BACK TO SCHOOL shout the billboards and shop window displays and it's still only mid January. I suppose this infuriates present day kids as much as it used to stir my juvenile ire. Well, if it doesn't, it ought to because it's a kind of theft of time. Like the table of hot cross buns in our local Woollies: six-pack specials, more than three months before Good Friday.
For former teachers, 'Back to School' probably arouses other, less youthful associations.
After spending the first two years of my working life very enjoyably at a northern Victoria technical school, I returned to the city and an appointment to a new and still growing suburban high school. The headmaster, a large, rubicund bloke accustomed to revelling in both the responsibilities and the pomp and rituals of leadership, told me when I introduced myself a few days before the term started that he had 'two buffoons' on his staff and he was intent on reducing not adding to their number.
On the first day of term I arrived at a few minutes to nine and signed the time book for 8.30, as was the custom. The time-book was an insulting, unprofessional imposition that I and others refused to respect and which would be soon swept away in the upheavals to come. Anyway, on that morning, having scribbled in the book, I was walking past the head's office when he appeared in the doorway.
'Matthews!' he bellowed (a bellow was his normal decibel level). I kept walking.
'Matthews!' he roared again (a roar was his default vocal position). I kept going.
'Mr Matthews!' he positively exploded. I stopped.
'Did you not hear me?' he said, as I approached with a carefully manufactured look of puzzlement on my face.
'I answer to "Brian" or "Mr",' I said, as my father had taught me, 'nothing in between.'
You could see from his beetrooty features that his entire physical and spiritual being was tossing up between having apoplexy and hooking me under the jaw.
Of course, he did neither, subconsciously recognising that, insufferably smartarse and disrespectful though my reply had been, it had a certain justification: times were changing and just as the time-book, resting on its stand behind us as we confronted each other,