Teaching in 1911

Beatrice Taylor began teaching in 1911 after just 6 weeks training. She was only 17 year old. Beatrice reflects on her experiences teaching at the outbreak of World War One, supervising classes of 70 students, and other oppressive conditions and demands of her times… “I felt delighted. The children were simply gorgeous… I can see them all so plainly… they were as enthusiastic as I was… There was another teacher in the room with me. I was talking against another teacher all day and it was exhausting… the boards were all uneven with cracks between them and it was freezing… We were always reading and studying and you didn’t mind…‘You must have been teaching then when World War One began?’ Oh, yes! That was when the real horror began!” For information about contributors and the JPL Podcast, as well as Journal of Professional Learning articles and Centre for Professional Learning courses, please visit our website www.cpl.asn.au/podcasts

Tomorrow is the Centenary of the Teachers Federation where I work; we’ve unearthed a tremendous amount of material from the past century. Here is an interview I edited recently of an interview with Beatrice Taylor; she began her teaching career in 1911. She talks about the early days of teaching and how the conditions evolved over time. My grandmother (also Beatrice) wanted to be a teacher. I rather imagined her when working through this recording.