Mr. Coffey for English
I had a great teacher for English in secondary school. His name was Mr. Coffey and you could tell he loved to teach. He used to get on a roll during some lectures as if carried away in the moment. You could always tell when this happened as his whole face would take on a look of sheer amazement. I used to think this was a conscious act as how could someone be so amazed at the same material he’d been reciting for twenty plus years?
Mr Coffey had numerous tricks or gimmicks to keep us all engaged. He introduced us to the phonetic spelling for fish (ghoti), later attributed to G.B. Shaw. One day he wrote the following on the board:
forte lorez inaro.
Demsno lorez demsis trux,
fulla giisan ensan dux.
I suppose now the look of awe on Mr Coffey’s face was not so much from the material he was trotting out time and again but more from our own faces mirroring back at him as he slowly opened our minds to the world.
