My teachers changed my life, and one of these days I’ll sit down with Ken and recall our teachers at Northland College — Mr. Holmes, Mr. Rowe, Mr. Lee, Mr. and Mrs. Moss, Mrs. Lyons, Mr. Ballantyne, Mr. Matley, Matron Faugie, Matron Laing and the rest. I know Ken will want to add Selwyn Wilson, Peter Coup and Eddie Bergen.
But this is about my own brief stint in the profession ~ Ian
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A teaching studentship enabled me to finish my degree — that, and the two of us working part-time jobs, and a little help from my parents. That studentship entailed two years at Teachers College, while I completed my degree, and two years classroom teaching to work off the associated bond.
Teaching seems to have been quite a popular option at the time. Certainly the staff room at Henderson High School had a decent proportion of trendy looking young staff sitting at the back, muttering rebelliously amongst themselves during meetings.
I can remember comparatively little of those two years, and really all I’m left with are these fragments and some strong opinions.
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The early 1970s were a time of miniskirts and see-through blouses over no-you-can’t bras. One day, as we were sitting in a circle for some Training College exercise, our lecturer finally decided that he really needed to remind the young women, sitting with their knees mindfully aligned, of the distraction in the classroom they would cause if they went on Section dressed similarly.
“Section” referred to the brief time we spent in classrooms, in the course of which I came across two inspiring teachers. The first was a Social Studies teacher who was practising a no-caning policy at Auckland Grammar School. In the AGS environment that wasn’t easy. I readily adopted the same policy, believing that rather than mete out justice — which I’d accepted without question from my Northland College teachers — I’d likely resort to caning in a fit of anger.
My second inspiration was a softly spoken English teacher I saw performing in front of a class of largely Māori and Polynesian kids in Otara, South Auckland. His bond with them was very apparent. This was Ian Mitchell, who turned up 20-odd years later as Headmaster at Henderson High School, when Stephen was a student. Ian was fiercely committed to left-wing and Māori causes, and when it transpired that Stephen, his Head Boy, was an acolyte of Roger Douglas and free enterprise he lost all interest in him.
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On another occasion we went to a nearby Catholic school to use their hall. I don’t remember the object of the exercise — maybe it was a drama class in which we rehearsed scenes from a Shakespeare play — but it was there I first noticed Graeme, who was to become a good friend and remain one ever since. I think he may have been playing the Prince of Denmark to my halberd carrier. Given the difference in status it’s not surprising we never spoke.
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I can’t remember anything else about my two years of Training College except that our home room, if that’s the right expression, was on the right hand side of the drive as you entered the grounds; and also that our home room teacher, if that’s the right expression, was Tom Newnham. Mr. Newnham was a likeable, sincere and committed lecturer, and also secretary of CARE, the Citizens’ Association for Racial Equality. He went on to lead a righteous life of left-wing activism, particularly in China. Come to think of it I went to school with Trevor Richards, head of HART (Halt All Racist Tours), who was somewhat more of a firebrand.
Honestly I can’t remember anything Tom Newnham taught us, but I do remember arriving at Henderson High School feeling in equal parts well trained and inexperienced, like a recruit hearing the first shell overhead.
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Head of Social Studies at Henderson was Mr. Field, courteous, supportive and helpful to us newbies. The Head of English struck me as a rather pompous man of the old school whom I had less time for.
It wasn’t long before I and the other young know-it-alls were categorising the staff as either passionately engaged and committed, or time servers. It’s never seemed fair to me that they were all paid equally.
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My home class was a bunch of fourth formers. I liked them but they could be hard to control. Towards the end of the year I told one rowdy kid rather loudly in a fit of exasperation that I’d be glad to see the back of him over the summer holidays. It quieted not just him but the whole class. It turned out they liked me. And taught me that performative emotion can move people.
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One of my English classes was 4 Engineering. They had as much interest in English as I had in Engineering, but I took comfort in the knowledge that classes were streamed, which meant that I could put their lack of interest down to their lack of ability rather than my own. Some years later I read that one of those boys was running a fairly successful business in Henderson. That taught me another lesson, one best exemplified by an honest American English graduate, who discovered during the Covid lockdown that, though very bright, she’d never been taught any useful life skills.
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There was a curriculum, and we were expected to teach it. For me as a conscientious new teacher that was extremely hard work. We had resources like text books and the school library, but there was still the matter of creating lesson plans. I don’t know if there were, even then, pre-written plans that one could deliver by rote, but I created my own. The fact that we were also boatbuilding didn’t help, and that part way through the year we rented the house and began living in car cases at Span Farm.
The thing I remember most vividly in those pre-photocopy days was making stencils and running off copies on the school’s hand-cranked Gestetner. You started by writing, drawing or typing onto wax coated paper. This cut through the wax to create a master stencil, which you then ran through the Gestetner to make copies for your class, in my case generally at the last minute.
I found this rather inadequate photo on Facebook, which shows something similar to our school machine, with streams of comments from students and pupils, reminiscing vividly about the messiness and the smell of solvent from the purple ink. Interestingly, many of the comments talked of teachers giving their work to the school secretary for typing, but all mine were hand printed.
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Henderson High School had three problem 3rd Form classes. We called them the Mad, the Bad and the Sad. Graeme, my Prince of Denmark — the young man I remembered from Training College — had turned up teaching at Henderson and was in charge of one of these classes. He wasn’t finding it particularly easy.
Joy, another first-year, was teaching a second, and Heather started coming in once a week to give her students lessons in handcrafts. Those kids had had a difficult life. Heather remembers a boy who’d had his head stuffed down the toilet by a parent. He was one of Graeme’s charges, and Graeme couldn’t understand the kid’s behaviour until he met the crazy parents. A kid in Heather’s class threw a hammer across the classroom. Another approached her in the corridor, reached for her throat and began to choke her. The other kids ran for help.
