Jo

Really sad news this evening - I heard that one of the excellent teachers who taught, pushed and challenged me through my CELTA course nearly 10 years ago has died. She was certainly younger than I am. Fourth from the right in the back row here.

Two of the three tutors on that course had teaching skills I had never seen before. They taught us the content we needed to know along with the methodology for teaching it at the same time as modelling relevant teaching skills for that topic. Three in one. As someone who had trained as a classroom teacher many years earlier I was in awe.

(As an aside, one of the videos of good practice she showed us on that course featured a face I thought I recognised. A bit of sleuthing confirmed that it was our very own digitaldaze.)

About three years after I completed the course, when I was working as the volunteer coordinator for a refugee charity, I never expected the person wanting to volunteer to teach English to refugees to be my esteemed tutor and she never expected me to be her interviewer. We laughed. No way was I letting her slip through my fingers and unsurprisingly she proved a kind, innovative, passionate and supportive teacher of refugees.

If you were to google her, as I did this evening, you would find just one reference, from the local newspaper six years ago. (I'm linking because the photo is a total gem.)

She knew she was good at her work but she never sought the limelight and never wanted glory nor trappings. She just got on with doing what she did, brilliantly, for others.