'Teaching runs in the family like wooden legs,' my mother used to remark. And it was true. My parents, assorted uncles and aunts, and my paternal grandfather were all teachers. The latter started it all, taking an escape route from his publican father and the hated world of hotels.
When I was young, girls could be wives and mothers, nurses or teachers. Marriage did not appeal to me at that stage. As for nursing, I couldn't stand the sight of blood, let alone other messes. In any case, the life of teaching was the only one I knew.
It was a very sheltered and circumscribed one way back then, and the world at large bore an attitude of faint scorn towards teachers. Cushy job. All those holidays. But during the holidays, conscientious people prepared for another term of a job that was far from cushy.
Sad to relate, the information I receive these days indicates that teachers are working harder and more thanklessly than ever.
Grandfather began work with the Education Department of Victoria in 1908 as a pupil-teacher. He was 15, and schools were his life until he was 70. In 1908 the system of teaching inspection was one of Payment by Results, but 55 years later teachers were being inspected and graded. Their salaries no longer depended on examination results. Rather, their prospects of promotion depended on the all-important 'mark'.
I began teaching at 21, at a school in what is now a posh beach resort. Those were the days of external examinations, and it was absolutely no fun teaching The Merchant of Venice to a group of tow-headed surfies who could check the waves from the schoolroom window.
Because I taught in both primary and secondary sections, I was inspected twice that first year. The representatives of the Board of Secondary Inspectors were less fearsome than the despotic District Inspector, who ruled his primary schools with a rod of iron.
I received a good mark, but I was a gibbering wreck for a week, and can still remember, a good 40 years later, the recurring nightmare in which the DI lights a cigarette, stalks up the aisle between the desks, and then stubs the fag out on my upper arm. What Freud would have said I didn't like to imagine.
In Australia last week, Federal and State ministers agreed to a performance-related pay structure for teachers. The idea, an American one, is that short videos