No parent pushback, staff meetings or student reports: the profession's wondrous days of yore

I doubt contemporary school and university curricula reflect this exponential change, not only in what is taught but how it is taught.

For some, like myself, education and the world in general have undergone exponential and often bewilderingly dizzy change in the last 50 years.

Back then one could enrol in a Teachers College after successfully completing a Leaving (Year 11) Certificate. It was common to obtain a bursary to complete your Diploma of Teaching in exchange for a commitment to teach in a government school for three years.

My first appointment was in a regional Catholic College and my first-year teaching load was 42 out of 45 lessons per week.

Very few on staff had university degrees, and apart from an annual visit from the inspectors, there was no supervision or, for that matter, professional development.

There were no staff meetings, no parent-teacher interviews and no curriculum documentation. Most teachers were teaching outside their teaching speciality and were simply provided the relevant textbook and taught the content as they saw fit.

Apart from senior classes, middle and junior secondary classes included 35-40 students. Discipline was harsh and corporal punishment was de rigueur and draconian.

Teachers taught and students listened and copied copious notes from the blackboard. Group work and differentiated learning had not been invented then, nor for that matter, was pastoral care, a description more applicable to courses studied by our agricultural students.

There was no library and only one or two science laboratories. If there was an available laboratory, middle and junior school students observed the teacher doing an experiment and then wrote it up formulaically: aim, apparatus, method and conclusion, with the challenge of drawing meticulously labelled diagrams.

During my whole secondary education I never actually did a science experiment!

There were obviously no computers, and in one of my teaching rounds the whole school crammed into a large room and watched the moon landing on the only TV in the school.

Assessment was invariably an unseen examination, often set by the Board of Education. The Matriculation exams were set by the university and like the Leaving final exams were marked by external examiners.

The Proficiency (Year 9) and Intermediate (Year 10) exams were externally set but marked by one’s teacher. Otherwise, any assessment tasks completed during the year were not included in a student’s assessment.

My Matriculation assessment, for example, consisted of eight three-hour exams.

Exam results were reported as percentages. Year 12 students knew that only two thirds of their cohort would pass. Of a hundred students who began their secondary schooling, only a quarter made it to Year 12, and then another third would be culled in a cut-throat final examination regime.

It was common for students who had performed poorly in their exams to repeat the year. In fact, it was common across all year levels for students to ‘repeat’, but more so in Years 11 and 12.

Many students left at Year 10 and either worked or became apprentices. Students had a choice to attend either their local high or technical school until the 1980s when they were merged.

There were no school graduation ceremonies, and Year 12s waited patiently for their results to be published in the daily papers in early January. If you matriculated, you were able to enrol at a university if you could afford the fees.

Teachers were neither encumbered with writing curriculum documentation or school reports. You simply sent your percentage scores to the Form teacher who collated all the subject scores and then wrote a brief overall comment about the student’s behaviour and effort.

In my early years as a teacher, I never had a single parent interview. Parents invariably supported teachers and certainly did not challenge the marks given or discipline meted out.

It was common to be thanked by both students and their parents at the end of an academic year. Teachers, for the most part, enjoyed the respect of the wider community.

I am sharing these memories not to engender sympathy, but because I remember fondly those wondrous days of yore.

Ironically, there was not the massive teacher attrition rate we have in our current more enlightened era.

Things have certainly changed, but I am not convinced they have necessarily changed for the better!