Tag: nostalgia

Stuart Middleton
New Zealand Education Review
Vol. 14 No.23, 19 June 2009, p.16
APN Educational Media (NZ) Ltd.
Wellington

Shifted house, downsized and there is no room for my single-seater school desk so I have put it in my office. And much comment it has prompted I must say.

It is interesting that you can deduce a lot about the nature of education and the times as they are revealed in a piece of furniture such as this.

For a start it is made out of beautiful Kauri timber. Many of these grand trees of the forest must have been committed to providing seats for school kids over the years. Still it was a time when native timbers were plundered for use as housing framing and flooring. But clearly there was little teaching about renewable resources and the importance of sustainable forest management.

The seats are in the nature of stable boxes or the stalls in a cow shed. They provided a clear anchor for students and kept them sitting nice and straight facing in the proper direction – which would have been the front of the room – with little movement other than on the prompting of the teacher. These were classrooms in which students undertook one-way instruction and daily gave thanks for that which they were about to receive. Along with the discipline of the seating arrangements would have gone another discipline of hands up and permission given prior to the offering of an answer.

The top of the desk itself is offset to the right. Of course, all normal students were in those days right-handed and lefties were not to be encouraged. Fixed attitudes would also have underpinned how writing was taught and there would only have been latitude for individual style at a later age.

This desk has a feature that is nice – the top also slides backwards and forwards to allow students of more ample proportions to enter and exit the stall. This particular desk came from a secondary school – a Catholic girls’ school actually and Sister Augustine would not be pleased at all at what was written under the desk top. Graffitti is one of those things that has given rise to legends about how outrageous things were said but I wonder if it was more talked about than practised. Hacking grooves into the edges seems more to ave been the work of idle hands than any attempt to break out!

This desk has its original inkwell, a lovely ceramic receptacle with a concave top with a hole in the middle. What a pleasure it was to be chosen to fill the inkwells. Taking a bottle of Stephens Ink – usually black or blue/black – the chosen one would then walk around the room filling inkwells from the lovely neck of the bottle that was complete with a little pouring spout. Now, many of those who see the inkwell launch into a story about how their mother had her pigtails dipped in the inkwell presumably by the loathsome boy or horrid girl in the desk behind. 

Again I wonder if this really happened or was it one of those urban classroom myths that have persisted.

In Standard 3 and Standard 4 I sat in the double seater version of a desk like this. You certainly had to get on well with the other inhabitant but I don’t recall any real issues apart from the odd bit of cheating in which we led each other astray.

It was quite a routine to have a desk inspection. The class would be given a warning of the inspection and there would be some frantic cleaning out of paper, the odd old school lunch or part thereof plus perhaps items of clothing worn to school but not worn home. “Don’t forget to bring home your green jersey,” had been the parting words from Mum for a week now.

Surprisingly the last two years of primary school were the only years I sat in a desk such as this. In the primers we sat on Lilliputian chairs at low tables – but I am really very confused about all this. In Standard 1 and Standard 2 we have new square desks with lift-up tops. But in Standard 3 and Standard 4 it was over to Mr Burr in the old block with the original furniture. My picture of him is of a short man sitting behind the old style teacher’s desk – the oblong one with the 4 inch upstand across the front of it. This was rimu I imagine as I have one and it is rimu. The room was very full of furniture.

I bought my old student desk through TradeMe and was surprised at the number of school desks for sale. Actually it appeared at that time that there was actually a school selling off its furniture over the web. The items for sale were not antiques or perhaps even worth much but they were clearly the square student desk on a tubular frame and I wondered how good an image this was for a school and for education.

Where would it end? It might be a good thing to have a giant education jumble sale as a fund raiser at a central city site. Old School Journals (I would be in for these), unused scientific equipment, sports gear no longer needed and old, really old school desks would be a great attraction I would have thought. But what would the Auditor General have to say? There must be a huge amount of stuff lying around schools that is worth something but is of little value to a school.

But I wouldn’t trade my little desk for anything. I am small in stature so can sit at the desk and work. It is just right for writing with a fountain pen. Now…. that reminds me. On the desk is a little wire stand just up by the inkwell for the placing of the nib pen. This seems to me to be a gracious touch. I have only recently understood the teacher’s joke all those years ago when I asked what it was for. “That’s for his nibs!” he said with a smile on his face.

