It was around 1978, unwinding in the classroom PORTABLE, my clunker, an old V-8. At something like 25 cents a litre, commuting was easily AFFORDABLE. Another day was done, time to CONTEMPLATE.
It was an era that still included carbon paper and mimeograph MACHINES. There were daily registers to BALANCE. I realized quite frankly that, apart from theory, my true knowledge of teaching? I knew from BEANS!
You could earn a Bachelor of Education, up there on University Hill, experience a practicum on OCCASION but a teacher’s ’doctorate’ in the basics one didn’t even begin to earn until those years.
Thirty students, sixty pupils looking into your two EYES. Soon it became highly PROBABLE, the true teachers were those GIRLS and GUYS!
Then the federal Liberals came in and metrics became the new NORM. After that, nothing remained the same when the computer age was BORN.
Like, dude, whatever happed to tube radios, record players, gestener machines, overhead projectors, the NFB films, hernia producing 16mm projectors, screens, splicing liquid and C.B.C. schools broadcasts on the radio and using the office dial TELEPHONE? Just thinking back a few years when that portable became HOME.