Joan Young

I think that the educational gods smiled on me! All my early experience gave me the finest preparation for teaching at Croydon. In years six and seven at the Pinnaroo Higher Primary School, I was taught by Mr Ralph Martin, an outstanding teacher. As a result I received a Qualifying Certificate bursary and won a boarding scholarship to Methodist Ladies College in Adelaide. Later I was a student with him when he was a demonstration teacher at the Flinders Street Practising School and gained insight into his individual and group teaching techniques.

At Methodist Ladies College I had four years of daily contact with a remarkable educator; the headmistress, Miss Jean M. Harris. In my Leaving Honours year, as head of the boarding house, we often had long conversations about the needs of individual girls.

When I was 17 I went to Alawoona as a junior teacher. In this tiny railway town in the Mallee, I taught from the first to third grades in a separate wooden building. In a single class room, the permanent building, was Mr Lance Hocking, a very positive and enterprising man. With his encouragement and trust I experienced success with a group of children, many of whom had great disadvantages. For example, Lionel, a shy part-Indian boy lost his stammer and became a confident reader. Robert, in second grade, with his albino colouring, shifting pale blue eyes and limited intelligence, had been so unruly that he had to spend most of his previous year with Mr Hocking. He learned to enjoy ‘being good’ because I gave him tasks he could manage and praise for doing them.

I was much influenced by these three teachers as I entered Adelaide Teachers College in 1942. There I did a two years primary teachers’ course because I could not ask for longer support from my parents. I am sure that this was ideal training for my later teaching, especially as I had Dr H.H. Penny as my group ‘method’ lecturer in 1943. One exhortation from that inspiring educator is worth quoting. ‘Find each child’s door-step and lead him out from there.’

Six BA units from The University of Adelaide and a wartime shortage of secondary school teachers for the new area schools saw me avoid a one-teacher rural school and almost immediately become a secondary teacher encouraged by two fine headmasters, Mr Syd Scoble and Mr Ted Butcher, from 1944 to 1946 at Penola and from 1947 to 1950 at Oakbank where, under Ted Butcher’s leadership, Oakbank was a wonderful school. Many of the PEB students have had successful academic and professional careers. Our area school courses were constantly developed. With Mr G.T.J. (Scot) Hester I helped write a new course of social studies which was adopted in all area schools. Many of today’s horticultural leaders were taught by Mr Alf Pearce. Most importantly, it was school policy that every student be given the opportunity to feel significant in the school community. This was an increasing challenge as more and more students came from the Migrant Holding Camp at Woodside. We consciously widened the ‘worlds’ of both insular hills students and the newcomers to Australia by giving them a wide range of experiences both within the school and by excursions.

Following my father’s death I moved to the city to live with my mother. I went from teaching Leaving English under the gum trees, with a view across the Onkaparinga Valley, to the former central school building surrounded by ‘portable’ wooden buildings in the primary school’s asphalted grounds at Croydon Girls Technical School. We had to stagger recess and lunch times to allow room for movement. I was there as an assistant from 1951 to 1953.

The staff contrast was as great. Much older, all women much more constrained by tradition. No spirited argument and discussion with each other and with the ‘head’. (Some newcomers to Oakbank had been daunted by this.) After I said, ‘Do they know this?’ sufficient times I became a spokesman for a grumbling staff room to the head and senior mistresses. Not only did I get to know them all quickly but I developed a great respect for some of the older, former central school women and the standards they set for themselves and for their students.

The growing school had an annex built on the edge of the Croydon Boys Technical School oval some distance away, but apart from physical education classes I remained at the old school.

The most memorable year was my last. Because I had frequently commented during the previous year that a number of first year girls were ‘problems’ because they were being ‘black-listed’ and not given a chance, I was given a second year class of the 1952 ‘failures’. As their class teacher I was allotted their English and social studies but won the right to their arithmetic (the bête noir subject) and physical education.

When I discovered their complete lack of number skills we began learning ‘tables’ and doing lots of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing in games and drill – surreptitiously when our primary neighbours were at recess! A horror of decimals was overcome with a line of girls, one of whom was the decimal point and moved up and down by class mates. I had permission to set all their tests and their first and second term exams but had them ready for the end of year exam for all second years set, as was the practice, by the maths senior. It was wonderful to be allowed to ‘find the doorstep’ and motivate by success.

As they had four subjects with me we could ‘go with the flow’ and keep working with a subject as long as we wished. We interspersed short drills and exercises with other subjects. Very few had read a complete book and I read them several, chapter by chapter, often as a reward for effort. The first was My Friend Flicka because of their typical teenage girl fascination with horses. Later the reading of the first page or so of a book from the library would stimulate someone to borrow it. If the weather was inclement we would substitute another subject for PE. I remember how, one lovely morning late in the year, they gleefully greeted me with the information that I owed then a whole day of PE!

Compulsory schooling then ended at 14 and numbers often dropped greatly in second year, but only two or three of this class left school. Their morale had been increased by two picnics in school holidays – the first at Elder Park, where we explored the Torrens precincts and the second at Belair National Park, to which we travelled by train – a first visit for all of them.

When I was transferred to Whyalla for 1954 these girls joined ‘normal’ classes successfully. One went on to a good Leaving pass and became a valued employee of the Red Cross Society. During 1953 I had, for some time, carried out the duties of the English and social studies senior who was ill and I trained the school group that was to have performed for Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. The highlight of my year, however, was the opportunity to prove that a group of students with similar problems could first accept their deficiencies and then overcome them by sharing together, not over shadowed by more successful peers.

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