Heasley

QVS Teachers

Murray Heasley
A VSA (New Zealand's version of Peace Corps) from Dunedin, he was fresh out of high school. Extremely intelligent and elegant with a pension for cleanliness. He was the anti-thesis of Woody and by second term I had move in with him, with Peter moving over to live with Dave. We hit it off big time and co-wrote the staff play.
From a letter 1970: "...19 years old, 5'8", blonde beatle-cut hair. Its fascinating to hear him speak English. We have friendly fights over how to pronounce words. He works as hard and long as I do, but still have plenty of good times together.
This is from a student in 2003: Now let me tell you about this professor. He's of the best I ever had and if I had a choice I'd like this guy to be my mentor. But the university is apparently clueless on this mentoring thing, unlike universities abroad. Okay, so I am digressing a bit, back to the guy. Dr. Murray Heasley's been my professor for four subjects already and it was always my choice that landed my ass in his classes. I'd fight for that last goddamn slot in his class. There was this one time when I queued for five hours, heckling the registration assistants and fending off (elbowing off) damned line jumpers to get one of the few remaining slots in his class.That's how much I want to get to his class. Reason? The guy's a genius. Well he's nothing that the average Filipino student would expect. One thing, he's a foreigner, a Kiwi, a white boy. People would, at first, be intimidated by this guy. One would be forced to speak in one's parshali-perpekted-Englis to communicate with him. Most of my blockmates were when I first took Doc's class for Comm I. He had this very eclectic way of teaching. He never believed in quizzes, tests or exams. But he believed in one's voice and way of thinking. He dwelled on critical thinking rather than quizzing us on spelling and grammar.
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