Teacher, 1981-1986 and 1990-2005
† June 2016
The HKIS community fondly remembers the late David (Dave) Bickel, High School English and Humanities teacher. Every day, he modeled HKIS’ mission of “Dedicating our minds to inquiry, our hearts to compassion, and our lives to service and global understanding.”
Alumna Anita Lau ’84 expressed her appreciation: “His literature class inspired me to major in journalism. I have been writing ever since! Now, more than 30 years later, I’m still a food writer!”
In an obituary in Dragon Tales (Summer 2016), High School Humanities teacher Janet Tan wrote, “We will always remember Dave Bickel’s easy lopsided smile, his ability to raise one eyebrow quizzically, when he was questioning an idea or engaging in one of the daily table discussions at lunch time, on anything from writing, to teaching, to spirituality, to politics, to sport. A giant of a man and teacher, Bic, as he was affectionately known, was everybody’s go to person and mentor, when you needed to thrash out an idea, or test a thought. Or just to talk, and enjoy his humor, and his sense of irony, and to be made to feel whole.”
Janet continued: “Dave is still present with us at HKIS. His legacy lives on in so much of who we are, and what we do – like the senior project, which was inspired by his Senior Humanities class, like the Humanities Department which he was instrumental in building, in moving our thinking from disciplinary to interdisciplinary, always making the connections between literature, history, religion, and sport, connections we now all take for granted, and live by.”