Greetings Noble Sir

by Nigel Flaxton

  We pressed the point hard. In the end the firm went along with us. Later they showed us their entry. The plans, particularly the elevations, made the building look quite elegant and we realised it did have attractive proportions. The playground looked most exciting with geodromes, climbing frames, sand pits, ball targets and so forth in profusion between trees, bushes and flower islands.

  ‘Spenser Street,’ I thought, ‘if only.....’

  ‘If we win,’ our friend said, ‘we’ll acknowledge you two as Professional Consultants’. We felt ten feet tall.

  The result was announced six months later, by which time we had almost forgotten it. Our friend’s firm gained a Commendation, and third place. He was quite pleased.

  ‘Did they say why you didn’t win?’ we asked.

  ‘Oh yes! The winning entry had the gymnasium on the ground floor and the infants above. The critique said this was undoubtedly best in view of the problems of moving PE apparatus.’

  We crawled away.

  ‘That panel couldn’t have had a teacher on it,’ my wife exclaimed. She was teaching five year olds at the time. ‘Why don’t they make architects teach in the schools they build?’

  My mind went back to Spenser Street, of course, where there was no gymnasium and where I was assigned to a class on the top floor. Although I was there for only one month I came to know those spiral staircases very well indeed.

  So did the children. They mounted up them for morning registration then came down for assembly. They went back up for lessons, then down for morning playtime, ascending again some fifteen minutes later. They descended again at lunch time, back up for afternoon lessons, down for playtime, up afterwards, down at the end of the day - not to mention down for any games lessons and back up afterwards, similarly for any gratuitous visits to the loos, or with messages, or to collect material for lessons from the stock room (on the ground floor, of course), and the bell monitor performing his office at least four times a day.

  But not the infants. Their rooms were on the ground floor where the Victorian architect intended them to be. On-going aerobic exercise, sensibly, was reserved for the post-seven year olds.

  Chapter 9

  Everyone knows the adage that the best teacher is a born teacher. This is why you certainly don’t have to undergo a course of training to be a good teacher, neither can a course of training guarantee to turn an ordinary mortal into an outstanding one. The fact is that virtually all of us do some teaching at some stage of our lives - usually as an older or more skilled person imparting knowledge or skills to a younger or less skilled one.

  Parents teach their children to speak a language and manage it within a couple of years or so. People on factory floors, on farms, in shops, teach trades to newcomers - and many such teachers and students regretted the demise in the latter years of the century of the former apprentice system that served well for many hundreds of years. Fortunately it is being resuscitated, though the television programme of that name conveys a false image for true apprenticeships. A lad kicking a ball resolutely towards a convenient bit of road or park or village green finds a six year old scrap of humanity at his elbow - and though he ignores the insistent, ‘Please let me play...go on....’ for a time, finally he gives in. Then, in exasperation, when the kid wastes the other’s (and his pals’) time by mis-kicking and falling over he expostulates, ‘No, not like that! Come here, I’ll show you....’ and proceeds to give a first rate lesson in footballing skills. You can transpose that little scenario to back streets in South American towns, or the West Indies and substitute a bat and cricket ball where such teachers and students alike know that top grade skills are very marketable.

  Older sisters show younger ones how to use cosmetics and then wish they hadn’t because the stuff disappears so rapidly and kid sisters have no morals when it comes to their elders’ belongings.

  Precocious youngsters lean over fences and loudly ask neighbours, ‘What are you doing?’ If they are in a good humour the neighbours show them. ‘I want to do that - can I?’ comes next, equally loudly, and soon the youngsters are being shown anything from lighting a bonfire to making a garden pool. It’s always more interesting when the work is being done in someone else’s garden. Yes, I know that’s frowned upon by Authority which seeks to protect children from any adult who hasn’t been checked against a variety of registers, but I daresay the pendulum of common sense will swing back to an extent in due course.

  Many born teachers take up careers in demonstrating and become representatives of all kinds. Some excellent ones become well known on television; presenters of informative and documentary programmes need to have the full range of personal teaching skills to be successful and to be recognised as personalities. Of course, they have superb resource facilities at hand, which helps immensely if the subject is lizards in the Galapagos Islands, or the latest development in laser technology, or how to make over your garden in two days flat.

  Husbands teach wives how to drive cars and wives teach husbands how to change nappies. But more than this, at home, at work, in sport, in pubs and clubs, at church, on holiday, in hobbies and pastimes, in much of the vast range of computer software, whenever and however we meet one another, people are interacting and so very often that means someone is teaching and someone is learning. How to hang wallpaper, improve your golf swing, kick a football with dipping spin, line dance, sell your firm’s product, ease arthritis...and so on...and so on....forever!

  It is also blazingly obvious that some people teach others things that would be best left alone - hence crime, drug culture, sexual depravity - and a whole range of attitudes and actions that foster discord in micro and macro societies.

