regimented, but it didn't upset us because it was something that we were totally used to.
All of us in my group, regardless of wlzctlzcr wc zucn' eighteen years old and Jzad passed the Senior, or were adults witlz only a Junior background, were simply doing a one year course and all did the same subjects, as far as I know.
As I have said, I never actually was involved with any of the older people. I tended to stick witlz my own age group and I suppose the ex-servicemen tended to stick together, as did tlze older married men in their late thirties, early forties. So the class really was fairly ji·agmen ted in a social sense. I had forgotten, there were also a group of older women coming through - that
"When I look at the photograph now we all seem to be smiling. We are all wearing white shirts, we are all wearing ties, and we are all looking suitably conservative and suitably regimented and suitably, something like approaching Year 13, perhaps."
Group SlH, Senior Men's Group, 1953. Courtesy of Mr Kevin Oswin
Front row: Edmml Lc1111011, Barry Kcmum;, fo/111 Nit:, Ro11 Morse, Ken Murp/111, Kn• Os11•i11. fcfTJ011cs
Second row: foe McD01111/d, R11rry M11m11t11. Morg1111 ()'Rrie11, fo/111 Malicr, /i111 Macdo11ald. To111 K11iglit !dee), Gerald /11ckcs, M1;/cs McCorn;, Allrn Lmu
Third row: Leo McNult1;, Cm/111111 Ki111111i11s. Noel Lo,1s, H11rn1 M11uc/1, Doug Neill, Co11 P11terso11, Om·11 Iii/ls !dee!, fo/111 ]11ckso11.
Kc!' Murphy, Rri1111 K11y
Fourth row: Brian Murray, Phil Kcn11fi1ke, Aill11 Htwill. Kerr11 r!o1wood. Norn11111 Louk. /"111 Moore, Kcu Ki11g, Fm11k l.<1111/i !dn), Denys Minter, Gra/111111 fo/111sto11e, Clwr/es I Jaszi't'll
Absent: Ron Lester
points to the segregation, because there was the adult men's group and the adult women's group. Of course, there have been lots of building changes - this block, B, had only the one storey and in some classes we used to sneak out through the side windows whilst the lecture was on and disappeared, down to the Normanby watering hole probably! Again, I think it was just like a high school. In the same way that all schools take class photographs, the decision was made that all the classes would be photographed.
I can't recall anyone actually saying that we had to wear a tie but all men wore ties and white shirts - they were the vogue those days, so did not have to be insisted upon - people tended to wear them anyway.
We had a system of "deputies" - it was part of the school system. I think perhaps in high schools it was taken quite seriously, both by teachers and students. Normally a poll was conducted and perhaps the most popular student in the high school was elected deputy. Here, I think it was thrust upon the least popular, or perhaps the most gullible; but once he got the job he did it very conscientiously so that the roll was certainly marked quite religiously and it was certainly checked by lecturers. It didn't do us any harm. We didn't think about it, we didn't question it, and I suppose we could see nothing wrong with it. I don't know whether it made my teaching more regimented later on. In the fifties when I started to teach, new teachers tended to teach as they had been taught - a fairly authoritarian, expository kind of approach. Again, on recollection, I am not too sure whether or not the kids disliked it. I think most of us were quite popular with the kids when we started teaching and I suspect they might have learnt something too.
Whether what they were learning was all that relevant might be a good point, but nevertheless kids tended to work fairly hard. As College students we didn't see the staff very often - only saw them in the class. Outside the class you went to their staffroom in the same way as you went to a teacher's staff room in a school. The staffjust had a common room - no individual offices.
Arch Crowder was looked up to as an example of what we might become.
But there were times when we simply ducked off through windows and trees - terribly unfair to the teacher concerned and I feel quite ashamed of it when I think about it now, but there were quite a few lecturers like that, particularly one woman, who were simply not competent or sufficiently skilful to handle the lecture material, which was not really all that useful.
