I'm posting excerpts from a longer set of my ramblings, called "Monkeys and Parrots", about what it was like to be growing up in the Fifties. This bit is about my teachers at Ecclesfield Grammar School. I think it provides food for thought about the sort of qualities that make a good teacher.
Monkeys and Parrots 2
The teachers were academics, mostly Oxbridge graduates. That’s not to be sneezed at. It meant they were sharp, usually very funny, and, most importantly, it meant they knew what they were talking about when they taught their subjects.
The downside is that they often were not, by any modern standard, good or effective teachers. I doubt very much if any of them had a teaching qualification. In those days, if you had a degree, you could be a teacher, without further training. So, not unnaturally, their preferred pedagogic method was based on their own experience at school which was to tell us a few things, then make sure we all had “a good set of notes”. These were either dictated or written on the blackboard to be copied. (You had to write fast, or the board was rubbed and re-written before you caught up.) The notes, well and accurately regurgitated, were what got us through the still quite new GCE O level and A Level exams. This meant that as a learner you were effectively on your own. If you were someone who needed actual teaching, or coaching, or individual help, forget it.
But what our teachers really had going for them was that they had a precious and hard-won hinterland of experience and wisdom and a monumental sense of proportion. They came to us, you see, from the War. Chemistry teacher Sam Hemingfield had flown Halifax bombers, mission after mission, in the strategic bombing campaign that claimed the lives of 50,000 airmen. History specialist Paul Slater, later to be a Coventry comprehensive head, was in the Royal Navy and endured the kamikazes off Okinawa in 1945. Geography teacher Harry Birkby flew a Dakota, towing gliders to the Normandy landings, then Arnhem, then the Rhine crossing. And our maths teacher, Rudi Wessely, was a Czechoslovakian Jew who’d escaped to Britain on a Kindertransport train in ’39. All of his family died in the camps. And they're just the ones I knew about.
These were people who had seen life and knew what it was capable of. They relished what they now had, and they weren’t going to let anything get them down. They revelled, whatever their subjects, in the precious things that they had so nearly had ripped away – the countryside, poetry, music, drama, good company and fun. We didn’t appreciate that at the time, of course, but on reflection I realise that the War created a whole generation of role models for young people – men and women who had broader horizons and a driving sense of the importance of gratefully and zestfully living the life you’re given.
Monday, 30 November 2009
Saturday, 28 November 2009
Monkeys and Parrots.
I started this blog thinking I'd have interesting things to say about education --after all I've been a teacher, a head and a writer on education for many years. I actually posted a couple of things. Then I thought, "Hang on. There are too many education bloggers already. Do something different."
So I took down my educational ramblings. Instead, what I'm going to do is post here, as time goes on, is some excerpts from a book I've been trying to put together about what it was like to be a teenager in the Fifties -- about school, and National Service, and my first job. The whole thing runs to about 45,000 words, and it's called "Monkeys and Parrots", for reasons that are explained in it somewhere. But I'm not going to post the whole lot at once. Let's settle for 500 words at time. Here's a bit about when I passed my eleven plus.
"You have qualified".
My year group started at grammar school in 1948. I was the only one from my junior school to go there that year, the only one to pass the eleven-plus.
I remember taking the eleven-plus. I don’t think we called it that. To us it was always t’ Scholarship. If you were bright, or lucky, or both you could “Pass t’ Scholarship.” Presumably because there was a time, not long before, when that’s exactly what it was – a financial award to help poorer kinds into a fee-paying school. The school we were trying for wasn’t fee paying, though. It was a straightforward West Riding Grammar School, well down the pecking order of selective schools.
We didn’t take t’ Scholarship exam in our own quite small church primary. We had to travel to a much bigger junior school in the next village, where we had a rotten school dinner (I remember awful mince) and sat in rows, in silence, in a strange place, doing a full-blown exam. No wonder so many fell by the wayside.
Then we waited for the Word. Pass or Fail. Your whole future on the turn of an arithmetic problem (“A train leaves Crewe at nine-thirty am. It takes two and a half hours……”) My letter was late arriving, which makes me think I was perhaps on some sort of reserve list. I knew I hadn’t done well at maths, but I was certain I’d done an excellent English paper, and I’d probably been OK on the intelligence test, so maybe that tipped the balance. None of my classmates got the call. In some cases it was a surprise. The headmaster’s brother, for example (yes, he had an eleven-year old brother) who sat by me in class, didn’t pass, although he later made up for it with technical qualifications and did very well. Another star pupil, a girl, failed but went to a fee paying Catholic girls’ school instead.
I still have the letter. It’s very ordinary looking, and is called “Form S (E) 24”. The heading is “County Council of the West Riding of Yorkshire Education Department”. Then there’s my name, written in, and another heading, “County Examination for Selection for Secondary Schools, 1948.’
