‘Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” So said American novelist Willa Cather who had been a teacher of Latin, algebra and composition.
Cather probably knew a thing or two about recalling those special times etched on the mind of every teacher.
In my first year of teaching in New South Wales in the 1960s, newbie teachers were rigorously inspected by a state-appointed inspector. I had been teaching Grade 12 literature, Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I thought had covered every critical aspect of the play with painstaking thoroughness.
The inspector, stern and without so much as a nod to me, walked up to the first student in the front desk and asked: “Who wrote Macbeth, young man?”
“I don’t know, sir,” came the anguished reply.
At that moment I wished to be back in the classroom at Sydney Boy’s High School where I had completed my final practicum with a classroom of young men sympathetic to my inexperience.
“Boys,” I had said to the class, “tomorrow my supervisor will be here to watch me teach and I’m hoping for a good result.”
“Don’t worry, sir, we’ve got it covered.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Those who know the answer to what you ask will raise their right hands, those who don’t will raise the left, so there will be a sea of responsive hands. Just choose the ‘righties.’”
My fourth year of actual teaching in N.S.W. brought another inspector. This time I was ready.
In senior English, spelling was part of the curriculum in those days. Accordingly, Monday to Thursday, we introduced 10 new words at the beginning of each class. We used those words during class and had a quickie test as class ended. After a revision of the week’s 40 words on Thursday, we opened on Friday with a spelling test of the week’s words.
The inspector was critical of this practice.
“Don’t you realize, Mr. Johnson,” he frowned, “if you persist in this repetitive practice, that by Friday they’ll all get them all correct?”
Teaching and testing for success? Not yet part of his repertoire of educational philosophies.
As a young teacher, new to B.C. in the 1970s, I had volunteered to supervise a high school dance. There was a fight in the parking lot and I went to break it up.
“But sir, he was smashing the headlights on a car,” protested one of the combatants.
“No reason for you to be attacking him,” I said.
“But it was your car, sir.”
Later, as a vice-principal at a large B.C. secondary school, I learned about the mischievous imaginations of Grade 8 students, especially when it came to plugging up hand basins in one washroom, flooding the floor.
My colleague, another vice-principal, was up to the challenge.
With his ordinary desk lamp in his hand, we went from classroom to classroom explaining that we had dusted the faucets in the washroom with a luminous dust and this special lamp would identify the culprit.
We barely got into our spiel in the third classroom when one panicked Grade 8 student got up and fled from the room.
Then there were the clothing challenges.
Given what kids almost wear to school these days, it is difficult to believe that in 1970 there was so much controversy surrounding whether female students in high school should be allowed to wear slacks.
The sartorial ingenuity of some young women in solving this problem, along with a determination to guide their peers toward a post-1970 fashion future while defying their elders, led at least at least two of them into high-profile executive careers — always dressed in pant suits.
Then there were the kids who, years later contact you with an invitation for coffee and the opportunity to meet their (gasp) grandkids. It’s hard to keep your emotions in check when that happens.
There are teachers, too, colleagues from decades past who inspired in you a lifelong commitment to public education and who formed, without even realizing it, a significant part of your own professional education.
Willa Cather was right; who would want to have done anything else with their life other than to have worked with kids in public education?
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
