contact with him after school through his son, Ultan.
He suffered a stroke so he was in a home for the last part of his life and died in 2008, but I was so lucky to have had him teach me.
* Dave Lordon will be at the West Cork Literary Festival with Words Allowed (Teen Writers Workshop) from July 8-12. His new book of short stories First Book Of Frags is published by Wurmpress.
My mother heard Geraldine on the radio. She used to do drama classes on Saturday morning in the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork. I went to her when I was about 12.
My mother sent me there because she thought it would be good for me, I was very shy and she thought it would bring me out of it, so I got into drama through her. It wasn’t speech and drama it was more improvisation, reading plays, very much like drama school.
Geraldine wasn’t like a ‘normal’ teacher, she was disciplined but not too strict and you felt there was freedom to be yourself. You respected her but she wasn’t someone you feared. She was fun too and great at dealing with teenagers.
I took to it, I really loved it and she was very encouraging. Then Geraldine started up Activate Youth Theatre, which I joined, before that there was no youth theatre in Cork.
Becoming an actor was something I would never have thought of without having met Geraldine and gone to her classes, she made it seem possible to become an actor. She helped me with my audition piece for Trinity too.
I remember when I got Disco Pigs, we all went for dinner with my parents. I live in London now but if I met her on the street in Cork, we would go for coffee, and I’m delighted to be working with her daughter Jody in a play now.
I’m sure Geraldine knows she’s had a hand in me becoming an actor. I didn’t go to drama school so my foundation was laid through those Saturday morning classes. I look back on those days and think as a teenager it was such a great thing for me to be involved in.
* Orla stars in Digging For Fire, presented by Rough Magic Theatre Company at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, from Apr 22 until May 4, 2013.
I went to Nagle Rice secondary school in Doneraile, Co Cork. John Joe Breen taught me maths and chemistry.
His attitude was ‘if you aren’t going to do it right, don’t do it at all’. He was very strict, but also very humorous.
He is a big man, so he gained respect before you even talked to him. He was about six foot five, and wide. He didn’t have to chastise you; you always did his homework.
He had great rhymes, for maths and chemistry, to remember formulas and he’d stand up and start dancing and signing them.
John Joe was very funny; he used to tell us, when it was coming to the mid-terms or holidays, to carry our maths books around in our pockets. He said we should have one maths book next to the toilet.
In chemistry, he talked about the elements like they were people, so he made it feel like a practical, and not just a theoretical, subject. ‘Close your eyes and picture it’ — that was his style of teaching.
He always told me I could achieve whatever I wanted, as long as I put my head down and did the work.
I’ve kept that attitude since, in work and college. I made it to the top five in the Euro-toques Young Chef of the Year, I won the Trainee Chef of the Year, in Galway, in January, and I won the Knorr Young Chef award recently, all because of that.
I have kept in touch and have been called in to talk to the students, and I’ll always have a chat with my old teachers.
* Jack is a second-year student of the bachelor of business in culinary arts degree in the CIT department of tourism and hospitality. He won the Knorr Young Chef of the Year title in February.
I was in St Andrew’s, in Booterstown, and I had tons of amazing teachers, but one stands out. In school, you are so impressionable… there are a million things going on with exams and it can be stressful.
Mandy Hollwey, or Miss Hollwey, was a biology and geography teacher. She didn’t teach me academically, but she was my hockey coach all the way through my school years, and has continued to feature in my life. She showed me that I could do well at sport and academically.
I had a lot to juggle in school, because I was modelling, studying and playing sport. Any time you were suffering with a subject, she gave so much of her own time to help. For my Leaving Cert, I found biology really difficult and she made sure I got support. In university, when I was playing hockey, she came in and coached us — she just couldn’t leave a lost cause. I am still involved in hockey and so is she. I went back and coached in St Andrew’s, with Miss Hollwey’s help, when I didn’t have a job. She helped me get back into hockey when I gave up for several years, and to go back and give it a go when I was in a lull. She has an amazing connection with her students, and an ability to keep tabs on everyone, and watch out to make sure everyone’s still doing okay. She was a remarkable teacher.
* Heather is a model, extreme athlete and PR. She works for Outsider magazine.
Maurice Walsh was a teacher in my secondary school. He taught me English, geography and Irish.
The school doesn’t exist anymore. It was called Collaiste Thérese, Greenmount, in Cork City. It was a boarding school and he was one of the only two lay teachers.
Maurice stood out, because he was flamboyant. He was a big, tall, handsome man and he used to wear scarves and Sherlock Holmes-type suits. He was kind of extravagant, like an actor.
I had no notion of acting, back then, but I found him fascinating. When I was doing my Leaving Cert, I was concentrating on maths and science and I wanted to do pass-level English. It was a time before career-guidance teachers, and Maurice took me aside and said: ‘You are a born drama student’. He said I would be a fool not to do honours English.
He gave me confidence; even though I wasn’t good at writing essays, I loved Shakespeare and poetry. We studied Henry IV, Part 1 and he made you stand up and do it. I used to love that and now I making a living out of it. I do a lot of work in the Irish language, too.
I went back to see him before he died and he was delighted. He was a very inventive teacher. In geography, when he was teaching us about the sea and scuba diving, he came in with scuba gear and made us wear it as we ran up and down the stairs. We studied a very difficult play, Coriolanus, for Leaving Cert and he used to bring radio plays of it in to us, so we could listen to the beauty of the language.
He instilled that love in me.
* Denis will appear in Shakespeare’s Richard II, an Ouroboros Theatre Company production in association with The Everyman, at the Abbey Theatre, from Wednesday, Apr 17 to Saturday, May 4. For details, see www.abbeytheatre.ie