Then it tells me (not my parents, but me – a nice touch, that) “You have qualified for admission to Ecclesfield Grammar School.” (The school’s name is handwritten) and continues with the instruction to report there on 6 September next, and that I can get a travelling allowance. In fact I got a nice bus pass, with a red cardboard cover.
I was just elated. It wasn’t so much anticipation of the delights of the grammar school as sheer relief at not going to the grim, school-of-hard-knocks sec mod that catered for the sons and daughters of all the local miners. That was where the kids had been known to put a teacher upside down in a dustbin. Or so they said. I didn’t want any part of that. Oh dear, no.
So my mother took me to Cole’s in Sheffield to get my uniform – blazer, flannel trousers, beret.......
OK. That's enough rambling. If you like it I'll post a a bit more soon
Meanwhile, Ric, commenting on the above, suggests that I might bring in some contemporary references where appropriate. That seems a good idea, so I'll try to do that.
What this first excerpt does, I suppose, is help to show just how useless the eleven plus was (and sadly still is, because it does cling on a bit here and there) at predicting future success. My guess is that it's really no better than sticking a pin into a list of children's names. Worst of all, though,
as Bob Harrison's comment below suggests, was its effect on children and families. I could go on about this, but I really can't add anything to what was already a well worn debate when I first came across it forty or more years ago.
So I took down my educational ramblings. Instead, what I'm going to do is post here, as time goes on, is some excerpts from a book I've been trying to put together about what it was like to be a teenager in the Fifties -- about school, and National Service, and my first job. The whole thing runs to about 45,000 words, and it's called "Monkeys and Parrots", for reasons that are explained in it somewhere. But I'm not going to post the whole lot at once. Let's settle for 500 words at time. Here's a bit about when I passed my eleven plus.
"You have qualified".
My year group started at grammar school in 1948. I was the only one from my junior school to go there that year, the only one to pass the eleven-plus.
I remember taking the eleven-plus. I don’t think we called it that. To us it was always t’ Scholarship. If you were bright, or lucky, or both you could “Pass t’ Scholarship.” Presumably because there was a time, not long before, when that’s exactly what it was – a financial award to help poorer kinds into a fee-paying school. The school we were trying for wasn’t fee paying, though. It was a straightforward West Riding Grammar School, well down the pecking order of selective schools.
We didn’t take t’ Scholarship exam in our own quite small church primary. We had to travel to a much bigger junior school in the next village, where we had a rotten school dinner (I remember awful mince) and sat in rows, in silence, in a strange place, doing a full-blown exam. No wonder so many fell by the wayside.
Then we waited for the Word. Pass or Fail. Your whole future on the turn of an arithmetic problem (“A train leaves Crewe at nine-thirty am. It takes two and a half hours……”) My letter was late arriving, which makes me think I was perhaps on some sort of reserve list. I knew I hadn’t done well at maths, but I was certain I’d done an excellent English paper, and I’d probably been OK on the intelligence test, so maybe that tipped the balance. None of my classmates got the call. In some cases it was a surprise. The headmaster’s brother, for example (yes, he had an eleven-year old brother) who sat by me in class, didn’t pass, although he later made up for it with technical qualifications and did very well. Another star pupil, a girl, failed but went to a fee paying Catholic girls’ school instead.
I still have the letter. It’s very ordinary looking, and is called “Form S (E) 24”. The heading is “County Council of the West Riding of Yorkshire Education Department”. Then there’s my name, written in, and another heading, “County Examination for Selection for Secondary Schools, 1948.’
Then it tells me (not my parents, but me – a nice touch, that) “You have qualified for admission to Ecclesfield Grammar School.” (The school’s name is handwritten) and continues with the instruction to report there on 6 September next, and that I can get a travelling allowance. In fact I got a nice bus pass, with a red cardboard cover.
I was just elated. It wasn’t so much anticipation of the delights of the grammar school as sheer relief at not going to the grim, school-of-hard-knocks sec mod that catered for the sons and daughters of all the local miners. That was where the kids had been known to put a teacher upside down in a dustbin. Or so they said. I didn’t want any part of that. Oh dear, no.
So my mother took me to Cole’s in Sheffield to get my uniform – blazer, flannel trousers, beret.......
OK. That's enough rambling. If you like it I'll post a a bit more soon
Meanwhile, Ric, commenting on the above, suggests that I might bring in some contemporary references where appropriate. That seems a good idea, so I'll try to do that.
What this first excerpt does, I suppose, is help to show just how useless the eleven plus was (and sadly still is, because it does cling on a bit here and there) at predicting future success. My guess is that it's really no better than sticking a pin into a list of children's names. Worst of all, though,
as Bob Harrison's comment below suggests, was its effect on children and families. I could go on about this, but I really can't add anything to what was already a well worn debate when I first came across it forty or more years ago.
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