[Richard Geddes]
Was my mum right advising me to be a teacher? Yes, absolutely right!
She knew me very well. Better than I thought she knew me.
She recognised the show off in me, she recognised the bossiness in me, and those things have been handy for me. So, no I've, I've had a career which so far is not finishing and has been an enormous enjoyment to me.
So, she was dead right!
My name's Richard Geddes, and I've been teaching for 55 years.
I had had experience of taking groups of 25 kids for homework and so on.
So, it wasn't very daunting. I was really quite comfortable with it.
And I had a strange habit with my own teachers of, of watching them manage a group and making mental notes about what not to do.
And therefore, I was sort of quite used to the notion of being in charge and, and what would work
and what wouldn't work. And by the time I got to take my own classes, it was something I was really, really happy to do.
I wasn't really nervous at all, frankly.
Cynthia is one of those very good students.
Now what I mean, very good is that she has a thirst for learning and she's very open and very friendly and she works very hard.
But she's her attitude to learning is that she wants to learn and she's thirsty for it.
And she's clever and she does very well.
[Cynthia]
Mr. Geddes is a wonderful teacher.
We actually, the first time I met him was in year eight when he was a substitute English teacher. He's very passionate about his teaching job because he's been doing it for so long, and he is very practical with what he does. He's very responsible as well.
He lets you learn things by yourself, but if you ever need explanations or any sort of help, he would help you.
[Richard Geddes]
When I got into my fifties, I was diagnosed with cancer and I thought that, I thought I was going to die and I thought I was going to die immediately. But, you know, I thought I might have six months or a year or something.
And that meant that I really stopped and thought about things and confronted my own mortality and what I wanted out of life.
And fortunately for me, I was it was completely curable by operations and I and so that now I'm completely free of it and there's no hangover from it at all and I'm very, very lucky.
But that moment was a clarification of what was important to me in life. And what was important to me in life was my family. And I realised how absolutely central they were.
And the other one I realised, which surprised me a little bit, was how much I wanted to continue teaching, because I just feel fulfilled in it.
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