Twenty-five years ago‚ a high school history teacher named Pippa Visser got up to deliver an assembly devotion.
The school‚ my own‚ was rooted firmly in Baptist dogma and these short motivational speeches were usually something to be endured or‚ now and then‚ marvelled at as they segued clumsily from New Testament metaphors about rich men and camels to explaining why we shouldn’t smoke behind the bicycle shed.
When Miss Visser stood up and walked to the lectern‚ however‚ we knew we weren’t going to get camels.
That was partly because of who she was: a plain-talking academic whose wire-rimmed John Lennon spectacles and an unwillingness to suffer fools or cant hinted at a life of activism and possibly iconoclasm beyond the school gate.
But on this morning‚ it wasn’t just her personality that told us we were getting something different. It was her face.