Crowder, I think, handled material that was not all that useful, quite efficiently. I suppose nobody actually looked at how we might teach. They talked about the theory of education and there was another subject, I think it was called "method" -but in fact we did not really look at what you might do in the classroom. That was left to the prac situation. So names like
Montessori come to mind, and the Dalton plan, and all sorts of educational schemes and theories which were introduced over the years, none of which seemed to be particularly relevant or useful.
My interest in social studies came later on, because the bloke who took us was really a dreary sort of person. We had the primary school syllabuses and I think we simply started at Grade 1 Social Studies and read through to Grade 7 and in some general kind of way discussed what the content in each of those grades was all about.
Resources - library facilities were non-existent. I can recall going to the library, and getting out Frank Clune's book called Dig, because I had seen a model lesson on Burke and Wills taught to a Grade 5 class when I was on prac at Windsor State School. It sounded very interesting and on that basis I borrowed it from the College library - I can't recall ever having used the library other than for that particular reason. There certainly was not much there at all.
I think phys ed for me meant mostly playing basketball in the lunch time.
Basketball was popular, possibly because Brisbane had had a visit from the Harlem Globetrotters. But I think in sport I was a traditionalist. It was always my great desire to coach cricket teams, which is what I did over the years. But we didn't have a cricket team at College. In fact what sort of surprises me these days is to read about cricket being a component of the phys ed curriculum. Just recently [mid 1989] The Courier-Mail ran an article which stated that there where fifteen girls doing a coaching course at the 'Gabba. My experience in those years, both here at College and in the schools, was that very few phys ed teachers were interested in cricket, and certainly the two phys ed lecturers we had here were not interested. So we didn't play any cricket at all.
Softball was a big game during phys ed sessions. I played a lot of softball then. We went to Ithaca pool one afternoon a week for us to become fairly proficient in swimming - 100 yards freestyle and 50 yards breaststroke. It was compulsory, from the non-swimmers to the very good ones. The lifesaving we did was in a compulsory first aid course at the end of the year, using what was then called the Holger Neilsen method of resuscitation.
I don't think the day was broken up with bells, but we certainly had 45 minute periods from 9am until 3pm with "little lunch" (I am not too sure that they called it "little lunch"), but certainly we had a morning tea break and then the hour for lunch. There was a bit of a canteen under A Block where the janitor sold milk, I think, and there was a pieman parked outside.
So we had our lunch, wolfed it down, and got onto the basketball court. We
had dancing lessons - ballroom dancing, old time and modern with the jazz waltz, the quickstep, the foxtrot, the Boston two step, the gypsy tap, and all those dances which used to be so great. I suppose it was operated under the auspices of the College but really it was a voluntary activity by Dr Squires on a Friday night at some place at West End. He would provide all the musical instruments and I can recall him coming around very early in the year asking if any student had a car.
John Phillips, in the Maths Department, had a car, so he had the job of carting all the musical gear to the hall. Once that was set up we had dancing lessons and sort of danced through to 1 lpm at night.
There was a great imbalance of women and men. We were outnumbered, perhaps four or five to one. I never really thought about the effects of that imbalance, except in some general way that high school teaching was for men and primary school teaching for women. There were not too many high schools in those days, so I suppose that meant that most of those who wanted to go teaching would have been women going into primary school, and a minority of men for the secondary level. I don't think we thought of it in terms of better prospects or promotion. I certainly never thought of any sort of promotion. That is an interesting point, because no one at College, no lecturing staff, ever mentioned the avenues of promotion.
The assumption was that you were going into the classroom and no one ever thought beyond that. They continually hammered the idea of a one-teacher school and "having your own school", but it was not having your own school with a staff of fifty or sixty, it was having your own school with just you!
