A fire destroyed a demountable classroom at Beechworth Primary School in 1960. It was one of several temporary classrooms most of which were still there when I was last in Beechworth some thirty years later.
Anyway, Grade 4 spent half the year in the Congregational Church Hall where Mr Bernaldo struggled away with long division, üThe Pioneers by Frank Hudson from the Victorian Education Department’s üA Fourth Reader, and what was called the Cursive Script.
It was called “”Grade 4”, note.
Sue was plain dumb and a truant. Mary had glandular fever. The rest of us learnt what we could under Mr Bernaldo. He didn’t have a given name. I thought he must have been born “”Mr Bernaldo,” if, indeed, teachers were born.
Mr Bernaldo did not use a strap, or detentions. Nor did he yell and scream in the classroom. They were reserved for playground offences, where it did not matter.
The playground at Beechworth Primary then was half asphalt and half gravel where terrible injuries were inflicted during the course of “”hoppo-bumpo”.
One boy was drafted to go in the middle of a 40-by-20-metre stretch of asphalt. The rest lined up along a line at one end. The boy in the middle selected boy from the line, usually the weakest, who had to hop to the line on the other side without being biffed on to two feet by the boy in the middle. If he was biffed he joined the boy in the middle so there were two in the middle to greet the next boy selected from the line. However, if the boy made it, the whole mass came across and the lone boy had to pick off any as best he could. When the mass were across to the other side, another weak boy from that line had to attempt a lone crossing back. This went on with the boys in the middle getting steadily more numerous until there was only one boy left on the line, the toughest and most heroic.
The game had a curious appeal to the conflicting instincts of both herding and dominance: the key instincts in the process of natural selection.
The game was banned when I was in Grade 5, Mr Rasmussen’s class. That was 1961. These were enlightened times.
It was immediately replaced by Around the Shelter Shed, a game of only marginally less brutality.
In the classroom, natural selection was applied with less violence, but none the less as strictly. Mr Bernaldo had one threat to make us learn: the threat of Staying Down. Staying Down meant humiliation. It meant being at the bottom of the class.
At Beechworth Primary School, Staying Down applied much like the English soccer divisions, where the bottom two teams are relegated. Every year the bottom two kids usually had to stay down. The herding bonds of the friends in Grade 4 would have to be severed. Those that stayed down would have to join the unspeakables now in Grade 3 who would become the new Grade 4. The rest would march on to Mr Rasmussen’s Grade 5 and the Victorian Education Department’s üA Fifth Reader.
That is why they were called “”Grades”. You made the grade and you were selected to move into the next grade. They were not “”Years,” which presumes a linear progression rather than an upward one.
December was fast approaching. Mary and Sue had failed test after test. Would they Stay Down?
At the end of the last day we got our reports and Mary ran out. We knew by her tears that the inevitable had happened. The girls followed and caught her, offering what comfort they could. The boys just sang with glee: “”Mary’s staying down. Mary’s staying down.”
Eventually Mary showed us her report. Mr Bernaldo, for once using the passive voice to ameliorate any blame, had written: “”Another year is suggested.”
Sue’s report had the same words. She did not cry, but lost some her cavalier attitude. She was hurt, but put on a brave face.
They were both better for it, of course. Going into Grade 5 without long division would have sent Mary into a hopeless circle of forever being behind. No doubt she could have done without learning Frank Hudson’s üPioneers, but she would have needed the vocabulary of the üFourth Reader before tackling the fifth.
It was a dreadful December day for Mary, but a better year for her in 1961.
There are no Grades now, just Years. And a parliamentary committee has just reported that a quarter of primary school children go into high school unable to read or write to standard.
Mr Bernaldo would not have let it happen.
Education in Beechworth was finished off in 1966. GMV-6 opened in Shepparton. It was just within range, and the first television set _ black-and-white _ appeared in Garland’s Electrical Store. People sat in chairs on the footpath with blankets, and others parked their cars, bonnet to kerb, to watch the flickering, silent tube. It was then a benign mystery, yet to malignantly invade our homes and change our lives.
Mr Bernaldo is dead.