London Normal School - Spectrum Yearbook (London, Ontario Canada)

Page 11 text:

VICE-PRINCIPAL OF TEACHERS ' COLLEGE For the past year you have experienced the difficult and often frustrating problems that are only the initial steps in the education of a teacher. Your courage, industry and perseverance that made it possible for you to make the transition from the relative- ly carefree role of a student to the extremely responsible role of a teacher, are the very qualities you must continue to demonstrate as a teacher. You have acquired some skill and some knowledge as a result of your successful year at London Teachers ' College; but you ' ve only begun to learn to be a teacher. Practise your skills and add to their number; husband your knowledge and continuously acquire more; reassess these acquis- itions constantly and so achieve that quality of education that surpersedes both skill and knowledge -- wisdom. The love and the pursuit of knowledge is the basis of wisdom. As a teacher make your love of knowledge and respect for truth so apparent that those you teach will be swept enthusiastically forward in their quest of wisdom. My parting wish for you is that through your own efforts you may one day earn the greatest reward our profession has to offer -- the satisfaction of being a GOOD TEACHER,

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PRINCIPAL OF TEACHERS ' COLLEGE You enter your life ' s work at a time when change is rocketting through our world. In some of the sciences more discoveries have been made within the last ten years than in all previous human history. Many of the things we use daily -- among others, commercial television, jet flight, the means of pre- venting polio -- were unknown as recently as your first birthday. So it is right and fitting that much of what you teach children today should differ, not only in what it is made up of, but in how children learn it. You know something of how courses in mathematics and science and social studies are being turned upside down; and you have seen such things as team teaching and programmed learning. It is unlikely that Canadian parents will be content to have their children taught neither more or less than they themselves were taught, and by the same kind of teachers they had themselves when they were young. Yet when all this is accepted, there is an old German proverb that we should remember. It goes something like this: Don ' t throw out the baby along with the bath water. Because some things are old, it does not mean that they are outdated. In fact some of these old things are needed more in today ' s world than ever before. For, you see, servo-mechanisms and computers are after all only tools, and few of us would subscribe altogether to the materialist ' s definition of man as a tool-using animal. Some of us are really frightened today that man, like Mary Shelley ' s Frankenstein, is in danger of being the victim of his mechanical creations. So there are some very old things which young modern teachers might well cherish, and these are really the very things which make man more than a tool-using animal. There are the questions which the ancient Greeks asked about man twenty-five hundred years ago, and which each generation needs to ask of itself again. There are those treasures of literature and the arts which man, if he were only the most dexterous of the apes, could never have risen to. And there is a moral code created by a Man of Bethlehem, whose measure none of us, in the two thousand years since, has ever been able to fill. So all of us, both as persons and as teachers, might pause occasionally among the dizzy wonders of this brave new world, and reflect upon those achievements of the past which are neither outdated nor reactionary, but are indeed needed more today than ever before. F. C. BIEHL

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The past eight months of work with Student Parliament have been most enjoyable for me. Looking back I can honestly say that each of my nineteen fellow students in parliament was willing to do his share, indeed more than his share, of the work required. We talked, argued, cajoled, complained, took a stand on issues, compromised, and finally worked out what we thought were the best solutions to the problems facing us, attempting to make student affairs run smoothly and run well. Most important we continuously tried to improve our own efforts and to improve the structure under which we were working. Now the class of ' 67 at London Teachers ' College is looking forward to its first year of teaching. We are about to enter one of the most essential professions in our society. Thus there are four things I hope each of us will keep in mind in the years to come. First, we must remember to be ourselves. Children have a way of sensing when a teacher is putting on a false front and is trying to be someone he isn ' t. Second, we must remember that as teachers our efforts at teaching will never become perfect. We must continuously self-critically examine what we are doing and try our best to improve. We owe this to ourselves, to the teaching profession and most of all to our students. Third, we are working in a system which, because it is administered and operated by humans, can never of itself become perfect. We must always be prepared to seek ways to do our part to improve that system, even if it means speaking out to the peril of our jobs, when we feel we are right. Fourth, and most important, we must remember that the group of children in front of us is made up of individuals, each with his own abilities, his own potentials. We are the young, the idealists, the generation which would set the world on fire. Let us make certain that we can justifiably be proud of our successors. Lawrence Daub Prime Minister 8