Stuart Middleton
New Zealand Education Review
Vol. 14 No.15, 24 April 2009, p.16
APN Educational Media (NZ) Ltd.
Wellington

I have just shifted house and have come to realise that the act of unpacking has something of the excitement of an archaeological dig about it as layers of items are revealed, the tissue paper gently put aside, the bubble wrap giving a distended glimpse of whatever is inside.

Many more, than I might have realised, of the bits and pieces that were dragged across the suburb had an education link and this surprised me. Foremost amongst these was the sigle seater kauri school desk. It is over 100 years old and was recently restored in a most caring way that would have found approbation on The Antiques Roadshow.

“This is a most splendid example of the New Zealand school desk from the late Habens or possibly early Hogben era. Tell me, did you use this type of desk yourself?” “Well actually only in Standard 3 and 4 where we had the double seater model.” Ah yes, that was a later innovation. I adore the patination of the desk, the delicious ink drops around the inkwell. And this is what sends shivers down my spine – an original white ceramic inkwell. Thank you so much for bringing it along. The problem is that it doesn’t easily fit in the new place!

Not like the rimu teachers desk that I got for the new study, that fits, but only just! It has the same ink stains. I remember being chosen to go around the classroom with the large bottle of Stephens Ink with the little pourer at the top of the neck. It was with great power that each inkwell would be filled. The desk has an upstand around the front that always faced the class and approaching the desk, especially if summoned, had all the solemnity of Judge Judy – “Please approach the bench!” But it is a grand teacher’s desk.

Packing up was full of surprises. I came across an aged brown paper bag that had treasures of school in it. The items given to us when Queen Elizabeth II visited in 1953 – a medal with a blue ribbon and a fold out concertina-picture of the state coach – were especially fun. So too were some secondary school artefacts – the sergeant’s stripes from the school cadets.

Let me make clear that I gained these stripes while playing in the school band. At the start of the school year all the boys in the school were lined up on the field in order of height so as to make up platoons of boy-soldiers that looked good on parade. My brother and I were second and third from the end. A tiny little fellow was at the end. Well we were placed in the last platoon – tiny soldiers too small to carry a gun! It was either this humiliation or joining the band and eventually making the level of the three stripes – no, not adidas!

Finding each little memento triggered memories and stories, some told truthfully, others embroidered by time’s multicoloured threads.

Then there were the boxes of the kids stuff – her three girls and my two boys. Why do girls save old school uniforms? And school magazines while boys save little that their father hasn’t thought to put aside. One box had all the school reports from father and two sons. I can say confidently and on the strength of this robust sample that reporting improved dramatically between the 1950’s and the 1980’s. The only example of my own school work that I appear to have kept is a Camp Diary written for a Form 1 camp in 1957. I must say that if I was in my own class 15 years later I would have been repeating much of the work – it was pretty unformed in every sense of that word, scrappy and untidy. I assume the ticks on each page meant to indicate that it has been sighted.

What worries me a little is that I have yet to find the box with the various collections (well that is rather a grand word for it) of school journals, reading series, Biggles and The Hardy Boys. They must be here somewhere waiting their turn.

School Journals were an amazing feature of New Zealand schools and provided generations of little readers with little readers to cherish and, proudly, to take home for reading each night. Often this was done in a little cardboard folder carefully made and decorated (crayon and dye again!). Little readers had access to the work of such writers as Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame, Elsie Locke, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Joy Cowley and Margaret Mahy who published her first work in a School Journal. Poets such as Alistair Campbell and James K. Baxter were presented alongside playwright Roger Hall and writers Jack Lasenby and Anthony Alpers and artists Roy Cowan and Juliet Peter and E Mervyn Taylor. Children were allowed to read the best of those who wrote and illustrated. What a goldmine it was.

And there is a copy of a Broadcast to School booklet – just like a School Journal but printed to go with the regular broadcasts to school – remember when the loud speakers were vehicles for the delights of music and singing and the spoken voice rather than the squawking purveying of messages and admonitions from those who must be heard despite not being seen?

The last treasure I come across is an old book, a copy of The Education System by A G Butchers published by the National printing Co. Ltd. of Auckland in 1932. Butchers earlier wrote another book called After Standard IV., What? and here we are in 2008 still asking what is essentially the same question. I often dip into this book to remind me that education is a profession of tradition and nowhere more so than in the issue it grapples with. Butchers deals with the hot topics of the day – assessment, funding, control, the structure of the system, how to keep kids in school, and many more.

It’s a bit like shifting houses – we still get up in the morning, go to school and come home at night. What takes so long to put stuff in cartons and to take them out again are the many little journeys of remembering that it all unpacks.