Highly entertaining audio recording (in Dutch) which indicates that — at least at one point in time — I was a really bad student:
One day (January or February 1978 when I was 15), two class mates, Henk Snikkers and Marinus Spaan, brought a tape recorder to school. The recordings were not too exciting in most classes, but the recording in the history class of Mr. van de Moer turned out to be golden and seems to pinpoint the lowest performance achieved during my education. More importantly, the recording is really funny and actually also interesting as a window into 70s teaching when it is acceptable to compare students with sheepdogs who have to learn how to do their tricks right.
Mr. van de Moer was actually a very good teacher who I liked a lot. He was insightful and could tell a good story. In those days you had homework for almost each class. Depending on the course, this would consist of exercises to do or things you had to learn (or both). At the beginning of each class, the teacher would "randomly" select a student to see whether they had done the work. Mr. van de Moer was a bit different in that he had told us that he didn't want us to just memorise what was in the book. We had to keep a notebook in which we would summarise, analyse, write down our own thoughts and questions, and provide info on terms and places that we hadn't heard about before. Such a fuzzy/imprecise assignment was unusual and most of us had not taken his threats that he would check our notes seriously. Guess what? On "recording" day, Mr. van de Moer collected all notebooks, marked them, and reported our scores with commentary.
This happened at the beginning of the second semester when we started fresh in terms of our marks. My friend Wim and I got the lowest score of all students, namely a 2 (out of 10). Now the results were pretty bad overall with more than half of the class getting a fail. But in the previous week I had been the victim of one of the usual "random" checks to see whether I had done the reading. Since I had not even looked at it, I couldn't answer any of the questions, and I received a 1. When Mr. van de Moer points out that my average is now a 1.5 the class starts laughing followed by an entertaining response of Mr. van de Moer. Just to be clear, it was unusual not to do my homework. Mr. van de Moer never gave us much to read, but this notebook thing seemed like an inefficient way to absorb the material. And I also thought it wasn't strictly required. Now that I am much older, I understand what he was after and actually agree it is an excellent way to study.
Listening to the tape you may get the idea that this was a class with quite a few cheeky students. Mr van de Moer is repeatedly challenged, both regarding this unusual approach and the marks given. But we knew that a recording was being made and Mr. van de Moer gladly took the bait. Interestingly, this is the class with the nerds, but I had a lot more fun with them than when I was still hanging out with the "cool" kids.
I did quite a bit of editing by cutting out the boring bits. It starts with the "evidence" of my friend Wim and I getting the lowest scores. Then a couple other highlights like when Mr. van de Moer compares his approach with the one used by a football coach in deciding who is going to play in the match. Later these can be heard in a bit more context (although with still some bits being cut).
Finally, I would like to thank Mr. van de Moer and teachers like him. He was a wonderful teacher and I enjoyed his classes a lot. In fact, he and several of my other secondary school teachers seemed much smarter and more insightful than several of the teachers in my first two years at university.
