AGS Fourth Year continued

My teachers in the first year of 6A were the best available.

For English, Owen Lewis was just back from the war and full of enthusiasm. I continued to learn well from Owen Ingram for Latin, and Henry Cooper for French.
Joe Russell continued his unique method for History, while in the new (to me) subject of Zoology "Pongo" La Roche was the guru.

Latin, French and History were "more of the same", "steady as she goes" programmes.
But in English we were pushed hard from Day 1: the first week we studied Shakespeare's Macbeth, and the next week we went on to another topic. In other words, we were encouraged to get our teeth into a solid project from week 1. I learned that particular lesson well; when I became a senior English teacher I had my sixth form classes tackle a solid topic in week 1 as well.

Owen Lewis had a programme where we studied a selection of representative poems, which changed in alternate years; for example, one year the list started with Spenser and the Elizabethans, the other year it started with Chaucer. One year the course included the history of drama, the other year the history of the novel. One year for one Shakespeare play, one year for another. So it was planned to cover the whole syllabus over a two-year stretch.

I found this a very sound basis for a knowledge of English; in fact my first two years at University were largely a repetition of what I had learned in the two years in 6A.

The major novel we tackled was A Passage to India by E M Forster. It was well above my head in many ways; I have read it several times since and taught it more than once; I have lived some years in India as you know, and have read just about everything else Forster wrote, and several books about his friends and contemporaries. And I don't imagine I have exhausted its ideas.

One of Owen's good ideas was to set us a poetry project: to find a contemporary poet (one still alive and writing) and read some of their poems and write an essay about them. He introduced us to Dylan Thomas, who that year was still drinking himself to death, among others. I developed an interest, along with several of my fellow-students, in War Poets, and chose Siegfried Sassoon for my project. I don't think I did very well; it was hard in those days to find the books and poems of these poets.

My exam results at the end of the first half-year indicated how much I was struggling to cope with the extra challenges: 36% in English -- quite unbelievable to me; I was used to 80s and 90s in most subjects. Fortunately, I had enough resilience to bounce back and put my mental shoulder to the wheel again.

Similar challenges faced me in the Zoology programme.

We were taken on a field trip early in the year to introduce us to one order of animals: insects one year and sea-shells another; we were expected to make and prepare a collection of one or the other as one of the year's projects.

The other early topic was Geology, the introduction to which is more or less essential in Zoology. So we began to learn the geological periods, and about fossils and evolution. The most interesting topic was volcanoes, including a brief survey of the Auckland ones.

But before long we moved on to Zoology proper, and this meant studying one animal from each major family of vertebrates, dissecting and drawing them in turn. I remember cutting up dogfish and frogs, and struggling with the sketching involved.

So in all these ways my studies progressed through 1949. That was the year I grew fast, and at the same time suffered from an outbreak of boils down both legs in turn; so large and painful at times that I couldn't bear to put my foot to the ground so had to stay in  bed for a day or two. They were the only days I missed school during the whole five years.