Concordia

Concordia Winter 2023

“his excuses are of a vintage usually reserved for a kamikaze pilot explaining to the emperor why he’d turned back with a tickly cough”). He drew himself up to his full height and passed judgement disdainfully: “I assumed you were just showing off!” In the end, the boys always had the last laugh they so richly deserved. None more so, I would imagine, than one of my tutees whose final report sententiously warned him that “few of us would want to be the old David Frost, never mind the new one”: an admonishment which he so successfully ignored that he has become an American broadcasting legend, renowned precisely for his rigorously intellectual interviews, which have made many a hapless politician squirm. As the years passed, systems changed. Databases like Phoenix, SIMS and iSAMS and reporting packages like

diversity in personality, temperament, and performance. In those areas, it was the boys rather than the teachers who were ahead of the curve, being typically tolerant of all approaches even though, by and large, they preferred “old school” masters to newer, more fashionable varieties: they knew full well when they couldn’t tell their ars from their ablative or needed to stop acting the goat. They set little store by educational waffle, which they tended to dismiss as so much flimflam, but they liked the high expectations we had of them, the demands we made on them; and they responded by raising their game. Common Room as a whole, was, I think, grateful for the privilege of teaching young men many of whom are far cleverer than we ever were. I recall asking one Fourth Former circa 1999, what he thought of his English report (which had contained phrases like,

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The SCR in 1992