My Teaching Years

I started late in teaching. I went to training college aged 40, by far the oldest in the class.

I started out teaching Maths at Arbroath Academy in Angus in Scotland, but quickly added Computing to my commitments. That was when we had half a dozen Apple II computers.

There were no formal courses to begin with except one which stemmed from the Sixth Year Studies Maths Paper IV which was numerical analysis, but required students to write a non-mathematical program in BASIC. I know I am getting old but those students wrote better programs than any I have seen since.

The BBC computer came next and I had two labs of twenty machines when I moved to Linlathen High School in Dundee. We were also very lucky to get a grant to acquire a few Apple Mac Plus’. For a short while, our school’s computing capacity matched anybody else in the city including the university. It was a very exciting time in Computer Education in school.  As a teaching machine the BBC was extremely useful, rugged, reliable and versatile.
TBC