It is sad to let you and all past students know that Mr. Hilary Lee Hoi Chow 李海洲, our beloved Science, Geography, English and Mathematics teacher, passed away on February 16 at the age of 89. His funeral service has been scheduled at 11:00am on March 12 (Wednesday) at Universal Funeral Parlour, Hunghom. The WYKPSA will pay tribute to the late Mr. Lee in the previous evening.
Mass for Mr. Lee Hoi Chow
Date: 5pm, Saturday, 15 March 2008
Venue: St. Ignatius Chapel, Wah Yan College Kowloon
Please join to pay last tribute to our beloved Mr. Lee.
Vincent Lee, a student of Mr. Lee, has written an article tribute to Mr. Lee.
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Mr. Lee was my Form Master in F.1 D.
He spoke (English) slowly, and with such clarity and “authority” – perhaps just to give us little boys (like me) who never had classes fully immersed in the English medium (except in P.6, but then in P.6 it was Mickey mouse because the Fathers understood full well our Chinglish !) the benefit of being able to follow him. He had his rather “peculiar” or “special” way of pronouncing the word “little”, I thought at the time, then got used to it. (It was me, of course, not his pronunciation that was the problem.)
At first he seemed somewhat stern to me, like our FB. When we got to know him a lot better later in the term, I found him warm, caring and easily approachable. He would speak Chinese to you to help you out if you had a problem with your school work and sought his help outside of the classroom. A gentleman and an excellent teacher in our truly formative years – Form 1, 1960, I just turned 13. I also remember consulting him after class about joining the boy scouts (they had their recruiting drive early in the 1st term of F.1). He highly recommended it, told me “You can’t find any better extracurricular activities than scouting……; we have an excellent group, go and see Mr. Anthony Ho….”! “Extracurricular” was such a big/new word, I had to ask him to repeat it, and I learned that word first hand from him. He took the time to spell it out and taught me how to make the “rrrr…” sound.
I don’t think in F.1 we had “divided” classes (disciplines) in science, at least not in 1 D. We just had “science” three times a week. It was in science classes we learned about botany/biology and other interesting stuff. I think it was split into Phys., Chem. and Biol. in Form 3. As Form Master, he was almost “one-foot-kick”: taught us English, science and possibly also math. (can anyone help me out and confirm ?). Mr. Liu Kay-Ming taught us Chinese Language and Literature (and in his wisdom, used Mandarin as the main medium of instruction).
When I met him again 40 years later at our 2005 Easter reunion dinner, he said he could not recognize me off hand, but as soon as I reminded him of the “extracurricular” incident, his face lit up and said to me “you were in the scouts, yes….”. He seemed a little pale, but in good spirits.
Thank you, Mr. Lee, you were right on both counts: I benefited from scouting like from no other extracurricular activities; and Ho Sir and his scouters ran an excellent 11th Kowloon Boy Scouts Group! I wish I could be in your classes again, with loving memory,
VincentPC