It's that time again, when exhausted Australasian teachers are wondering whether they'll make the distance and finish the school year with their sanity more or less intact. It's also the time when they have to endure snide remarks about a really cushy job and all those holidays.
But it's not a cushy job, and teachers get the holidays only because the children get them: in any case, teachers often stay on after their students have left, and also return to school days before those same students are due back, while part of the summer break is usually spent on preparation for the next year.
My mother, a teacher given to gnomic utterances, was occasionally heard to remark that teaching 'runs in the family like wooden legs'. This was her way of pointing out that my brother and I were third-generation teachers, having followed in our parents' and grandfather's footsteps. A great-uncle, an uncle and two aunts were also teachers, and so was a cousin.
In earlier times, of course, teaching ensured upward social mobility (some of our pioneering ancestors had been illiterate) and a means of getting a free education.
Teaching has never enjoyed much status. Generations have been haunted by George Bernard Shaw's scathing judgment that those who can, do, those who can't, teach. It is also often thought that anybody can teach, but experts are not necessarily guaranteed to be effective communicators.
And how many people could cope with teaching, say, in the old one-teacher rural schools? My parents and grandfather started their careers in such isolated schools, where a lone teacher might have ten or 12 pupils in the whole establishment, with those pupils usually spread over five or six classes. Classes were taught in rotation, with some working from the blackboard while others received direct instruction from the teacher. Organisational skills were of the essence.
Stamina and resourcefulness were also of prime importance, for the teachers, who were often very young, were responsible for every aspect of school life. In the 1970s, in two extremely bizarre and testing incidents involving the same miscreant, children and teachers were kidnapped from their schools in country Victoria. Both teachers were only 20 years old. In the Faraday school case, teacher Mary Gibbs managed to kick out a panel of the van in which she and her six charges were trapped: she then led the children through the bush to safety.
"Teachers never know where their influence