Mark – a class act on soccer pitch and as teacher

Lifestyle – Ex-Galway United player Mark Herrick tells KEITH KELLY about his teen years playing soccer in the UK before returning to Ireland and sitting the Leaving Cert as an adult. Now a teacher in the school where he was once a student, he feels online classes are no substitute for the real thing and says attending school is vital for young people, socially and emotionally as well as educationally.

On the decking of Mark Herrick’s house in Oranmore on a Tuesday morning, the family’s new kitten, Toffee, is exploring the socially-distanced interviewing space while the noise of children playing on the green behind the house carries into the garden over the back wall.

The patio door opens and out steps seven-year-old Matthew, son of Mark and Geraldine, a radiographer who works in UHG.

“Sorry Dad – do we have straws? I think we had some juice cartons with straws on them, have we any?” Matthew asks.

Mark and Geraldine’s only child, Matthew is a pupil at Gaelscoil de hÍde in Oranmore and is doing a project at home as part of his school work. Mark appreciates the need for children to continue with their education in these times, as he’s a secondary a school teacher in The Bish (St Joseph’s College) in the heart of the city.

Being a parent and a teacher, he knows the issues from both perspectives and empathises with anyone who is struggling with this new world of remote learning.

“He goes to the Gaelscoil, and I wouldn’t have great Irish, so between that and trying to grapple with technology so he can upload things, it can take a while,” Mark laughs.

As a teacher during Covid-19 – his core subject is history, but he has also taught his other degree subject of geography – Mark tried to hold classes over Zoom, but soon concluded they weren’t working.

“I’d be a big believer in interaction with the students, in eye-contact, in movement and you just don’t get that over Zoom. That’s what my concern is for September – we have to get the kids back in to school, you just can’t run classes over a computer screen. I do think we will get the schools back and open, the kids need it for schooling but also for their own social development.

“I see Matthew, he enjoys doing the work at home, but he misses his friends, he misses the classroom, his teacher, the playground, the social aspect. That is just important as the learning side; it is all part of education,” Mark says.

For many of us, time spent in the classroom as students was all about ‘rote learning’ – you’d go into a certain class, and for 40 minutes, take turns reading aloud paragraph after paragraph from a certain book until the bell signalled the end of that particular period of torment. Only to realise the bell also signalled the start of a new 40 minutes of sheer boredom.

That’s not Mark’s style, according to parents of boys he has taught in The Bish. He likes to engage students, to challenge them while also trying to bring an element of fun to the learning process.

One way of doing this via a crossword he’d set for history classes every Friday, with clues relating to topics they’d covered that week. He smiles at the memory.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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