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My favorite teacher - by Thorsten Ball - Register Spill

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My favorite teacher wasn’t a very popular guy. He was confident, had strong opinions, and didn’t exactly teach like the other teachers. He was our history & sociology teacher in 12th and 13th grade and he made us summarize. He made us summarize everything. Through summaries, he taught. As a class, we would read a page in our history books about the Ems Dispatch in 1870 and he’d ask us: what does this text say, in three sentences? Someone would raise their hand and try to summarize what we had just read, in three sentences. Sometimes it would be three sentences, sometimes not quite, and very often our teacher would say: no, that’s not what the text says, here’s what it says. Then he would say three very clear and grammatically flawless sentences that perfectly summarized what the text said. You couldn’t help yourself and think that, god damn, this is exactly what the text said. We would have to summarize newspaper articles in three sentences, summarize a letter in five sentences, summar

My favorite teacher wasn’t a very popular guy. He was confident, had strong opinions, and didn’t exactly teach like the other teachers. He was our history & sociology teacher in 12th and 13th grade and he made us summarize. He made us summarize everything. Through summaries, he taught. As a class, we would read a page in our history books about the Ems Dispatch in 1870 and he’d ask us: what does this text say, in three sentences? Someone would raise their hand and try to summarize what we had just read, in three sentences. Sometimes it would be three sentences, sometimes not quite, and…

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