Peter Wilson
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Most of the plant and material was very old. The library was in the western end of B Block, a very old musty place, very few books. I can always remember the library because I had to teach a science lesson at prac school and I remember carrying a stuffed owl from the library collection of animals and birds, walking over to the tram, carrying it home with everyone looking at me, up to school the next day, and bringing it back on the Monday. I was very embarrassed.
The canteen was at the northern end of A Block. My wife, who I met here, used to work in that canteen and her pay was one free drink a day.
We had very few text books from what I can remember, very few resources at all. People would lecture and students took notes in the traditional way, and there was hands-on work at prac. Written work was based on lect11re notes and I can't remember ever really going to the library as you would today, doing research and writing an essay.
The problem was, of course, that we did eight or ten s11bjects-all the primary school curriculum subjects - by the time we got through all those there was not really much energy left for anything else. Oddly eno11gh, those subjects are some of my fondest remembrances. Everything was totally geared to the primary school and was predominantly functional. Things you had to teach at school you were taught here.
Social studies was taken in A Block. I can remember the teacher walked in on the first day and said, "This is Book 1 of the eight books in primary Social Studies", and he went through them page by page, showing the pictures and
111e Union Shop, 1960s
talking about them. We would have to read them through and then almost on the last day he said, "This is the last page of the Grade 8 Social Studies book".
I had an interest in geography since my high school days, but had no idea I would go on to be become interested in geography teaching methods. I was totally committed to being a primary teacher - even the thought of being a primary principal never even occurred to me in those days.
I always remember art, held in an old building on the southside, where D Block is today. We were taken by Robbie Robertson who, I think, was newly arrived. I was hopeless at art and he told me so many times to "Just keep trying". It was a very functional course, learning the very things you would teach the students in a school. There was cutting-out work, elementary painting, a lot of craft work that involved needlework, because we had to teach needlework to boys and girls.
Perhaps you might expect those subjects to have been more segregated, but primary teachers in those days - probably as it is today - had to teach everything. I quite liked needlework. And there was a lot of paper splicing, cutting paper in different forms and weaving it together.
Music was held down in the eastern end of B Block, taken by John Ashton.
I used to be a very good singer in early primary school and then my voice broke and I emerged with a hopeless voice. We all had to sing and the examination was actually to stand up in front of the whole group and sing a song. And we all practised the recorder and we all had to pass the recorder.
I found it very hard and most people did not enjoy teaching music at prac school; but there were no experts and everyone had to teach it for an hour or so each week.
Education was taken by Arch Crowder. He was probably one of the best teachers of all and had a phenomenal memory. He took us for all educational theory, philosophy, sociology and he was a very enjoyable lecturer.
We also had educational administration classes, and that was totally functional again. We marked rolls,filled in every form we would have to fill in as teachers, right up through to being a principal in a one-teacher school, every form the Department required. It was very valuable.
Science was taken down in E block, an old ramshackle building, by Gordon Jones who later became Director of this campus. He was very young and very nervous - he had his Bachelor of Science and Dip Ed and had only been teaching for a very short time when they brought him in to train primary teachers.
I remember we had to do one applied test and teach it to the rest of the group in the class. I chose to show how salt on ice in a glass phial would eventually freeze and burst the glass tube and then we went through the physics of that.
It was all at a fairly elementary level. Most of the courses were very functional and not of a very high academic nature.
Early Childhood was under A Block, at the southern end. We used to laugh and giggle all the time through this because they taught us like Grade ls and 2s - lots of cutting out - and they introduced us to fairy claps, clapping with two fingers on your hand. In hindsight this was probably one of the most valuable courses because when I had to teach Grade ls and 2s, virtually everything taught us at College could be used.
There was no specialisation in any particular grade;
if
you were a primary teacher you were a primary teacher and could be asked to teach any class, from Grades 1 through 8, which was still in the primary school at that time.It was an enormous span.
I was very interested in sport in those days, being a state hockey player, so I found physical education one of the most interesting subjects. Many people seem to have enjoyed it, I think because of the people who taught it; they were simply good, dynamic teachers and contributed to making sport part of the ethos of the College - we had one of the best rugby teams in Brisbane.
I didn't play rugby union but that was the main sport and, coming from Grammar, I had to follow it. We did gymnastics and tumbling out in the quadrangle of A Block, which was bitumen in those days and is where the basketball nets were also - when you had classes in A Block all you could hear was the gazump, gazump, gazump of basket balls. I grew to really like basketball, which filled most lunch hours.
Hockey was frowned upon here, as it had been at Brisbane Grammar, but we did other progressive things, like learning to dance. Dancing was one of the highlights, held in G Block, another old ramshackle building over near the golf course, where we did a lot of folk and rhythmic dancing, but especially ballroom dancing.
