I had reason to speak about a former colleague recently and was reminded just how exceptional he was by a student who had been taught by him many years ago.
David Shanks taught classics at Selkirk HIgh School for many years where the numbers of students taking Latin and Greek (and succeeding) surpassed the numbers in most of the prestigious independent schools in Scotland.
David was a genius in the classroom – although he would be very unhappy with me for using such a description.
I tried to capture the essence of the man in this poem which I wrote from a child’s perspective.