Students
Angela Blazy-O'Reilly
Inspecteur d'Académie, Académie de Clermont-Ferrand
I applied for the PGCE course at York during my last year of my BA at Southampton and was lucky enough to get a place. I found myself in Eric's tutor group alongside other students from very different backgrounds and experiences but all sharing a desire to teach modern languages and, if possible, inspire children to learn and enjoy them. We went with Eric into secondary schools in the York area where he still taught 2 or 3 hours a week, we took the kids to France on a school trip with him, we spent many enriching hours in his study learning the job and things about languages we had never even thought about before. Eric helped me and others to grow and blossom as teachers. I am now coming to the end of my career in the French education system (teacher, lecturer, then teacher trainer, and finally language advisor and schools' inspector) and have always felt that I learnt all I ever needed to know about teaching languages at York over 30 years ago with Eric Hawkins and the team of people (Mike Buckby, Trudi Berger and others) he had with him there. I had the occasion to allude to this experience two years ago when I sat the competitive "viva" to become a French Education Ministry schools' inspector. I am so glad I was able to pay tribute to Eric and the Language Teaching Centre on that occasion. Thank you for everything Eric.