The Tallebudgera Camp was one of the organised tours of the College and it was notorious for its strenuousness. We were up early for Kenny Southgate's workouts on the beach- one of the hardest workouts I have ever had. I was very fit in those days, playing hockey, and he worked us out on the beach for an hour and at the end of that he said "Righto men", he always called us men, "You can go for a swim". Virtually no-one could even make it to the water.
Everyone had to try, just try - we had thin people, fat people, they just had to try as hard as they could, because everyone had to teach sport in schools.
We didn't do a lot of rule learning- mainly sports teaching was all applied, you played a lot of the sports.
The other interesting part of phys ed was Kenny Southgate' s first aid classes.
Everybody had to study first aid and pass the St John's Ambulance course.
I can still remember his lecture on treating blisters; he was explaining how they used to get a big steel scrubbing brush and scrub them off, and at that point three people left the room.
The bandaging exam was one of the funniest I have ever been in. We worked in pairs, forty people in a room - two lots of twenty - and he would walk around and look at you and then nominate a bandage for you to do on the other person. And we had bandages all around the room, people with head bandages, arm bandages, feet bandages. In the end it all got a bit too much for us and we all broke down in laughter.
Another organised trip which everyone went on was to Runcorn State School, a project school held up as the shining light of the Department, because of their forestry plot. We also all went to Tangalooma to the Whaling Station though for the love of me I can't remember why. Then too, we all went to Beerwah State Forest School to see a forestry school in action and to do a little bit of integrated science with the growing of pine cones.
So that's four trips the whole College went on and that built up the cohesion of the College- everyone got to know each other very well. We had very little chance to know the teachers. It was fairly impersonal. I got to know my own group, and still recall some of the people from that class - many have since left teaching. My group were well motivated. I think all of them wanted to be teachers and since it was such a short course and you were going out one day a week, the end of the tunnel was always very close.
I think the system of prac teaching worked well and gave student teachers confidence. I was very lucky with prac because I went back to Ashgrove Primary School, where I had been as a boy. We went one day a week, which in hindsight was excellent because you were constantly learning things during the week and going out and trying them at prac. You brought work back from prac and it was looked at in classes here. I think everyone found prac interesting and exciting because that was a very expansive year or years in Queensland education, when both primary and secondary were expanding tremendously.
Examination of prac was one of the most nerve-wracking periods of the year.
Any student who says they are nervous about me going out to see them now,
I always tell them about my prac evaluation because it was carried out by Dr Greenhalgh, College Principal, he saw everyone, I believe, and I think Arch Crowder was the other one. So there were two from College, plus the classroom teacher and the Principal of the school - four people for a final evaluation.
They all sat at the back of the room and the student would be talking to the class, then they would all lift their heads and write at the same time. You could actually see them out of the corner of your eye and would wonder
"What did I say wrong then?" And at the end there was a formal meeting with these four people who then talked it through, told you whether you had passed or not - very nerve-wracking period.
I enjoyed prac, going out once a week to teach - it was what I was here for.
People today who talk about deferring prac until third year or fourth year, I wonder if they ever think back to their days, when they came here wanting to be teachers, to get out there and have a go.
The most exciting day wasn't given a specific name but what I would call the "Appointment Ceremony", which was the highlight of the year. It was held in D Block, an old building over the Jar side of the golf course where we used to do phys ed as well. Virtually everyone attended, about 1000 people.
It was run in alphabetical order - a big map of Queensland out the front and all the old experienced teachers who had served in small country schools gathered around that map. They would call out a name, there would be a token pause, and then they would call out the school. Then there would be screams of delight, particularly if you got somewhere like the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, or Cairns. Then of course it might be One Tree Gully and there would be "Oas" and "Ahs", and the person would run forward to the map to try to find the place. As you can appreciate, many of those small schools were not even on the map.
Suddenly it would be found, perhaps close to, say, a home town, and there would be more screams of delight and people would come running up and down the aisle. In my time this was normally run by Kenny Southgate, and was absolutely one of the highlights of the year.
I had trained as a primary teacher and then taught two years at Taringa and then asked to go to Mt Isa, because my financee had by then finished her two extra years art training at the old Tech College and been sent there - the Department was so surprised that they called me in and said "Do you realise what you're doing? This is most unusual".
I was in Mt Isa when Grade 8 moved from primary - I changed to secondary with it, as did many others, teaching the new syllabus and being required to teach virtually everything. That is wizen I slowly began to specialise in geography, maths, economics.
I taught in several places, before deciding to apply for a deputy principals/zip. Then, in 1973, a job as a lecturer in social studies at Kelvin Grove came up - and I got the job: a promotion and an extra few dollars a week.
We were still part of the Department, in fact you just could not get here unless you were a member of the Department; so for virtually everyone who came here it was just a promotion. Probably the first thing I noticed was that there had not been m11ch change. It was then a primary and secondary training institution and I took primary social studies and secondary geography method.
