We, (Ben and Matthew Arscott) have benefited enormously from the four years Mr Jones taught us. Although we both had to have an interest in history, our grandmother being a history teacher, Mr Jones’ enthusiasm and energy as a teacher certainly confirmed our enjoyment of the subject and ensured that all our best work during those four years was done for history. It is also credit to Mr Jones that both of us are looking at humanity degrees involving lots of history and that I (Ben) have two history GCSEs.
As a credit to Mr Jones as a teacher: his lessons were interesting, large amounts of extra work were done; 14 year olds spending hours working on minute detail of “hover buttons” for websites with essays of history already on them. Additionally from standard essay writing and technology, debating and speaking skills were continuously improved through the extensive variety in teaching methods. The unique Versailles experience managed to give students insight and enjoyment into one of history’s most important but driest events. When entering his classroom with the prominent Welsh flag, tributes to communism, Ali G on the wall and the unforgettable ATBQ hat, in an utterly unique way the past was bought alive. Continually excellent results show the boring stuff was also taught and few people who experience Mr Jones cannot recite, faultlessly, his acronym-full essay writing system or his simple but thorough source work strategy.
While history remains one of his greatest assets his ability to stimulate the “non-historians” in Theory of Knowledge was often unprecedented. Combining politics, philosophy and history we were given a glimpse at the complexities of ‘historical’ knowledge: the advantages, disadvantages and often the sheer ridiculous. Teaching TOK I can imagine being a nightmare, with such abstract ideas that are inherent to the subject matter, I don’t think I have seen many teachers teach it so persuasively, enthusiastically let alone interestingly.
Not living in Toulouse anymore we are unable to comment on the circumstances, as we don’t fully understand them. However we can appreciate the school is in a unique position, consciously losing its greatest asset by losing Mr Jones. As well as being a great teacher who invoked a genuine interest in his subject and consequently managed to make students do extensive work upon it, Mr Jones pioneered the school’s unique technological position, which made the laptop extravagance worthwhile.
