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Non-Fiction
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| Supervisions Inspections Observations | |
| By patterjack | ||||
| 23 March 2007 | ||||
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I thought best to get these out of my system. There are other tales I could tell , but these from early on will do. Super Visions Inspected One of the duties of Teachers' College lecturer , whether he himself had been a good schoolteacher or not , was to go out to schools with students and supervise them during practice their teaching weeks . I believe that those periods of student teaching now have the somewhat inflated title of The Practicum , typical of the way theoretical educationists make their material sound so much more important than it really is . I am always reminded of the garbage collector now fancifully retitled as sanitation engineer. The process could be wearing on all concerned . From the two country colleges where I lectured we would sometimes bus students daily to towns many miles away , and my first college actually hired a train which could drop one or two students off at several tiny country villages along the Sydney line , villages which sported one and two teacher schools. The train terminated in a city with several primary schools and a big high school . While still only seconded to that college, I needed to tread carefully if I wanted to gain permanency , as the two previous lecturers in my position had run foul of either the college principal or the treacherous head of the department . Hence my six weeks of supervising at the high school and one or two of the smaller schools was fraught with dangers for one as tactlessly outspoken as I . It was the first time that that high school had been used by the college , and the Serpent head of department had taken me aside and hissed in my ear that I simply had to make a good impression there , for my own sake as well as that of the college . I am still amused at the various double faux pas that the Principal of the high school , (who incidentally had been a science teacher at my own home town high ) was prone to making at school assemblies . His best was to stand up to the microphone and bellow condemnation of girls wearing slacks to sport . In MY day , girls didn't wear pants . Well --- not for sport anyway. The infants headmistress , of the school set in the same grounds as the high school , absolutely loathed and detested the fact that , despite having many more rooms than required for her pupils , she had to accommodate a couple of high school classes . So there was I , supervising a pleasant mature lady student , who asked me would I take over the first year high school class and show her how to have her pupils dramatise the poem she was teaching , a poem about a paper boy and his calls . I did get the class going quietly on it , and came to a point where I was asking them to demonstrate what the paper boy's mother would say if he shouted at home . At that very moment the headmistress appeared by the open door , turned back towards some pupils outside a class far down the corridor , put her fingers to her lips and loudly exclaimed Shhhh !!! . This being exactly what I was asking the class to do , they burst into laughter . Much offended , the lady took it upon herself to enter the classroom , abuse the pupils , the student teacher and me as well. After finishing one session of it she left , but decided to come back and have another swipe at us all . I controlled my temper and my laughter both , but even when she was serving morning tea in her office to the Serpent and me she carried on with a litany of complaint . It seems that it got no further than the overall head of the area, the high school principal , who was no doubt fed up with her eccentricities anyway. I survived the practice unscarred . Infants' school mistresses were people you avoided where possible , even at the cost of missing out on morning tea and scones , delicately served , on lace doilies . That same city had a small suburban primary with a lovely aboriginal name , but it remains mostly in my memory for the reason that it provided two notable cases of inappropriate dress . The style of the time was roped petticoats and lots of them , so that the girls often looked like inverted poppies , or a ballerina with a downwards extended tutu . I sat up the back of a kindergarten class and watched one lass , tall enough to allow her skirt , as she swept down the aisles between the rows of low desks , to brush pencils , books rulers and any other accoutrements away , clearing the desks completely . She had no idea she was doing it , until I gently pointed out to her that the children needed those things for their work. The girl teaching in the next door class was similarly attired . Her problem was that as she sat on a kindergarten size chair to read the class a story , the stiffly roped skirts were pushed upwards , almost obscuring her face . Reading a story to children as they sat on the mats before her was a task she managed , but only just , with a judicious pushing down of skirts , and having to repeat the action each time she turned a page. I did not always supervise girls . I remember watching one larrikin lad , who never prepared a lesson or wrote up his notes and who later failed his yearly exams . He was a personality style teacher , relying on chance rather than prepared knowledge to keep him going .The outstanding time when he was blessed by fate was when he was talking to his class about the difference between moths and butterflies . Temporarily stumped for words , he looked up to see a moth fly into the classroom. He snared it and used it as a teaching aid . He missed out on any gods-sent butterfly , however . Sometimes it was the supervisor who provided the laughs. While a co-lecturer and I were waiting for duties to commence in the principal's office of a big country primary school, he casually leaned forward , saying : I wonder what this does ? and flicked a switch , for no reason that I could determine . At that point the Colonel Bogey March , which was regimenting the children towards their classrooms ceased its thumping rhythms , and what had been till then an orderly procession became the equivalent of the Calgary Stampede. The principal was a kindly and understanding bloke whom I met some years later when he was boss of an even bigger Sydney primary school . He recalled the incident with good humour , and we were both able to enjoy the laugh, So it was not only the students who could provide sniggers .
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