  It is because everyone is engaged in teaching in its widest sense to a greater or lesser extent that so many people show interest in schools and education. Schools may fascinate or infuriate you but it’s not very likely that you have no opinion at all about them. After all, nearly everyone goes through them at one level or another and emerges satisfied or not according to individual experience. All adults once had plenty of opportunity to appraise or criticise their own teachers and at some stage most try imagining what they would do in the role. I suppose this is most likely to happen when your own children go to school, especially if they don’t get on as well as you expected. At such moments all your innate teaching ability asserts itself and you think, ‘I could do the job ten times better than Miss Bloggs!’

  Then you look hard at hundreds of happy puppies as they gambol, shove and scream their way out of school, and you have reservations.

  The fact is that schools only deal with part of the education of society’s youngsters and all adults are engaged in the other, more informal part, either as individuals or in their jobs or their leisure. How short the time in school really is, compared to the ‘non-school’ part, is revealed when you do the arithmetic. For a child, from age 5 to age 18 seems a lifetime. But when I annually greeted newcomers and their parents to an Upper School serving the 13 to 18 age group, I used to emphasise that in most subjects they would have about 285 hours teaching from the moment they set foot in the School until GCSE. Put that into context of a working day and night it covers about one and two thirds weeks. Indeed the whole working school time amounts to about 11.5% of life in the thirteen years from 5 to 18. So non-school time and opportunity for influence has by far the greater weight.

  Teacher training courses help with the theory of education, practice and technique, and provide some academic extension for the B.Ed. (Bachelor of Education). For the PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education) the prior degree course far outweighs the training element. But neither can turn a naturally poor teacher into a good one, nor is formal training essential to be an outstanding teacher. A good teacher is a good teacher - in or out of the profession.

  On one of our weekly half day practice sessions when it was my turn to take a lesson, the VP had
me walking on air when he told me that I had ‘a good classroom presence’. This made me so obnoxiously big-headed that I thought I was in the ‘born teacher’ category and therefore only had to open my mouth and the children would hang on my every word. With so many people watching their every move during our half day lessons they were usually very attentive. At Spenser Street I was lucky that they seemed to take to me quite quickly; and they already had three young teachers on the permanent staff. I was assigned to Miss Beaumont’s class and although she was not of the youngest in age she was certainly young at heart. She was also the Chief Assistant, so most members of the class were good in both work and behaviour.

  It contained forty-seven ten and eleven year olds. The reason for the age spread, which I experienced myself at junior school, was due to the Chief Education Officer - or to give him the title to which he was appointed in 1933, Secretary to the Education Committee. He conceived the notion of six monthly promotion for all schools throughout the city, which meant that every class had two sections - juniors and seniors. Halfway through the year the seniors moved up to the next class, and the juniors became the seniors. The ploy helped at both ends of the age spread - then 5 to 14, but it ensured that every class had to be taught in two halves. It was universally unpopular in schools and I have never experienced it elsewhere.

  I soon had a seating plan with the names of the children in my lesson notebook, ready to commit to memory. Miss Beaumont gave me a few thumb nail sketches, such as Harry W who, though quiet most of the time, was apt suddenly to kick out at you in a temper when frustrated and the best solution was to dodge quickly. If he made contact there had to be the inevitable report to Mr Overton and subsequent punishment; rather unnecessary, she said, because his temper evaporated just as quickly. But also there was Sheila C, with an IQ of 132, who was soon to move to a well-known Grammar School. We were taught a great deal about IQs - intelligent quotients - and how to measure them. At the time it was generally accepted they were fixed, like one’s height. Subsequently it has been revealed there was some fixing of the research data that led to the assumption. Nevertheless with a high IQ Sheila stood tall in the crowd of her peers.

  Despite its tough area I found my fears were groundless and that Spenser Street was indeed a good school for teaching practice. All I had to do was dig up some good lesson material from somewhere to manifest significant experiences and I would be home and dry. Fortunately I knew I had just the right source at home in some books which I was treasuring for the future. They had been given me by a near neighbour who was Headmaster of a Junior School and who had been at St Andrews in the early twenties. They were entitled ‘The Practical Senior Teacher’. I knew they would really come into their own during the next year when we were to train for senior teaching but, as Miss Beaumont’s class contained the oldest juniors, I felt sure I should find plenty of suitable material, since many would be moving to a senior school in a few weeks’ time.

  There were six volumes, imposingly bound in red covers with gold lettering and embossed designs. With them was a box file, made to look like a seventh and much thicker volume, which contained an assortment of classroom charts and pictures. The man said that now he was permanently in his Junior School he had no further use for them. Actually they were in pristine condition and had I looked carefully I would have realised he had made hardly any use of them at all.

  They carried a Foreword by Sir Percy Nunn, an educationist whom the VP was wont to quote in his lectures. Naturally they covered all subjects taught in schools, so they seemed to contain everything that anyone could possibly need for any lesson of any kind.

