Sorry
With Tesco taking out full page adverts to say sorry for selling us ponyburgers, now is the time for us all to say Sorry.
Write a letter of apology to someone who deserves it.
props to Monty_Boyce
( , Thu 17 Jan 2013, 14:50)
With Tesco taking out full page adverts to say sorry for selling us ponyburgers, now is the time for us all to say Sorry.
Write a letter of apology to someone who deserves it.
props to Monty_Boyce
( , Thu 17 Jan 2013, 14:50)
« Go Back
I like these letters to old teachers that were in the Grauniad last year
Dear Mrs French Teacher,
Sorry for sticking pins on your seat. It must have been painful.
Yours sincerely, Simon Hattenstone
Dear Mr Gadja,
Sorry for saying: "Oy, Nobby, over here," in class. It was disrespectful. I know your real name is Norbert, and I know that even though I know it's Norbert really I should call you Mr Gadja. I understand now that only your best friends call you Nobby, and I'm not one of them.
Simon
Eccles Sixth Form College
Dear Mr Computer Studies teacher,
Sorry for climbing out of the window when I saw you coming into class. At least it was the ground floor. (I'd had a drink.)
Yours faithfully, Simon Hattenstone
(former part-time student)
Dear Miss Denton,
I'd like to apologise, for myself and my whole class, for being generally horrid and playing such a nasty trick on you, 56 years ago in maths lessons. Because you were one of our least horrid teachers. You were young, rather shy, pleasant, blushed easily, and so we attacked. Because it was easy. We couldn't do much about the really horrid old witch teachers who made our lives hell, like Miss Titmuss, the RE teacher, who shook us whenever possible, or Miss Ashley, with her grey sausage curls and outrageous punishments – Latin detention for me, for jumping down three steps into the playground. No, Miss Denton, you were sweet and kind. So you got it in the neck. One day, you had just got to the end of a gigantic sum, which had taken us half the lesson to do, and which you'd written up on the board. You wrote in the answer, and then were suddenly called away to the telephone. One of us, I'm not telling who, because we all egged her on, rubbed out the answer and changed it. Back you came. "Please Miss," we said. "You've got the answer wrong.'"And you had to go through the whole gigantic sum again, until you got the right answer, and then apologised meekly for your silly mistake. We all looked very serious. You probably never knew that it was all a nasty joke. How we laughed when we got out of class. But why? You were never nasty to any of us. So, sorry Miss Denton. We liked you really.
Michele
Dear wood- and metalwork teacher,
I am sorry that we didn't pay attention and ignored the safety briefing in favour of re-enacting the previous night's The Young Ones (the mouse episode). I'm sorry that when you said to me: "You're good at maths, you should be a civil engineer, it's starting to be a fascinating industry for women," I blew out my fringe (grown to cover spots) and tutted and didn't bother to look into it even a tiny little bit, or do my technical drawing homework, and as a consequence got a dreadful report. If the books hadn't worked out, creating roads and bridges and airports would have been vastly more fulfilling and rewarding than the junior public-sector admin role that was my only alternative. And now I've married an engineer, and have a son looking that way and he says: "I'm going to be an engineer like daddy," and I hiss "civil engineer" at him. Then I tell him to go talk to his grandpa. Because as every teacher's child knows, it's bloody awful being taught by your own dad, however much you love them. And when we walk down the streets of my home town, the number of gainfully employed, useful, successful, handy boys who come up and say: "Hello, Mr Colgan" (you never recognise them. Being a retired teacher in a small town is a bit like being a retired rock star), and thank you copiously for everything you did for them makes me feel even more foolish than I undoubtedly was back then.
With love, Jennifer xxxx
Dear Miss Mitchell,
I'm glad to have this opportunity to apologise for having been such an absolute little cow during the years you taught me German, French and Russian. Although you are now at rest in the great staffroom in the sky, I still feel a pang of shame when I recall how badly I behaved during your lessons. I remember your patient sigh when you caught me inking in little black spots on my legs below the holes in my black tights, or painting on pearlised orange nail-polish under the desk. You pretended not to notice my CND badge, banned on school premises, or the whiffs of cigarette smoke that lingered in the girls' toilets. I hope you never read any of the cruel notes my friends and I passed around in class, commenting on your appearance, and speculating on your love life. I felt ashamed when I learned, afterwards, that you'd lost your fiance during the second world war, and teaching us became your life instead. I would like to thank you for your perseverance. As you must have guessed, at heart I was always a little swot, and at home in private I practised those strange gargling sounds you taught us, and memorised the Lorelei song, and long passages of Phèdre and Evgeny Onegin. And thanks to you, even after all these years, I can still pull off a cool subjunctive, which impresses the Frenchies no end.
