Scotch College

Auf Wiedersehen Scotch!

I will be leaving Scotch College at the end of Term Two after twelve years and will move into the next phase (as yet an unknown one) of my career.

I am very proud of what we have achieved at Scotch over the past eleven and a half years of LOTE learning and there have been many highlights. I offer my sincere thanks to Graham Nowacki for taking the chance on a teacher from Germany who was rather an unknown quantity on arrival in Australia in July, 1990. Thankyou also to Guy Mason, his administration teams, secretaries and staff for their support of LOTE and especially to Brian Sampson who has been a tower of strength with policy documents, German Days etc.

I fell in love with the German language at the age of twelve when I had my first lessons in England after twelve months of French. I then had quite a long phase without German until meeting Insa in 1990. Interestingly enough, we met on the Greek Island of Naxos,

she was learning French at the time and I was struggling with my Greek. It was the big incentive we both needed to attempt to master each other's language. There is no better way to learn a language than to live in the country itself and my fantastic nine years in Hamburg did the trick for me. Our exchange year in Melbourne in 1985 turned Insa into an almost 'fair dinkum' Aussie.

The Grade Three concerts were a highlight for me, especially Rolf Zuckowski's 'Die Vogelhochzeit' The performance was a great combination of music and language, along with some excellent art work and drama.

Our one-off performance at Tabulam Nursing Home in Bayswater was also a really unique experience for everyone concerned.

Our annual participation in the poetry competition (with three state winners) and our German Days were all fun activities.

The development of a content-based unit of work based on Soccer in the German Bundesliga has proved to be a great success with Grades 5 and 6. I still have senior school students ask me about the team they followed in Grade 6 and I'm sure the sporting themes will be ones the boys will remember the most. Scotch College is a passionate sporting school and I have loved my own involvement with the boys. I have been able to encourage many to play the 'real football' (that's the one with the round ball) and have enjoyed helping them improve their skills in a sport that is struggling to survive in this country.

Many of the boys have followed my own involvement in athletics and indeed sent emails to me before my races for the Australian team in Holland and Japan.

The Scotch cross country and athletics teams have always worked hard and had lots of fun with training and racing. I'd like to offer my thanks to Peter Hawkins for the opportunity to be able to work so closely with his department in the coaching of many sports.

Three cute, fun things will probably stay in my memory for ever I think. Aiton McPhee, then in Prep, sent me a postcard he'd written himself, all the way from his holiday in Berlin. In the first couple of years I had a boy in Prep who went home after his first lesson with me to tell his parents how much he'd enjoyed his first Japanese lesson. During the first few weeks of the school year the Prep boys used to say loudly 'we're not Kinder!' in reply to my daily greeting of 'Guten Tag Kinder' (ah, the beauty of language)

4W was the first class to have German in the Junior School on February 4, 1991 and the final classes in the German room will take place on June 28, this year.

During my time at Scotch, I sincerely hope I have been able to pass on some of my enthusiasm and knowledge to my students. Thousands of Scotch boys have come to the German room for their lessons with 'Herr Clarke' (or Mister Herr Clarke as some of the Preps used to say) and hopefully they have been able to take with them some fond memories of their experiences of German culture and language.

Mr Ian Clarke