On this week’s episode of FHS Meets FHS, we welcome the renowned Mr Galloway, who has been an English teacher here at FHS for six years. As Head of Outreach, Mr Galloway leads on the school’s charity initiatives and is also involved in organising our beloved TIPS Week. Mr Galloway certainly gets stuck into a bit of everything at FHS!
The poem:
The Geography Lesson
Our teacher told us one day he would leave
And sail across a warm blue sea
To places he had only known from maps,
And all his life had longed to be.
The house he lived in was narrow and grey
But in his mind’s eye he could see
Sweet-scented jasmine clinging to the walls,
And green leaves burning on an orange tree.
He spoke of the lands he longed to visit,
Where it was never drab or cold.
I couldn’t understand why he never left,
And shook off the school’s stranglehold.
Then halfway through his final term
He took ill and never returned,
And he never got to that place on the map
Where the green leaves of the orange trees burned.
The maps were redrawn on the classroom wall;
His name was forgotten, it faded away.
But a lesson he never knew he taught
Is with me to this day.
I travel to where the green leaves burn
To where the ocean’s glass-clear and blue,
To all those places my teacher taught me to love
But which he never knew.
The Book:
East of Eden – by John Steinbeck
East of Eden is a novel by American author and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Published in September 1952, the work is regarded by many to be Steinbeck’s most ambitious novel and by Steinbeck himself to be his magnum opus.
The book brings to life the intricate details of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, and their interwoven stories. The Hamilton family in the novel is said to be based on the real-life family of Samuel Hamilton, Steinbeck’s maternal grandfather.
