Peter Joss:
CLASS OF 1967
Herricks High SchoolClass of 1967
New hyde park, NY
Peter's Story
TRIBUTE TO JOHN SNYDER
(CLASS '67 FAVORITE TEACHER)
Sometimes a teacher becomes the Class Favorite using humor to get his/her students to learn. John Snyder was able to share his enthusiasm for English not by getting his students to laugh, but by making them work harder.
It was as though he wanted us to be as affected as he had by the tragic end of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman ("He didn't just want to be liked; he wanted to be well-liked"), or the advice given by Henry David Thoreau in Walden Pond: "If you have...Expand for more
built castles in the air....now put the foundations under them."
John Snyder also demonstrated to us how the lyrics from American musicals often paralleled our times. We listened to and discussed the lyrics of "Fiddler on the Roof " before leaving on a class trip to attend a new Broadway show, "Bajour." He also was fascinated by how words such as "mellifluous" sounded similar to their meanings.
John Snyder may have been intense, yet he always positive. But one day, he began class with the words "Oh, no!" He smiled as he pulled out his lesson plan for the day: his two year old daughter had mistaken it for a coloring book, and....
Submitted by Peter Joss
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