The Wykehamist
Valete
VALE MJB
MJB, a native of Hampshire, grew up not far from Wickham. He graduated from Oxford( Chemistry, Wadham, 2016), and arrived at Winchester in 2018 after a short spell at Sevenoaks.
Boys and girls will remember him in Science School as a don of the most exacting standards, but popular with his‘ keen Science beans’; demanding and fastidious as he may have been in the lab, he latterly became a Div don who let loose pupils’ creativity, with watercolour painting, as well as cooking and baking to the fore. A keen player of racket sports, especially badminton, he has done much to sustain them at Winchester. He has run a very successful Gaitskell Society over the past few years, hosting Lord Hogan- Howe to mention but one of the big-name speakers.
MJB has been assistant-housemaster in Phil’ s( 2018-23) and a tutor in Beloe’ s( 2023-5). The boys testify that his apparent powers of teleportation always kept them on
VALE JOC
“ Grow a moustache. I am thinking classroom control.” The advice from the Headmaster of Bennett’ s The History Boys cannot be the explanation for JOC’ s facial grooming, for despite his youth when joining the Economics department as a newly-minted graduate of Warwick University in 2022, he has run his classroom with a competence that belies his years. Perhaps it is for sheer panache: the domestic staff in Freddie’ s know him as‘ the Freddie Mercury look-alike’, although I think his teeth are better than that.
On joining, he slotted into what was then the Marcas machine, helping to run myriad late-night exam-practice sessions and becoming known as the kindly face of the department – the one who might sometimes award a higher grade than a D. He has supported pupils applying to study Economics at university, conducting dozens of mock Oxbridge interviews. And in only his third year of teaching, he has led the whole cohort of over 40 top-years through the Microeconomics side of the course.
He is also full of enthusiasm for their toes when he was in charge of the house, although his ability to be present without prior apprehension did backfire on at least one evening when his approach to a corner was mistaken for that of a fellow-pupil, and he was ambushed by` a pack of high-spirited Philites.
He has done a huge amount of work for his fellow dons in ways which are too various to mention here. The same energy which has enthused his pupils has made him a well-loved member of Common Room, and he has been a great friend to me personally. In summer 2023 we spent two weeks at the Goethe Institute in Berlin on a German course( testament to his broad cultural interests, which include taking up Latin in adulthood). If readers could only have witnessed our attempts to be streetwise in Europe’ s( arguably) coolest capital …
MJB leaves to lead his own department at St George’ s College, Weybridge. I am glad to say that I think we shall be seeing him again.
JAT
a subject sometimes dubbed‘ the dismal science’: faced with a potentially dry piece of economic theory, he brings it to life through behavioural experiments with the pupils as lab-rats. In Freddie’ s, where he has been a superb tutor and then Assistant Housemaster, his Preces have demonstrated this academic passion for all things economic: the financial model of those obviously terrible Zeusthemed video games advertised online; an explanation of why the same weight of pasta in different shapes has different prices.
At a recent INSET day, however, an illustration of the Tragedy of the Commons backfired: the school had generously provided creme eggs for the attendees and JOC overexploited the resource, sneaking an extra egg into his pocket for later. Alas, he rediscovered it later transformed into a stubbornly resilient sugary goo, smeared all over his keys; one of the bunch still refuses to function. Nevertheless, lack of keys does not stop JOC: ashamed of the frequency with which he had asked for the spare from the Porters’ Lodge after locking himself out of his flat, he climbed up the scaffolding and entered through a top-floor window in broad daylight.
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