Training College (1955)

After a discussion with Royston Brown, my mother's cousin and a friend of both my parents, who had been a missionary before the war, I had set my course for a teaching career to prepare to offer my services to the New Zealand Baptist Missionary Society for work at St Paul's School in Agartala, where the current Principal, Eileen Arnold was nearing retirement age.

So I applied for Training College (Auckland Secondary) at Epsom, and was accepted for the course. English graduates were rare in those days; there were only two of us in our year, although there were several with some English in their degrees.

English and Foreign Language graduates were in the same class, with Peter Wells, an inspiring teacher originally from Wales, with experience in Australia and New Zealand, as our tutor. Our classes also included Social Studies, and some educational theory, although not much. We were to have three stints of teaching practice during the year.

At the same time, I enrolled for three papers at the university to start the course for the Diploma in Education: Education Stage I and a research paper.

We started the year with a visit to an intermediate school, to get an idea of the levels achieved by Form 2 pupils. My visit was to Kowhai Intermediate, the first intermediate school in the country to be opened, about 1922. There has been a lot of criticism of the intermediate schools, but they were originally intended to be junior high schools, providing four years (up to Year 10) of education for less academic pupils, and a good grounding for the ones who would progress to Senior High School and University. The second part of the idea was never bought into by the general public.

I had only been at Training College for about three days, when a message came to say that one of the young teachers at Kaitaia College had had to go away for a fortnight's military training course and could I go and relieve for him? So I was booked on the DC3 for Kaitaia on the Saturday, and reached Kaitaia late in the weekend, because the weather was bad and we had to travel by bus.

This was my first introduction to the Far North and I enjoyed the experience. The students didn't have time to get to know me well enough to cause problems, the people at the College were friendly, and the rural lifestyle relaxed. When I got back to Training College I didn't seem to have missed much.

One of the features of that year was learning about new technology. Reel-to-reel tape recorders were just coming on to the market. A few weeks in to the year, the College took delivery of one of the new machines and we were able to record our own voices and play them back, to help us improve our classroom speaking, and to enable us to learn how to use the new gadgets for teaching English oral skills, and pronunciation of foreign languages.

My first school "section" was at Auckland Grammar, where I was introduced to the protocols and some of the politics of secondary school staffrooms: which chair you could sit in at morning tea, and so on. Even though I had been a student fairly recently, it was nowhere near as friendly as Kaitaia, though some of my old teachers were helpful.

Later I went for three weeks to Morrinsville College. I had cousins who lived out of town on their farm, where we had stayed for holidays a couple of times, and that was pleasant, as was the country school.

My final section was at Takapuna Grammar School, large and a bit more impersonal. The Deputy Head was a distant cousin of my mother's, who was very welcoming, and his daughter was also a teacher there so I did not feel strange for too long. But I remember sitting in on French lessons taken by the senior languages teacher, who later became an Inspector. His text-book (for sixth-form French) was annotated with the dates he reached a particular page each year, and where he inserted his jokes. He had obviously taught the same way for many years!

In early October we had to apply for jobs for the next year. I applied for two; Papakura High School, and the newly-built Hamilton Boys. The Hamilton school application was successful. I was ready for my first year of teaching, or so I thought.