Do svidanya, auf wiedersehen, adieu,
Marina
.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/oct/23/dear-sir-im-sorry-apology-former-teachers
( , Thu 17 Jan 2013, 15:42, 4 replies)
Dear Mrs French Teacher,
Sorry for sticking pins on your seat. It must have been painful.
Yours sincerely, Simon Hattenstone
Dear Mr Gadja,
Sorry for saying: "Oy, Nobby, over here," in class. It was disrespectful. I know your real name is Norbert, and I know that even though I know it's Norbert really I should call you Mr Gadja. I understand now that only your best friends call you Nobby, and I'm not one of them.
Simon
Eccles Sixth Form College
Dear Mr Computer Studies teacher,
Sorry for climbing out of the window when I saw you coming into class. At least it was the ground floor. (I'd had a drink.)
Yours faithfully, Simon Hattenstone
(former part-time student)
Dear Miss Denton,
I'd like to apologise, for myself and my whole class, for being generally horrid and playing such a nasty trick on you, 56 years ago in maths lessons. Because you were one of our least horrid teachers. You were young, rather shy, pleasant, blushed easily, and so we attacked. Because it was easy. We couldn't do much about the really horrid old witch teachers who made our lives hell, like Miss Titmuss, the RE teacher, who shook us whenever possible, or Miss Ashley, with her grey sausage curls and outrageous punishments – Latin detention for me, for jumping down three steps into the playground. No, Miss Denton, you were sweet and kind. So you got it in the neck. One day, you had just got to the end of a gigantic sum, which had taken us half the lesson to do, and which you'd written up on the board. You wrote in the answer, and then were suddenly called away to the telephone. One of us, I'm not telling who, because we all egged her on, rubbed out the answer and changed it. Back you came. "Please Miss," we said. "You've got the answer wrong.'"And you had to go through the whole gigantic sum again, until you got the right answer, and then apologised meekly for your silly mistake. We all looked very serious. You probably never knew that it was all a nasty joke. How we laughed when we got out of class. But why? You were never nasty to any of us. So, sorry Miss Denton. We liked you really.
Michele
Dear wood- and metalwork teacher,
I am sorry that we didn't pay attention and ignored the safety briefing in favour of re-enacting the previous night's The Young Ones (the mouse episode). I'm sorry that when you said to me: "You're good at maths, you should be a civil engineer, it's starting to be a fascinating industry for women," I blew out my fringe (grown to cover spots) and tutted and didn't bother to look into it even a tiny little bit, or do my technical drawing homework, and as a consequence got a dreadful report. If the books hadn't worked out, creating roads and bridges and airports would have been vastly more fulfilling and rewarding than the junior public-sector admin role that was my only alternative. And now I've married an engineer, and have a son looking that way and he says: "I'm going to be an engineer like daddy," and I hiss "civil engineer" at him. Then I tell him to go talk to his grandpa. Because as every teacher's child knows, it's bloody awful being taught by your own dad, however much you love them. And when we walk down the streets of my home town, the number of gainfully employed, useful, successful, handy boys who come up and say: "Hello, Mr Colgan" (you never recognise them. Being a retired teacher in a small town is a bit like being a retired rock star), and thank you copiously for everything you did for them makes me feel even more foolish than I undoubtedly was back then.
With love, Jennifer xxxx
Dear Miss Mitchell,
I'm glad to have this opportunity to apologise for having been such an absolute little cow during the years you taught me German, French and Russian. Although you are now at rest in the great staffroom in the sky, I still feel a pang of shame when I recall how badly I behaved during your lessons. I remember your patient sigh when you caught me inking in little black spots on my legs below the holes in my black tights, or painting on pearlised orange nail-polish under the desk. You pretended not to notice my CND badge, banned on school premises, or the whiffs of cigarette smoke that lingered in the girls' toilets. I hope you never read any of the cruel notes my friends and I passed around in class, commenting on your appearance, and speculating on your love life. I felt ashamed when I learned, afterwards, that you'd lost your fiance during the second world war, and teaching us became your life instead. I would like to thank you for your perseverance. As you must have guessed, at heart I was always a little swot, and at home in private I practised those strange gargling sounds you taught us, and memorised the Lorelei song, and long passages of Phèdre and Evgeny Onegin. And thanks to you, even after all these years, I can still pull off a cool subjunctive, which impresses the Frenchies no end.
Do svidanya, auf wiedersehen, adieu,
Marina
.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/oct/23/dear-sir-im-sorry-apology-former-teachers
( , Thu 17 Jan 2013, 15:42, 4 replies)
« Go Back