While driving to Shell Cove school where I do a fortnightly IT gig, I drove past the school at Mount Brown. I’ve done a heap of relief work over the years there over the years but, as I drove by, the thought suddenly struck me that my teaching days are over. Yes, I can still do casual relief work if I want to but, since I am now retired and only allowed to earn $200 p/f before I threaten my pension, it seems that I have seen the inside of the classroom as an educator for the last time.
I suddenly felt incredibly sad that a significant chapter of my life has now closed and I looked back on the years as I drove and wondered just where all the years had gone.
I started my teacher training at Wollongong Teachers College in 1969. Not long after I started attending lectures, my number came up in the National Service lottery and I was called up to serve in the army. Australia was still sending troops to the Vietnam war and many young men, just like me, had served and some had died or been terribly injured in the conflict. The idea didn’t appeal so I applied for determent of my entry into the army on the basis of my status as a full-time student. This was granted on the proviso that my exam results met the necessary criteria. Needless to say I worked like a slave to make sure that they did and, when a selected group of 30 2nd year students were chosen to be the first to undertake a third year of teacher training, I was in that group and so staved off my service for another year.
Graduating at the end of 1971, I was inducted into the army in February 1972. I did my recruit training at 1 RTB at Kapooka, just outside the town of Wagga, NSW and was stunned to find that, when the corps allocations were announced, I had been posted, not to the Infantry, as most “nashos” were, but to the Army Education Corps. There were 6 teachers in my platoon and only two of us were chosen for Education, me and my best mate, Dave Thompson who was my room-mate at Kapooka and who, like me, came from Wollongong. Dave was posted to 1 PIR at Port Moresby and served there and then on attachment to the navy on Manus Island where he spent his two years in tropical ease.
Me? I was posted to the one place that I would want to be posted to least. Kapooka! Yes, I had been assigned to the Education Staff at the hell-hole from which I thought I would escape at the end of a horrible ten weeks of recruit training. Nevertheless, it wasn’t that bad. I was appointed as an Instructor at a temporary rank that meant I out-ranked the Corporal instructors who had made my life hell for the previous ten weeks. That was fun.
Shortly thereafter, I was posted to Holsworthy in Sydney and spent the rest of my National Service lecturing education courses to serving soldiers who were required to meet certain educational standards. They were VERY well motivated students. I lectured English, History and Social Studies and I loved every minute of it.
At the start of 1974 I was discharged and received my first posting with the Education Department, to a school in Wollongong, hooray. Back then it was almost a “given” that new students straight out of college were posted to the sticks somewhere and left to rot there for at least their first three years of teaching. If they endured that without too much complaining, it was known that they could expect to have a much better choice of posting when the letters were sent out at the beginning of their fourth year of service. But I was posted to home, I couldn’t believe it.
And so I began what would end up being 40 years in the classroom. With occasional time-outs to explore IT and other passions, I spent the time between then and now in primary classrooms in several states and territories and, latterly, also in high schools teaching English and Modern History.
Was it fun? Of course it was. I was granted the inestimable privilege of dealing with our nation’s most valuable resource, its children. Have the kids appreciated my service? Yes, they have. Despite the fact that teachers are rarely appreciated by their students until much, much, later, I have been around long enough to see my students’ children in my classrooms and to be told, on many occasions, how much my students appreciated me as a teacher and as a person. For a teacher who finishes their service as a non-fulltime staff member there are no gold watches, farewell dinners and flowery speeches, but I don’t begrudge that. Instead I treasure the little cameos that have dotted my time in the classroom and a comment made by one of my ex-students that is a fitting finale, at least as far as I am concerned. Some 37 years after I taught her in Year 4, a lady said to me a couple of years ago, “You know, Mr Hall (she couldn’t bring herself to call me Phil) the year I spent in your classroom was the happiest year of my school career and it was because of you that I went on and trained to be a teacher myself.”
Could there be a better reward that that? I don’t think so.
small e says
Your could do worse for a rewarding career Phil. Inspiring young minds. I recall a couple of notable teachers. One left school himself at 15 to join the merchant navy, and after 20 odd years seeing the world he returned home to become a secondary teacher. His stories of the high seas (and ‘low’ ports!) brought Social Studies to life for me. I still retell some of his amazing tales. Thank you Mr Steedman… The other was my Grade 6 teacher Harry Quick, who became a Tasmanian Labor rep. in Federal Parliament. He taught me in 1969 and because the school didn’t have a TV, he marched us down to his mother-in-law’s house nearby so we could watch the moon landing on TV. Our class was the only one in the school who saw this incredible event. I’ll never forget that moment. Thanks Mr Quick. Harry Quick is retired but is teaching English in poor regions of Asia. Hats off to educators.
Phil Hall says
I hope that we all can look back on a couple or maybe a few favourite teachers.