Teaching in the 1970s

This recollection was told to me by a teacher who was working at a school during the mid 1970s and into the 1980s.

I had been teaching for a couple of years after training college, teaching Mathematics up to O level standard in a mixed comprehensive school in the West Midlands when an opportunity back near my hometown came up. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy my current job, but the school had employed quite a few new teachers during a period of transition, and I saw my path to progress was likely to be blocked for some while. The school was a decent standard and was doing its best to improve in all areas, including education, sports, facilities and discipline. The headmaster had been in place for three years prior to my arrival and the governors had supported his plans to have a tougher line on the use of corporal punishment. It was not excessive by any means but the use of the both plimsoll and cane were increased by several hundred percentage, albeit from a low basis. As a new teacher I wasn’t permitted to administer any physical punishment during my first two years but ironically I was due to be authorised to do so in my third year if I hadn’t handed in my notice.

Since college, I had lived away from home in a shared rented house and my starting wages left little room for much at all. A move back home, meant I could move back in with parents and save a fortune that would eventually allow me to buy my own place. I knew of the school that I was to be working from my own schooldays through sports, and had played there many times in various activities. It was larger than my previous school with over 1000 pupils. The catchment area was mostly private housing and most families who sent their sons and daughters there were of reasonable means. I learnt on my training day that I would be the form teacher of a first year group, which was pleasing as it meant they didn’t know more about the school than me. At this school there was a headmaster who had two deputies, one male and one female. Corporal punishment was used here, with boys receiving either cane or plimsoll, and the girls mostly receiving the plimsoll. I was told that girls could be caned but it hadn’t been necessary in the last five years. I would not be authorised to use it on either gender but could refer a pupil to a senior teacher who would carry it out if I wished them to. At the time I was very indifferent about corporal punishment. I’d experienced it myself growing up and whilst I hated getting it, I knew that it acted as a good deterrent for the majority of pupils in my school and was a big part of the good order that our school knew. As a new teacher at the school I confidently expected that I wouldn’t need to send anyone off with what was known by the kids as a “whacking note”.

However that soon changed, as I realised that I needed to make it known that I wouldn’t stand for any nonsense, and it was only a few weeks into the term when a third year class, wouldn’t respond to my threats, so I sent three boys and a girl to respective senior teachers and told them to explain why they had been sent. About twenty minutes later, the three boys returned within a minute or so of each other, looking less confident and apologised to me. I didn’t ask what had happened, but some of the other lads did and I heard the response of “slipper, six hard ones”. The girl however didn’t return during the remainder of my class. I learnt during break time that she was a frequent visitor for such purposes and the teacher I’d sent her to had decided that a visit to the deputy headmistress was needed. Consequently she received six smacks with the plimsoll on her bottom and was also told to seek me out and apologise. When she did find me, it was at least an hour after I’d sent her out of class, but she was still crying. It would be fair to say that subsequent lessons with that group were fair easier to manage, and so it was that my attitude to the use of corporal punishment changed overnight.

Over the next two years I sent a few boys and a small number of girls off to teachers to receive corporal punishment, and I became rather blasé about the whole thing. It was just the way that the school operated, and all the pupils and staff knew that.

It was in the summer term of my first year, that I got to witness a girl receiving punishment. She was in my tutor group, and had been caught forging a note to say why she’d missed school. It was her housemistress, who had been alerted by the secretaries office that the letter was a forgery, and I was called in to offer my opinion of the girl's overall behaviour. I had to admit it was out of character, as she’d presented no problems to any of her teachers so far.

She was called into the office midway through a lesson and asked to explain why she’d missed school, and given lots of opportunities to say if there was a problem, but she said nothing in mitigation. Mrs Davies told her she had no option but to use corporal punishment and explained what that meant, which brought immediate tears to the girls eyes. Then came the moment. She was told to bend over the desk and stretch as far as she could. She could just reach the other side on tiptoes.

Mrs Davies went to a cupboard and took out a white plimsoll, probably about size 5, and without warning brought it down across the girls skirt very hard. There was a scream and she went to rise but was pushed back down. Mrs Davies kept one hand on the girl's back to keep her down and then gave two more lighter smacks in quick succession. That was it, over and down in less than a minute, but remembered for a lifetime by me and probably by the girl as well. She was soon on her way back to class, crying, and I returned to the staff room soon after.

