By Joyce Shaw
Although I was not part of the PE students who specialised in this subject, I was put in a small group of students who couldn’t swim. This meant travelling into Durham city to the baths, every Tuesday morning before breakfast, (ie 7am when most students were considering getting out of bed,) with the PE students who supervised our tuition.
Even with flippers, floats and a person moving along the side with a rope and pole guiding my neck, I never learned to swim or overcome the fear of water. Eventually, I was placed with an expert Norman Sarsfield. He was an ex mayor of Durham and boasted that he had never failed to produce a swimmer…I was his first failure!
Teaching practice was a stressful time. Lectures were suspended but the preparation and then the travel to the school, made each day very long and tiring. The area for our college was not on the doorstep! My first teaching practice was in Billingham. In the 60s, ICI was the main employer in the town and the factories belched out an acid atmosphere….my nylons suddenly had holes in the legs when I ventured out.
It was a primary school and we had be warned to wait in the staff room before sitting down, as teachers had their favourite seats there. When visiting the staff toilet I was amused to find that the spare toilet room was covered with a crocheted lady! This reinforced my determination to be a secondary school teacher as I had more to do in life than decorate the staff toilets like this!! It was perhaps the end of an era, where female spinsters were the norm for primary teaching. In the first week of practice, I observed experienced teachers..what a contrast! One teacher was wonderful as she adapted and changed her prepared lesson one day, when a boy brought in seaweed and shells from a visit to the seaside….she did a hands on lesson talking of the area where they had been found, and seashore life which was new for most of the Billingham town children (some had never seen the seaside). One boy of 5 or 6 years old sat on his own playing with plasticine, making Daleks….Dr Who was very new to everyone then.
Another observation lesson was with a male teacher. Most men who went into primary teaching were rare and were heading for promotion as deputy and head teachers as they had the lead on females in those days. It should be remembered that at this point in time there was no Equal Opportunities Act or Child Protection Act. Corporal punishment was part of my childhood education and was still practised right up to the late 1970s.
This man was tolerating me under duress and told me to sit in the corner and sharpen the pencils! Another reason why I did not want this type of teaching!!!
Although I wanted to teach in the secondary sector, I had to do a teaching practice in my first college year, in primary schools. The country was short of primary teachers and so this compulsive teaching practice was done with the hope that some students would be persuaded to change the desired teaching age range.
My next 2 teaching practices were in different areas of Hartlepool. This time in the secondary sector. This is before the comprehensive system. Again, the air was far from clean but when one head asked me about the town, I complained about the air. He was most offended, as he said that I had no right to complain when I came from Consett (where the Iron Company thrived at the time with its red dust!)
This school, like most secondaries in Hartlepool, had a poor reputation with pupils with difficult (behaviour) problems. While I was there, the woodwork teacher was pinned to the wall by one of the boys who had threatened him with a chisel at his neck.
