School summer holidays are rapidly coming to an end for the current intake and lie-ins and homework free evenings will soon be a thing of the past again. For the teachers too…
In these books teachers share their memories of the classroom and the lessons they learnt.
To serve them all my days by R.F. Delderfield (braille 12v; TB 2377 ), spans two generations who fought in two World Wars, surveying their values, their ideals and the enormous changes of the twentieth century. The theme is expressed through the eyes of the boys at a public school in Exmoor, and of their teacher, David Powlett-Jones. He becomes headmaster of Bamfylde School, and through the triumphs and catastrophies of the years, he guides the destinies of the staff, the boys and his own family.
It's September 1945 and Billy Hopkins is off to London to train as a teacher, with only ten bob in his pocket. Despite his dad's gloomy warnings that he'll pick up bad ways from the toffs down South, Billy survives two years in the Big City, and returns to take up his first teaching job in Manchester - on £300 a year! The catch is his first class, Senior Four, who bitterly resent the raising of the school leaving age, and are all set to take it out on their teacher - luckily the kid from Collyhurst has some tricks up his sleeve which he shares in High Hopes (braille 8v).
In the midsummer of 1949 Edward Blishen presented himself at a London emergency training college to be hastily converted into a teacher. A Nest of teachers (braille 4v; TB 3616 ) is about the pains and pleasures of being a teacher - and about what the author sees as the eternal impossibility of being trained as one.
Meanwhile across the Atlantic 15-year-old Ved went to America to attend the Arkansas School for the Blind. In Sound-shadows of the new world (braille 6v; TB 6747) Ved Mehta describes how in the three years there he fell foul of two members of staff: the PEteacher who believed only the combative could survive in a sighted world and an Evangelical Baptist musician who told him he was damned because he was a Hindu. Girls too were a problem...but he learnt to get around Little Rock himself by perceiving objects and terrain by means of "sound-shadows"
Back in London a young black teacher at an East End school shows his courage and imagination in dealing with difficult teenagers To Sir, with love by E R Braithwaite (braille 4v; TB 1268).
In Head over heels in the Dales (braille 6v) Gervase Phinn, schools inspector in Yorkshire begins his third year with a spring in his step for in April he will marry Christine Bentley, head teacher of Winnery Nook School. But before then he has to suffer the wicked repartee of his fellow inspectors on the subjects of love and marriage.