UNDERGRADUATE PAGE

Teaching : by Trial and Error

By G. H. HANTUSCH (St Catharine's College, Cambridge) IT is quarter to nine on a September morning. A young man steps off a tram-car, picks his way through a crowd of small boys in blazers and caps, and walks quickly towards a tall Victorian-Gothic building, through the front door and into the deserted vestibule. As in all schools, this entrance is reserved for staff and visitors, but he will be going through it each day for the next three months. He recognises the smell from his first visit, something like a railway station, familiar and not unpleasant. The year is 1949, and I am the young man. My teaching practice has

begun. .

Today, by an almost universal rule, a graduate who wants to teach must first do a year's course in education. He studies psycho- logy, history of education, methods of teaching and similar subjects for two university terms, but a third term is spent at a school, as an honorary member of the staff. Normally the practice does not come until the theory has been mastered, but times are still far from normal. Like many others since the war, I started on my practice quite innocent of theory, playing in the dress-rehearsal before I had learned my part.

The first two days were spent in being introduced to the staff (there were sixty-five) and in worrying my supervisor about time- tables and schemes of work. Then came a fortnight of observing the other masters who taught my special subject. Although I had left school four years before, the world of classrooms and desks was still familiar to me, but it was uncanny being in a class without belonging to it. My arm twitched when questions were asked, and an incipient "Please sir" had often to be smothered. The lessons seemed very simple indeed, but quickly I began to admire the skill with which some masters marshalled their facts and their class. It often seemed as if one was drawing things out of a boy's head that just could not have been there, but no sleight-of-hand was involved. Bread cast upon the waters had a habit of returning, even when it was not expected. Where a text-book gave one example the master would make up ten without pausing to think, and put them through bewildering permutations. Each lesson treated only a few simple points, but it needed a practised eye to see through the illusion of variety. After every lesson the master would give me a short explanation, and I was amazed to find that it had all been "routine stuff," and that the ordered pattern of it had become second nature. Without exception the masters insisted that no amount of observa- tion could equal the practical value of actual teaching, and before long I stood in front of my first class.

It was a fourth form, and a good set of boys. I was told later that they were used to having students teach them. The master sat at the back because regulations demanded that he should keep an eye on both the class and me. I had spent the evening before poring over my instructions, and had made lots of notes in my notebook. I was to revise the use of definite and indefinite articles in French, and, if there was any time towards the end of the lesson, there was an exercise the class could do. I had thought long and hard to make up examples, and on paper they satisfied me.

At first all went well. I found my voice and the class listened. I shot out questions, and a forest of hands rose to give answers. There were thirty boys, and I had to point at the ones I wanted to hear. I knew no names, and they all looked alike. After a time I discovered that eyes were no longer fixed on me, but on a piece of chalk that was performing acrobatic feats in one of my hands. As soon as I caught myself in this nervous action, the chalk dropped on the floor and broke. The class gate a unanimous sigh, because the suspense had become hard to bear. To regain their attention, I had to use my one trump card. "Potts," I said, 'give me the French for 'of the inkwell '." It was a silly question, but he answered it. and the class settled down again to placid half-attention and a few smothered yawns. Potts was the only boy whose name I had learned.

There were many such lessons, and after a while I was allowed to take classes on my own. On those occasions the boys were inevitably in the best of tempers, but more noisy, and from the beginning friend Potts became a problem. Somehow there seemed to be a Potts or his first cousin in every form. He could be trusted

to see everything that was accidentally funny, in my examples, and to draw attention to it in a loud whisper. It was Potts who asked about questions of grammar that were a hundred pages further on

in the book. If Potts had any conception of paradise, it lay some-

where across the yard, and his efforts to get there during lesson-time would have taken a lost soul out of Sheol. The only way to keep him quiet, apart from old-fashioned violence, was to keep one jump ahead of him and to change the subject frequently. The other masters did that, and all told me the golden rule of "keeping them busy." Where I could apply it, it worked.

Potts has become the nigger in my woodpile. He is the sort of boy who is always in. detention, but who comes up to a master on the rugger field and talks intelligently about the form team. In the staff-room his sins are a welcome topic of conversation, but in class he can make the coolest tempers boil over. He is the form barometer, and if I ever learn to read him and keep the needle steady, I shall have become a teacher. He has set me the problem of becoming an actor in the next ten months, for I shall have to learn how to keep a straight face at his remarks and how to pour cold water on him when he starts taking a liberty too many.

With my complete ignorance of theory, apart from a few books I had read, the time at school was full of trials and errors, with the errors well up in front. The masters helped me in every way, and

I owe them thanks for their advice, their frank criticism, their tact when discussing my mistakes, and for the lessons they gave up so

that I could take them. But it was awkward to be told by one that moving about was fatal, and by another that liveliness and movement alone kept a class up to the mark. Sometimes I moved around with the wrong class, and had my failing pointed out in fatherly fashion.

The school, with its nine-hundred boys, had its own peculiar atmosphere, but there was much about it that reminded me of my own, old school. There was the same impressive headmaster's study, with its high ceiling, dark panels and rows of books ; it was a seat of power, but of law also, and much human kindness. There were the usual dusty honours boards, with their long lists of boys who had made their names in school and out of it. The brass plates commemorating old masters seemed to be a particularly fitting reward for their long years of service. Despite all these evidences of time and its passing, the lists of dates and the records of genera- tions, there was youth and timeless vitality about the school. I felt it most deeply its Hall, during the Founders' Day service, in the voices of the boys as they sang the school hymn.

Mr. Chips made a bad start when he came to his school straight from university, and only the happy chance of an Alpine walking-

tour saved him from a very terrible kind of life. Quite lately the phrase "a Himmler of the Lower Fifth" occurred in a very moving play about schoolmasters. Perhaps there are many men who teach

without interest what they only half believe. If this were very

general, a teaching practice would be a frightening memento morl, and Many students would hesitate after seeing their future profession as no outsider can see it. This was not my impression, and I look forward to meeting Potts again, and to hearing a school choir sing each morning. There is something about those voices, clear and fresh and solemn, that makes me want to hear them for many a day.