So from a promotional view point nothing was ever greatly considered and from a study view point, of course, it was not even mentioned at all. All they talked about was getting a 1/1. See, we went out as Class 2, Division 6 and the peak was Class 1, Division 1; for that you needed six university subjects, including English I and Education I. But no one ever mentioned doing a degree - you just worked towards your 1/1. Crowder had a degree and all the staff here had their BAs, which in those days certainly lifted them up above the great mass of teachers.
Some friendships formed at College were enduring for a time. It used to be that in our first year teacher training, we met in the old Criterion pub on payday. We got paid too, five pounds a week- of course, we were also bonded because of that, but it was very handy money.
It was the deputy's responsibility to hand out the cheques once a fortnight and on that particular day someone would write on the board "Meeting at the Criterion Hotel at 4pm" and we would all go down to the Cri. A bookstore
called Barker's used to cash teacher's cheques, so you tended to go first to Barker's, cash your cheque, and go into the bar at the Criterion. Then for the first two or three years after we began teaching we tended to meet there at holidays, so to that extent the friendships continued until they faded away.
In 1971 we had a reunion (after fifteen years of teaching) which was very well attended.
We used to have a few examinations. A lot of cheating went on too, in a very hilarious kind of way, questions with answer sheets being passed back over shoulders and from side to side. I don't think anyone was caught. Exams were not taken all that seriously. I can recall studying for them but I wondered later on why I bothered - it just seemed to be a waste of time. One bloke, I recall, did fail. I didn't know him very well but he came across as being a fairly independently-minded person, and I suspect that he must have crossed a few lecturers and, in a sense, bucked the system. I think he was expelled as opposed to failing the course. There was another bloke too who was expelled - and he joined the police force!
For me the wheel has turned full circle and I am back in B Block - where I occasionally jumped through the window to exit a class! I was teaching at Mt Gravatt CAE in 1981 and just read about the proposed amalgamation in the paper. It was mooted even then that perhaps we should join Griffith University but I don't think people were all that keen on the idea then. I think there was some concern about loss of jobs because the emphasis was on rationalisation. But as it turned out there was no rationalisation - all they did was simply to say "OK the primaries will stay at Mt Gravatt and the secondaries will stay at Kelvin Grove". And so people who taught secondary teacher trainees came across to Kelvin Grove.
Now I had never thought of Kelvin Grove as my alma mater. I just came to College in 1956, left at the end of the year, and never envisaged returning.
I had been at Mt Gravatt for eleven years and I could not quite see the reason for moving; but once I got here it was as though I had been here twenty years.
There are many people on the staff here with PhDs, and I certainly could have made time to take one. But my interests are in foreign languages. I have a great fascination and a great love for teaching European history because I have been there and I am familiar with the culture of Germany in particular.
I teach English to migrants- I am intrigued by language per se and I suppose it is extended across to foreign languages, particularly German which I have worked at over the years.
I studied Russian many years ago and gave it away, much to my regret, because I worked very hard at it. I did do a course in multiculturalism at Armidale CAE which had a couple of units on English as a second language.
I found that fascinating and a great help with teaching of migrants. I've enjoyed my teaching here and I have certainly adjusted to the new demands of teaching. When I first taught in a school I always thought I taught effectively but it certainly seemed to be total exposition. I have moved away from that, although I still think there is a place for it - I can see the value and the benefits of a more enquiry-based approach to teaching and the need to challenge students. So I certainly have no concerns about the really big changes that are taking place now.
That notwithstanding, I don't think this place should be a university. It seems to me that you don't just wave the magic wand and create a university out of a college when the great majority of teaching staff are ex-high school teachers who, in the words of the Nicklin Report, don't have a university ethos. The place isn't a university. It's a teaching institution and its job is to train teachers and I think the Social Studies Department does it quite well. I see myself as a teacher - the word "academic" always grates on me because I am not an academic and I suspect many people here at Kelvin Grove are not academics in the true sense of the word.
From an interview with Denis Cryle, 1989.
Gordon Jones