Ivan Handley
A sad duty this morning, as I attended the funeral of my colleague Ivan Handley. Ivan specialized in the teaching of Databases and Database Systems, for which I was in awe of him. Because of this disparity, we never taught together, though he did take over a module which I had written, rewriting parts which he called ‘a bit soft’.
One day he became the fourth (or fifth) person to try and explain normalisation to me, and failed.
Ivan was proud of his JITT (Just In Time Teaching) technique, and would frequently lecture using just a marker pen and whiteboard. For someone who still goes armed with laptop, pen drive, marker pens, post-it notes, handouts and case studies to teach a class of maybe five students, this was very empowering.
It was good to see a other lecturers from UCE there too to pay their last respects, and I was particularly pleased (of that’s the appropriate word) to see that it was a humanist service, presided over by a ‘celebrant’. The service was short, but appropriate.
I’ll be cracking open a bottle of wine tonight in memory of Ivan.
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