  Not for me the harassed search for lesson materials, I thought smugly. Whilst the other chaps were ransacking College and city libraries, and were begging ideas from the senior year or older relatives who were teachers, I smiled patronisingly at their efforts, secure in the knowledge that I possessed it all in the six volumes of ‘The Practical Senior Teacher’. The books were published by the New Era Publishing Company and each had highly decorative book plates inside. These, fortunately, had not been pasted in because on the back of each was an explanation that truly summed up the wealth of my treasures so perfectly:

  ‘AN EXPLANATION OF THE PLATE’

  ‘It is a work of great beauty and considerable artistic merit’....it explained, in case you weren’t sure. ‘It is designed by Mr W.P.Barrett, who has an international reputation and has designed book plates for an imposing list of kings and queens’.....(in those days there was still a list)......’ as well as for many other distinguished persons. The design represents the Dawning of the New Era of Learning breaking through the mountains and clouds which may be taken to represent ignorance and the many barriers which obstruct progress. The sun is the source of all power and good and represents the power which can be derived by the wisdom and knowledge which you should derive from the possession of the book......’

  I was most impressed by this sentiment: the wisdom and knowledge I could derive from the books and felt sure they couldn’t fail to put me way ahead of my unfortunate fellow students who were groping in the dark for their lesson material. As if to prove this to me, after some more detailed description of the plate, the blurb concluded,

  ‘The light......represents the power of wisdom and knowledge to develop that which is latent in the unplumbed depths of the possibilities of the individual, if knowledge and wisdom are laid before him clearly and concisely.’

  It was heady stuff for a student teacher. In the volumes were lessons and schemes of work for English, Mathematics, Geography, History, Music, Art, Physical Training, Science, Hygiene, Needlework and Handicraft. How could I fail to plumb the depths of the possibilities of the Spenser Street kids when I had all the necessary knowledge and wisdom laid out before me so clearly and concisely? What was even better, none of the other chaps had managed to find copies of these books, I found out discretely. It was hard luck on them, of course, but that’s how life went.

  In block practice you were expected to start taking some lessons after a couple of days. Our visiting tutors could be expected at any time after that, and you were expected to be coping well at least or carrying a torch at best, especially if you had ambitions to be one of the rare few who would ultimately receive the accolade of an ‘A’ teaching mark. Actually final teaching marks were strictly confidential, so of course they were subject to universal leaks.

  Miss Beaumont suggested that for one set of English lessons, ostentatiously labelled ‘Grammar’ on the timetable, I should teach punctuation. I realised from reading a number of their compositions that at least half the class were quite confused about this little matter, so I readily agreed to clarify the situation with a couple of lessons or so. I knew perfectly well the matter was dealt with in ‘The Practical Senior Teacher’ and therefore the matter was as good as solved.

  Of course some of the children could punctuate quite adequately, especially anyone like Sheila. However there was only one other grammar school entrant in Miss Beaumont’s class, so the total for the School was two, since hers was the top one. In the city as a whole one eighth of the children went to grammar schools, a figure arrived at each year by the simple method of counting the number of places available and drawing a line at that point on the examination results list. This procedure was mirrored in all local education authority areas, so entry to grammar schools varied according to available accommodation resulting in widely differing ratios. A very persistent rumour had it that in one town in mid-Wales the single grammar school was three times the size of the only other secondary school, so the 11+ pass rate there exceeded 75%. In our city seven-eighths of the children, therefore, went on to the organisationally new secondary modern schools (or a few to the secondary technical schools which had a fairly short existence as such) established under the recent 1944 Education Act. There were no new buildings, of course, and everyone still called them senior schools.

 
At night I burned the midnight oil preparing lessons on a range of subjects, including punctuation. I was still in the VP’s tutorial group and therefore knew he would visit me at some stage. The problem was I didn’t know when, so, as he very well intended, I had to prepare each lesson perfectly, just in case. But with my advantage I didn’t worry and commiserated in avuncular fashion with other students who were less fortunate.

  ‘Heaven knows what I’ll do if the VP comes into my lesson on long multiplication,’ groaned Archie. ‘You can’t make visual aids on a topic like that, so there’ll be nothing for the kids to flash around and impress him. In any case, half of them at my School don’t know their tables, so I’m stuck from the start.’

  ‘Never mind, old chap,’ I gloated, ‘write it all up under Problem. Impress him with your analysis. He can’t expect you to do wonders in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind if he comes to Geography - I’m doing the weather and there’s bags of stuff on that. I’ve managed to get a film strip on it and the School actually has a projector. Trouble is only one room blacks out, so you have to get the classes swapped around and they don’t like doing that.’

  I blanched. A film strip projector! He was lucky - Spenser Street had no such luxuries. A good lesson with that was bound to be impressive. But never mind, I’d got breadth in ‘The Practical Senior Teacher’ and I could illustrate anything - even punctuation! I chuckled to myself for I had just prepared handsheets for the pupils on that topic. Lovely illustrations they were, bringing full stops, commas, inverted commas, semi-colons, colons and dashes all to life directly from the pages of my precious volumes. If only the VP would visit me for that lesson!

  He did just that.