The Gift
By the sounds of the title of this week’s blog you’d imagine that I have been bestowed with a wonderful gift or better still that I had provided an amazing gift for someone close to me. I’ll let you be the judge on that one. This story begins at the end of University, January 1980 (inside voice please!) to be precise I'd recently graduated and although the ceremony wasn't until April we were considered eligible and qualified to begin teaching. The complicating factor to all this was that all of the teaching jobs were managed centrally via a single state education department who made all public school teacher appointments. New teachers were assigned based on when existing teachers either resigned or retired and for whatever reason at the time there was few of either, hence the glut of trained teachers in Australia during the early 1980's. Casablanca - the Classic In essence your name went onto the central appointment list, your positi...