One of our staff members turns thirty this week. Which makes him half my age. Pause for quiet, wistful introspection...
That makes him an eighties' baby, 1988 to be precise.
At lunch, one by one, we sort of mused aloud about what we were doing 30 years ago: a couple of teachers were pregnant, and so on. Cue more of that wistful introspection...
During the week my Goo Goo G'Joob blog happened to focus on Bryan Adams' Restless album. That also prodded some eighties memories to the surface centred around marrying Jacky Smith and then Keegan, Adam and Samantha's arrival before the eighties were done.
Along the way came fluro jumpers, a long mullet, skinny leather ties, bright shirts, bright socks, odd socks and eighties music like Bryan Adams.
During the eighties, while my wonderful Woodford House colleague, Jo McDowell, was at high school, I was, as she says, teaching.
Arr, the memories: film projectors and the advent of VHS tapes - the camcorders were huge things; chalk and blackboards - the chalk played havoc with my contact lenses; text books (I know, right. I've spent the years since throwing them away from various schools); School Certificate, University Entrance and Bursary; no computers or cell phones or interweb; reading periods in the library (I miss that); bizarrely, teaching literature I hated from my seventies school days like The Old Man And The Sea; teaching social studies, badly; banda and Gestetner copying machines for student worksheets; worksheets!!!
We've come a long way baby!
Huge shout out to all my former colleagues and students from New Plymouth Boys' High School (1983-85) and Macleans College (1986-89) who put up with my idiosyncratic teaching methods and those fluro jerseys.
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