Dress code of the mid-sixties - collar and ties still mandatory, but
theBeatlesinfluenceclearlycreepingin! A year later we became autonomous or
semi-autonomous and that was a very buoyant and exciting time because suddenly we had to make decisions ourselves. We suddenly realised all the things that the Department had been doing that made life a little bit easier.
That was the Whitlam era, there was plenty of money aro11nd, and it was quite a period of expansion. One of the immediate decisions, to build a new B Block, became a standard joke. They were going to build it the following year, so I spent an enormous amount of time going to the University and reading up about American geography classrooms and we put in a huge submission. As you know, the old B Block is still with us.
At that same time Peter Batsman came here as the new Director, the first outside Director of the College, with quite expansive views. The Maths/Science building was started, the new E Block was started, but by the mid seventies, the crunch came and money literally dried up.
Students were quite different when I came back. After all, we had been through the sixties by then and social attitudes had changed. For one thing, the uniform dress code had gone. College was still run like a school but it more or less had developed a university flavour to it, much freer.
If
you wanted to go to the toilet, you did not have to ask the teacher for permission.Students dressed as they wished, were much more socially outgoing. I enjoyed the students, as I always have.
Of course I came back to work with a lot of the people who had originally taught me - Kenny Southgate, Robbie Robertson, John Ashton. That could have been intimidating, but wasn't actually. Before Batsman was appointed, Arch Crowder was the Principal - he was excellent. My old teachers accepted me and I got to know them all very well.
I was one of that group of the expanding early seventies - the Whitlam expansion period, when course lengths were increasing and large numbers of people similar to myself came in. To get here in those days you had to have the traditional two degrees- BA, BEd. Once you got that second degree your chances of being a deputy principal or coming here were very good. I had just completed my BEd before I applied. No one had higher degrees in the College at all in those days- there was a sprinkling of Master's degrees but very few junior staff had been overseas.
Funding priorities here had to be directed towards buildings. The College was expanding and there was nowhere to put the growing numbers of students in longer courses. The library moved upstairs in A Block but it was still very small. One of the early things that Peter Batsman did was to expand it by pushing a door through to the top of D Block. I tried to convince them to get in ERIC, which they did eventually and the numbers of journals expanded. Now of course today it is going back the other way, with purchase of journals and books being cut back savagely.
I think students had become more enquiring, much more open. Their interests were much more diverse. Social activities have changed; College had had its own sporting teams in my day and the organised trips involving the whole College had gone. The College had become much more like a university, much more academic. The courses were three years now, and the academic expectations of the student was much as it is today.
Administratively it was difficult to be involved. I was a young buck then, one of the new people and, as it is today, most committees were staffed and chaired by the senior lecturers and College administration. Peter Batsman was much more open, although it was still in many ways run like a school.
Decisions were still taken from the top down and my input was limited to departmental meetings once a week.
One very interesting involvement for me was with the organisation of overseas exchanges. It started in the early seventies when a fellow from Maths went to Auckland. Peter Batsman was interested in furthering this aspect of College life, so we formed a College Exchange Committee and had
exchanges of staff from the late seventies. In 1980 I had to go back to Ohio State University to defend my dissertation and was able to help get the first student exchange organised at Lock Hara College in Pennsylvania, where the principal was a friend of Peter Bostman.
The first exchange students therefore came in the late seventies and we then sent students and staff each year for the next four or five years. Towards the end I was sending over twenty students each year to do six months - one semester of study plus eight weeks of practice teaching. It was very successful but it is something Kelvin Grove has lost since exchanges are now organised by a centralised committee of the BCAE. I think that was a backward step we took last year and when all the kerfuffle settles down regarding this institution becoming a university, we may be able to resurrect the system again.
Prospects on the promotion ladder were limited until very recently and opportunities within the College still reflect that big school syndrome: rigid classification on rungs of an upward ladder, as opposed to a university, where there are more intermediate upward or sideways moves, or the possibility of going into research.
As the Nicklin Report (1989) stated, we have been very strictly controlled by the Board of Advanced Education all these years; and there was a ratio of four senior lecturers to one lecturer, with some departments doing really great things, very highly qualified - and other departments promoting by the numbers game. That has sort of broken down a bit now, to more promotion across the College, but there are still many more restrictions than at a university; it takes us back to the old hierarchies of the Education Department and the inspector system and so on.
I had done a BA with all the Honours course work in geography and then became interested in teaching, so I did my BEd and by then I was interested in geography education. But it was all done part-time externally or in the evening- I virtually never studied full-time in my whole life. I will always remember studying in Mt Isa in the heat of the night but with all the doors closed because of the white bugs that used to fly in and chew you up.
Once I got used to the procedure of the notes coming and studying the notes, it was quite OK- occasionally a textbook was useful. But the main problem was trying to write assignments - you could only send away for a small number of books and then, nine times out of ten, none of those came back - you'd get five other ones that would only be peripheral to the topic. So doing well externally is very difficult, particularly in the assignment area. All subjects then had a big final exam.