He was quite an odd bloke as I remember it. We certainly had a strange relationship. He was my first year science teacher (I believe it would be called Year 7 now), and he wasn't shy when it came to giving me low marks. Usually when I hadn't done my homework. "0/10 x 3" wasn't my finest hour. It probably wasn't my worst, but that's another story. I was never sure if he liked me. I felt at times that he definitely didn't. He took me again, at least 50% of the time, for my GCSE years. He was a biology graduate, which certainly wasn't my favoured branch of science, but he never showed a lack of enthusiasm for the other areas of the curriculum he taught.

What I remember most, and what I am eternally grateful to him for, is the way he taught us about science. The very nature of the subject. Even though it is over 20 years ago, I can clearly remember him taking us from the Latin origins of the word, to what he thought it meant. For Mr Edyvane, science was a quest, it was a search for knowledge. It certainly wasn't just a body of knowledge to be learnt. He took us through several examples of how science had refined its understanding of a subject, in some cases completely throwing away previous hypotheses. He taught us it was about asking questions.

He taught us the nature of conducting experiments. I suppose he may have described it as the "scientific method", but I don't remember him calling it that. I remember him explaining about measuring things carefully, and understanding how we might make errors in taking these measurements. He taught us that a good experiment only has one variable, and everything else should be kept the same. He taught us to understand that sometimes things changed that we hadn't thought of, or that we couldn't control, and that all we could do was minimise these as much as possible.

He taught us that science was about developing a hypothesis, and then testing it. He taught us that a failed hypothesis wasn't a failure, just more data.

He taught us well.

I can remember almost nothing from large chunks of my secondary science education (particularly the biology part). Those first few lessons that he taught us though, are as clear in my mind now as when I first heard them. They are amongst the most valuable things I have ever learnt, and I refer back to those few basic principles almost daily. They have (I believe) given me a great clarity in the way I think about the world around me, what I see on television, read in the newspapers, and browse to on the internet.

Mr Edyvane was a great teacher.