I think I may have had the third class in some capacity, probably the Sad, as I can only remember a couple of them, and don’t recall their behaviour being particularly difficult.
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I thought it wrong that the three most difficult classes in the school were being taught by the least experienced staff members, and I wrote to the Principal to say so. I heard nothing back until one day at the staff meeting he unexpectedly, and to my great embarrassment, read my letter aloud. It felt like an ambush, but as a consequence I was seconded to the timetable committee for the following year.
This seemed like a constructive idea, but I don’t think I managed to attend any meetings, mainly because they were scheduled for the weeks after the senior students had ceased class for the year — that is, when the senior staff had free time — whereas my junior classes trundled on to the very end.
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Heather and I got to know Graeme as one of the young know-it-alls, and the even smaller subset teaching those mad, bad and sad third formers. I thought Graeme took his perceived novice shortcomings too seriously — I mean, look at my own! — whereas Joy was the best of us, motherly, competent and committed.
But Graeme was great fun, witty and erudite. And he’d travelled. He’d rented a flat in Glen Eden, maybe half a mile from our own place, to be close to the school. One night he invited us round for drinks, and it was a revelation. We tasted French bread, smoked beef and black olives, all for the first time, and drank good red wine from Windy Hill, a West Auckland vineyard where Graeme picked grapes occasionally. He and his brother were turning into wine connoisseurs. Graeme had also bought the latest Rolling Stones album, Some Girls. We ate the food and drank the wine and listened to the music, and walked home to our kids and the baby sitter.
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Who else? There were Cecilia and Clem and Peter and Kit and Gail. There were other married couples. There was the short order cook, and a serious bloke wanting a career as a writer. There were two staff members who later came across each other absolutely by chance on a Spanish railway platform. Many of the staff were interesting, most of them hardworking, some of them libidinous. There was occasional partying, quite a lot of drink, and a bit of — what did we call it? — pot seems such a trite name.
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Two more related anecdotes, the first of which fills me with shame.
Whereas I only stayed for a couple of years, Ken continued to teach for his entire career. When it came time for his daughter to go to secondary school, he had her enrolled at one of the elite inner city schools instead of the local West Auckland school where he was teaching at the time.
Getting round the zoning system like this was difficult but hardly unusual. There were a few young Mums in our own lunchroom at the time, and they often talked about how to wangle their kids into the school of their choice.
But I was still a left wing social democrat, or at least felt it was our civic duty to support the local school. Accordingly, our kids attended Henderson High School, where I myself had taught.
One night a few of us went to check out Brian’s new Barrister’s Chambers, and settled in for a few drinks. When the subject of school zoning came up, as it sometimes did, I let it be known long and loudly that Ken, specifically, was a hypocrite for not supporting his local school. I don’t think Ken was there to hear me. I hope not.
This was such bad behaviour that I bought Brian a bottle of Krug and apologised.
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Fast forward a few years and Heather and I felt differently. It started with Ian Mitchell, the Henderson Principal I mentioned earlier, who’d had a mutually supportive relationship with his Head Boy, Stephen — but cut him loose when he realised Stephen was a tech-obsessed capitalist in the making. We were a bit ambivalent ourselves, along the lines of Michael J. Fox’s parents in Family Ties, but this was definitely uncalled for.
Our feelings got stronger when Adrienne, then in the fourth form, came home proudly with a class project for which she’d received an A. We weren’t impressed, mainly because it was unambitious and full of spelling and grammar mistakes. At the upcoming parent-teacher evening, which we attended along with Adrienne, we told her teacher what we thought.
I can’t remember how the teacher responded — whether she told Adrienne that, yes, perhaps she’d been too easy on youse kids. Or maybe that she didn’t assess youse kids on your English skills, but instead gave out As for effort, team work and creative thinking. That sounds about right.
It didn’t matter. We just thought youse teachers needed to do better than that.
Judging by the news stories at the time, we weren’t the only parents who’d decided the school only cared about a certain demographic. It was steering our daughter towards a career in hairdressing, we reckoned, and we managed to emulate Ken and place her at Epsom Girls Grammar the following year. This wasn’t a particularly happy experience for Adrienne — she was dismissed as a Westie by the snobbier girls — but at least she made it to university and a science degree.
And yes, I’m being unnecessarily judgmental about hairdressers.
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I’m not claiming that my opinions as expressed are particularly informed or useful, but it’s been sad to see standards in secondary education retreat over the last fifty years — slowly but inexorably, like the South Island glaciers — and in particular at our own school, Northland College, which ranks near the bottom now in terms of student achievement. ~ Ian
Mr Leigh. Probably Mr Gale, there were two, Gales, social sciences Jim Gale and engineering, Len Gale, (brothers of Norm Kearns) and for me Phyllis Pettit. It was Ms Pettit who inspired my interest in France, through the history of the French Revolution and my introduction of Socialism that featured in my mother’s family – Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Perhaps, Thomas Roy Buxton. Interesting, Ian, I now on reflection, accept if I understand you correctly, are correct. All my children would have been better educated at Kelston Girls and Boys HS’s by offering them real-life, all-round experience of social diversity, specifically of the nature and customs of their Maori and Polynesian peers.
Ken, I knew you’d come up with a longer list of teachers. I remember Phyllis Pettit but hardly any personal interactions. Mr Buxton, the headmaster, I recall meeting with my parents in his office the day I arrived in the 3rd form. He struck me as looking and acting like the typical middle class gentleman and running the school with that authority. But the Gale brothers being brothers also with Norm Kearns! They must have been an intriguing family. I remember Len best, humbled by my inadequate Form 4 Engineering talent.