I retired from teaching in 2003 but during my time there were lots of incidents to tell you about in due course.

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ArishMell · 70-79, M

My school in the early to mid 1960s, an LEA Grammar of similar size, did use corporal punishment but it seemed to have been a very rare last resort.

I think I knew of only about four boys having the cane - twice for one of them - and I don't know about any girls being punished physically. Though the "playground samizdat" tends to spread only your own Year's gossip, so there were probably other instances.

Our PE teacher used the plimsoll but only very rarely and moderately. I saw this happen only twice in five years of one PE and one Games class a week, combining the boys from two forms at a time. Perhaps the threat was enough!

Detentions and written impositions were the much more common punishments; the former more effective still for a pupil barred by the detention from some after-school club on the same afternoon.

Yet on the whole, behaviour was good. None of us were little angels but I think the secret was mutual respect rather than fear.

When you read many of the accounts on SW it's clear that many parents especially, and some teachers, thought "respect" is gained only by terror of "discipline" that means only bullying and brutal physical assault. I have often wondered why so many parents were so cruel, often far crueller than even the worst head-teachers using their flog-'em-and-hang-'em mentality to hide their own ineptitude. I think though some probably were sadists anyway, most simply resented the burden of children they could not avoid producing.

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Whether corporal punishment being so common in my "yoof" inspired my interest in the theme as erotic adult games, I cannot say for sure but I trace its subconscious seed to witnessing an incident in Infants' School! Nevertheless I oppose all real physical punishment, of anyone, by anyone for any reason - and I abhor violence anyway. I used to buy a contact magazine on the subject, whose editors made clear their own opposition to real corporal punishment.

+ + + +

You were a Maths teacher? Oh to have been taught Mathematics by you or anyone else, rather than the two who ensured I failed in what was my weakest subject anyway!

Our Third-Form teacher was in his last year before retiring, and probably so bored with teaching unwilling adolescents how to work out (x+y)(x-y) for no apparent purpose*, he made the whole subject dull and incomprehensible.

While the Fourth & Fifth Year teacher, up to the O-Level exams, was an arrogant bombast interested in helping only the bright, keen ones. He had the nerve to write on my Report that I had basic weaknesses in my knowledge that need addressing - but he had never offered to help me and worse, deterred me from asking for help.

Incidentally, his real name was Hill but he was known behind his back by all and sundry as "Drasher", apparently coined by his sports-club in his cricket-playing younger days. No-one had a clue why! There is though a story that he once stood on Adolf Hitler's toe - by accident (presumably), when introduced to The Furhrer at a European youth athletics competition held in London in the 1930s.

.......

* I have just tried it!

I think (x+y)(x-y) = [ x^2 - 2xy - y^2 ]

but I had to use algebraic long-multiplication, it's probably wrong, and it's not something I've ever knowingly needed.

Though I do now wish I had been good at Hard Sums, and over the years since I have often used professionally and in my hobbies, geometry and trigonometry, pi, graphs and basic algebra; eventually learnt what dy/dx means by a strange chance encounter, and unexpectedly needed to understand logarithms for more than times-sums!

(Oh, I still have and can use, my log tables and slide-rule.)

Dez580 · 61-69, M

@ArishMell Still have my Faber Castell slide rule too. At the quite well known English Public school in the early 1970s the cane was used often

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@Dez580 I have two slide-rules - one had been my Dad's but the other was mine.

I also used to have a simple one only six inches long, given me by the school. That was a type made for sale to Local Education Authorities for issue by schools. The company is Blundell-Harling and it still manufactures simple drawing-boards and special slide-rules for various trades.

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The public schools did have a bad reputation for cruelty, probably due to a genuinely nasty past when teachers did not need know how to teach children, let alone care for or about them; the boarding pupils themselves dumped there by parents who clearly had not wanted children but could not help them somehow appearing.

Dez580 · 61-69, M

@ArishMell i still have my Blundell-Harling T SQUARE, better quality than the British Thorton ones, and used it often including in the Navy

Dez580 · 61-69, M

@ArishMell In my working life I still used mentasl maths mostly for calculus,and even my slide rule for trig. In Computer Alergbra is the most useful of the maths discipline, it is the basis of programming.

