Monkeys and Parrots 2

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.