Ode to Gezina Geertruida (Sies) Dik-Noorman | Unforgettable teacher and important supporter

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Beautiful ode by Esther Hageman to our Amsterdam grandmother.

Sies Dik-Noorman 1911-2007

Sies Dik was one of those school teachers you never forget. She was also the wife of an artist: painter Cor Dik. At the Asvo school in Amsterdam, she was a “special” teacher. Her father was a confectioner in the 3rd Helmersstraat in Amsterdam - and purveyor to the court. If you took something with your coffee at the Stadsschouwburg in those years, it was pastry from Noorman.
Her full name was Gezina Noorman, shortened to Ina in everyday life. But in class there were two more Gezina/Ina's. To distinguish them from each other, they were given different names. Thus Ina became Sies.

At the first school where she went to work, in Velsen, she met her husband. Cor Dik, born in Zaandijk as the son of a cooper. He had become a teacher at the Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem. That education was free and attracted bright working-class children, but set a condition: you had to be a teacher for five years. For Cor Dik, who wanted to paint but had been unable to go to art school for lack of money, teaching was really nothing.

Sies and Cor - but she called him “Kees” - married in 1933 and had their first child a year later: daughter Anje. When she was four and Cors's compulsory years at school were over,
they moved to Delden. There they became youth hostel parents. Then you lived for free, if you got the firewood from the forest you had no heating costs, the electricity was free, and in the summer you ate with the youth hostel guests - then still called “trekkers.

That existence gave Cor the opportunity to paint, without being obliged to sell work out of need for money. Sies and Cor continued to do it for seven years, had a second child - son Simon - in Delden, but resigned when the youth hostel was requisitioned in 1942 to house NSB women and children. For the rest of the war, the four of them lived in the small studio Cor had down the road, on the grounds of hotel Carelshaven.

But Cor was getting more and more portrait commissions from the Randstad, so he felt the need for a studio there. He found it on Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam - diagonally across from the Rembrandthuis, above a branch of the Amsterdamsche Bank. A few months after the liberation, the third child had by then been born, the family moved in as well. By renting out a few rooms, they still had some steady income.

Sies Dik returned to teaching in 1952 - and became the breadwinner - when the youngest, son Jaap, was seven. She went to work at the Asvoschool, an elementary school with both a Montessori and a “regular” department. Miss Dik took special Montessori certificates for it.

She became one of those teachers you never forget. “No other teacher at the Asvo, nor in high school, left such a deep impression,” a few former students said at her cremation. “The only real teacher ever.”

That wasn't just because she could teach well - though she could. She had a voice that sounded like a bell and narrated beautifully with it - especially in history. She also had her own pedagogical views. Once, when she saw in the street at lunchtime how one of her students took revenge on a harassing little brother by kicking him, she used an afternoon lesson on Charles and the Elegast to instill in the girl that Elegast, though an outlaw, had “always fought fairly and with open arms.” She was also “special. When she could afford, for the first time since the war, an all-new raincoat, she kept it on all day in class. If she saw a pickpocket at work on the streetcar, she would address him in that voice: “Say young man, will you please leave that!”

In 1965 they moved to Ilpendam. With the help of patron Rob Polak, a house had sprung up there along the dike that was just right for a painter: a large studio with northern lights on the second floor, living downstairs. The inward-looking Cor Dik and the extrovert Sies - if at a party you didn't know who she was, you only had to look for a group of people who were listening to her stories - became members of the Ilpendam artistic clan.

After the death of her husband, in 1975, things went badly for her for a few years. But she also regained herself. She outlived two of her three children and continued to live (and bike, and garden) independently in Ilpendam until she was 88. When that became too hard, she moved to the Otter-Knol House in Amstelveen, an old-age home for mostly highly educated people. Just as she had almost VIP status in Ilpendam, she had it now. Sies Dik was the one who told the Christmas story and chaired the client council. Until a brain hemorrhage and a fall, last fall, marked the beginning of the end.
 

Sies Dik-Noorman was born in Amsterdam on Feb. 27, 1911. She died there on June 17, 2007.