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@Dez580 Algebra is more than the basis of programming, isn't it? It's the language of mathematics!

I am nor sure I could manage mental mathematics!

Arithmetic, yes, to a point, and I create mental pictures of the "sums" as if written on paper. I've also developed techniques like rounding to the nearest 10, using factors then deducting the difference.

E.g. 7 X 17 = [7 X 2 so 14 then by 10 so 140 then take off (3 X 7) directly or in steps]

Or 7 X 14 = [7X7 then 49 X 2] And of course 49 X 2 = [50 X 2 = 100 then -2 = 98].

There is a limit though, to how far I can take this before reaching for pencil and paper.

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I have noticed over the years some sort of trans-Atlantic difference in the way maths is taught (and spelt!), and it was your using specific areas of maths for your work that reminded me.

In the UK we were taught Arithmetic in Infants' and Primary Schools; but Mathematics at Secondary (Secondary-Modern or Grammar) School. The Maths syllabus was of many topics: algebra, mensuration, geometry, trig, calculus, etc.; but all one cohesive curriculum subject with a single examination, even if the exam was split over 2 or 3 papers.

The Americans appear to learn much the same maths topics overall but broken into totally separate curricula divisions. So you have a course in Trigonometry, a course in Algebra, a course in Calculus, etc. Not a course in Mathematics that includes those.

I have asked if this is so, but not had a definite answer.

.....

One of my nephews once claimed you don't need learn much maths because "it's all in your calculator". I soon put him right by asking that if you don't understand maths, how do you know what to ask the calculator to calculate?

Dez580 · 61-69, M

@ArishMell the probelm witg a calculator etc is that one cannot easily retrace ones steps , very important in programming when error handling. i used to program ADA 95, PASCAL , and BASIC mostly, for both Mainframe and Client Server. in my working life. So many bugs are created by being dependent on the machine to do all the working out, so there is no formulae nor physical workings etc. So a mistake made during programming just replicates itself. I did Computer science to doctorate level. in post doctoral work , we did the manual stuff, sadly the new breed of programmers did not. Comand line prgramming sadly is not tasught so commonly today, in Spain , Linux is used a lot and saves the government millions they do not have to pay to Microsoft or Apple. People knock Linux often, forgetting Google's Andriod system is based on Linux

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@Dez580 I am not a programmer, just an ordinary computer user, now at home but also at work until I retired. Nor have I been to university - that was always beyond my ability.

The nearest I came to programming was using at work, electronic measuring equipment controlled by small computers that also calculated the results as files of numbers and plotted graphs.

These used BASIC programmes written by the people for whom I worked, and when I bought my own home PC, a second-hand Amstrad WP9512 (primarily word-processor) I started to teach myself programming using the included BASIC compiler. I progressed so far but was unable to understand how to make it write and read data files, something the text-book did not explain!

However I was talking about using arithmetic and maths generally, and many purposes do not need anything more than a calculator.

....

For work purposes in my 40s I took the standard GCSE Physics and Maths courses in evening-classes, finishing with the normal exams. While most of it was a refresher course for me, the maths syllabus was quite different from O-Level, a lot thinner and simpler; but contained a topic totally new to me, called Matrices.

I discovered their major developers included Prof. Charles Dodgson ("Lewis Carroll"), appropriately due to their totally abstract, surreal nature. Although only sets of simple sums with boxes of simple numbers, Matrices use strange moves given fancy names to confuse you, and are taught with no definitions, explanations or links to any other mathematics, let alone reality.

So I failed totally to understand them! I asked someone at work to help me by defining one of these arcane terms. She waffled excitedly away for several minutes, sat back and beamed at me.

"Thankyou", I said. "but you've only told me what the book and the teacher say, so I still don't understand it!"

She looked a bit hurt, did this professional mathematician I had baffled by what to her would be a very basic question. Experts at maths cannot understand why anyone cannot understand their hermetic Philosophie.

She did tell me matrices are now used in graphics-programming and for solving gigantic blocks of simultaneous-equations arising in certain engineering calculations. So no great loss for me - I have never needed use matrices anyway.

