Mar 7, 2007
I never did want to be a teacher, but after two years as a mechanic in Wellington automatic telephone exchanges it was obvious I was making no progress there.
My father asked me why I didn’t go teaching and I said I didn’t like the thought of it. So he asked what did I want to do, and when I said I’d like to join the Air Force, he said “No, but seriously.”
I had thought I was being serious. There was clearly no support for the Air Force.
So he said again “Why don’t you go teaching?” and I had no answer for that other than the one I’d already given, which was clearly unacceptable, so I applied to go to Training College.
At the interview in Wellington, one of the selection panel was Sir Frank Lopdell, who was Principal of Wellington Teachers’ College, and later became famous as the Chief Inspector of Primary Schools who established in-service training for teachers at Lopdell House in Titirangi. During my interview he remarked that, though my reticence was an admiral characteristic, did I really think I could actually see myself standing in front of a class of children?
Of course he was dead right. I couldn’t. But I could see that if I admitted it, and got turned down for Training College, I would be in disgrace at home, so I put forward some excuse about being out of my depth in such exalted company. In other surroundings I would be alright. I don’t think Sir Frank was at all convinced, but perhaps they were short of applicants that year. Anyway, I got accepted.
Training College at Christchurch was manageable, and I also managed to scrape through Physics I and Maths I at university. But working with little kids was a significant part of the course, and those sections terrified me. So at the end of the two year course I applied for a further year of training as a Nature Study specialist, and that kept me out of the classroom most of the time for one more year. It also required me to do stage I zoology at university, and I found that I really enjoyed that. So I got two years’ leave of absence and put my meagre savings towards two years of fulltime university study for a BSc, which kept me out of teaching for two more years, except that I was obliged to do a bit of it when the university was not in session at the beginning and end of each year. However, I got paid for it and the money at least was welcome.
After that there seemed to be nothing else for it but to become a teacher, and with my BSc I managed to get a job as junior science master at Christchurch Tech. The teachers there were great, - helpful and realistic and supportive, but the kids were pretty hard bitten and I was not on the same wavelength as them at all. For me it was two years of hell, with the second year only a little more bearable than the first. When I started at tech. I asked Ted Fancy, one of the senior masters, what had become of my predecessor, and he said “Oh, he left. He was temperamentally unsuited.”
Meanwhile I continued with zoology part time at university, and after a taking a further year’s leave to do a thesis I managed to graduate MSc. during my third year of purgatory among the Tech kids. When I left at the end of that year to go to Samoa as an entomologist, the staff put on a little farewell for me, at which I was able to thank them for their support and encouragement, and tell them that if anyone should ask what had become of me, they were to say that I too, was temperamentally unsuited.
Sir Frank had been right all along.
Samoa was the perfect place to send the traumatised. The people were civilised, gracious and kind, and even the kids had manners. My assistant was a dear old fellow who had been driver for the previous New Zealand entomologist, so he knew most of the entomological ropes. He also had chiefly status, so he could introduce me properly to the village people whose plants were being decimated by caterpillars, or whose houses were overrun by fleas or cockroaches. He also had contacts in the commercial world, whose copra stores needed fumigating against moths and beetles, and whose imported products sometimes needed treatment too. It was a rest cure, and I learnt a lot about many things. I suppose you could say I grew up.
I even did a bit of teaching at Avele Agricultural College, and with such polite kids, it was never a problem.
I could have stayed in Samoa for ever. It was so benign. But as I approached the end of my three year contract, I had the feeling that I should be looking for something more challenging to prevent me from declining to the stage where I might end up traipsing along the beach in sandshoes and no socks. So I wrote to an entomological acquaintance at DSIR in Nelson to ask him if there was likely to be a vacancy for me there. He replied that there wasn’t but that there was a job going at Massey University for a lecturer in invertebrate zoology. He must have put in a good word for me, because when I applied for it I got it.
Teaching at Massey was a very different matter from Christchurch Tech. The students were eager to get a qualification, and they appreciated any help they could get. Besides, zoology at Canterbury had shown me how to teach students to teach themselves by studying animals in the laboratory and in the field, and by searching reference books in the library. In Samoa we didn’t have much of a library, but we did have the publications of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, which included the Review of Applied Entomology, a monthly abstracting journal which summarised each month, all that month’s literature on entomology from anywhere in the world, and indexed it most thoroughly. You could look up any insect or crop on earth, and get right up with the world’s latest information on it. Massey library had it too, and I directed my intermediate and senior students to it whenever they wanted to fill out the material they got in lectures. They learnt to hunt out the original papers too when they needed more detail. They even learnt to enjoy it.
That’s what I think education is all about, - learning to learn; first by being shown and imitating, then by being told with explanation, then by being shown where the information is to be found, and finally by finding the information by yourself. That’s research.
After ten years at Massey I moved to Auckland to take charge of a group of diagnostic laboratories for the Ministry of Agriculture. Scientific administration was a new field for me, but I soon found that staff training was an important part of it. Diagnosis of plant health problems is largely a matter of identifying organisms and then finding out what others have already discovered about them. With support from the very complete DSIR library, and from the various DSIR specialists, we were about as well equipped as we could be to do a good job.
Strangely enough the entomology graduates I employed from Auckland University had never heard of the Review of Applied Entomology, though they soon got to appreciate it and to make good use of the library. They also learnt to put material together for publication, and to get enough of a reputation in their fields to be accepted for PhD studies at Otago University or even London. One went on to become a respected entomologist at the British Museum. Learning how to teach yourself is fundamental to doing good research.
Most of the diagnostic work we did was the identification of bugs of various sorts that were picked up by the Agricultural Advisory officers who used to encourage the farmers and growers in those days to a more scientific approach to their work, but we also dealt with a mass of enquiries that the citizens of Auckland sent in, - fleas, flies, ants, wasps, cockroaches and lice, - and we got quite a bit of foreign stuff from the Agriculture Quarantine people at the ports and airports. So we were also involved in staff training for them and for the advisors, and occasionally also for Pacific Island agricultural quarantine staff when the South Pacific Commission ran refresher courses for them in Auckland.
Growing out of that I got, after I retired, a selection of nice little jobs in various places around the world, reviewing their plant protection systems, and training their staff in the operation of them. But even before I retired, some of the MAF advisory officers who had got jobs teaching at the newly opened Unitec asked me if I would teach plant protection there, so I was teaching part time from 1984, and that continued until 1997, when I retired from that too. Even so I did an occasional spot of relieving work there until 2002, and got the best compliment of all when I was walking back to the car park with one of the students from the class I had just taken, and she asked me, “Why don’t you teach us all the time?”
So perhaps I became a teacher after all, and my father was right.