What puzzles me more is why they were in a school syllabus at all, especially when such an isolated, abstract topic for its own sake! Rather than as part of Degree courses in computing and engineering.mathematics.

Dez580 · 61-69, M

@ArishMell embedded computers, often found in engineering and equipment, was not my area,apart from some dynamic,but cannot chat about those (OSA)

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@Dez580 Ah, well, I am afraid I am no expert on computers anyway! I just use them... sort of.

That Amstrad came with a second compiler for a very abbreviated language indeed, called DR LOGO, (by Digital Research), and I bought a teaching manual for it. Supposedly invented to help schoolchildren learn "structured programming" whatever that meant, but capable of genuine projects for useful purposes, it was extremely difficult and utterly non-intuitive. I soon abandoned it even as a purely intellectual exercise.

Some people sneer at BASIC because it can tolerate clumsy programming - forgetting that is the fault of the linguist not the language - but at least its text makes sense. LOGO was so abbreviated it was impossible to see how even the examples printed in the book worked. You could copy an example and provided you made no typing errors it would work, but you didn't learn anything about it.

I am not sure it will run now in MS-blasted-11 but I have an old copy of a pretty-patterns generator called POV-Ray, and that is all command-line programming but fairly easy to understand, at least at an introductory level.

My work sent me on an Introduction to MS 'Access' course, to prepare databases for a possible local administrative system that never came about. Thankfully. I found it extraordinarily unintuitive and the hardest to learn of all the 'Office' set!

Dez580 · 61-69, M

@ArishMell I am severely dyslexic,even now use specialist software to write a reply,so i have an advantage, many software engineers are either dyslexic or autistic. I leant on a Commodore Pet back in 1977, then on an ICL1900, My first home computer was a BBC micro, which i used for many years , upgrading it along the way. I( also had an Apple IIg Then I had a IBM clone Tandon PC. At work we had a mixture of ICL/Fujitsu Siemns Mainframes and IBM PC/Lenovo plus Apple and unix/linux computers we built ourselves. Now retired I have just Lenovo laptops and a Lenovo desktop running linux as a back up. i do thoiugh encounter issues with packages like MS Office 365, and need to get help. As for smartphones, social media etc, i am a novice

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@Dez580 I am not dyslexic but am poor at numbers and IT.

At one point our section at work needed PCs much more powerful than the commercial ones, and the MS Windows of the time (probably 5), so constructed a small, purely local network based on Sun Microsystems machines and their own server.

I did have an account on one but it was fiendishly hard to use, because it relied on a sort of hybrid windows / command-line OS. At least it was free of all the gee-gaws the Seattle lot seem to imagine necessary.

SW and one other are the only general public social-media I use, plus a few sites dedictaed to my interests. As for "smart"-'phones... After a few months' battle with one, for which no instructions were available as far as I could see, I gave up, sold it, paid off the expensive contract and bought a basic portable telephone whose primary function is voice-telephony! (I wonder if that concept will catch on?)

I use a PC for all Internet use, on a broadband service, but need a proper machine with decently-sized screen and keyboard anyway for most of my uses for it anyway.

Dez580 · 61-69, M

@ArishMell I do remember being issued with a Vodaphone Transportable mobile in 1985 i think, it was the size of two bricks. My work was mostly number crunching on a massive scle and spotting sequences. Colleagues used Sun Microsystemes , and we had redundant Apricot, Hoskins, Honeywell Bull systems, which we also used, kept going by our large computer support team, though our Keinzle Minicomputer using round papercard discs was retired in the 80s

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@Dez580 Well, Vodaphone did call it "Transportable" rather than just "Portable"! :-)

I've not seen card discs but I once found some 8" floppy discs of more conventional type, for a long-gone PC! I'd never seen that size anywhere else.

That Amstrad used 3" floppy discs, but of course that size and its CPM operating system are not compatible with other makes. When I needed a lot of documents I'd written transposed by a friend to, I think, his Apple computer, a mutual acquaintance who had a dual-size disc-reader transferred the work as plain-text files.

Dez580 · 61-69, M

@ArishMell my apple IIg had floppies and used a cassette deck back up, very well built computer, its up in the loft these days