Alethea May Acason
(This
is the contents of a PDF sent to me in November 2019 and maybe it's
time to reflect on what we know and didn't know about our teacher)
Miss Acason, we hardly knew you (but you probably didn’t know much about us either)
by Brian and Sarah August 2019 DRAFT 5
Our much loved 'Aco', in spite of two years' continuous pedagogical custody over us fledgling young Australians, was a curiously mysterious person to us. In keeping with the fostering of our interests in theatre and music, she provided the ultimate stage show for us – that of the 'prim and proper English schoolmarm'. Her acquired English accent, honed in the Old Country by her years of teaching experience there, was accompanied by an intolerance of anything resembling Aussie ruffian behaviour in our classes, whose rooms sat above those of the Millers Point kids below. This was our unspoken lesson – segregation based on social class and intelligence quotients determining our privilege.
But Miss Acason was in many ways a 'fake'. We had no idea that she had endured gut-wrenching poverty and domestic violence in her own family during the Great Depression. Only after more than fifty years did we learn of her terrible childhood experiences when we met her brother and some other family members during our 2007 First Reunion held at the school.
Her parents came from the UK to Sydney in 1920; her father had served in the 1914-1918 war and suffered from gas poisoning. They lived at first on a dairy farm in Dumbleton, now Beverly Hills, where May was born, the third of four children. The dairy farm didn’t work out; they lived for two years during the Depression in a one-room shack in Londonderry with an earth floor, lined with hessian.
There were no social services or other government aid in the early 1920s – child endowment did not generally start until 1927. Children’s clothes were sometimes made of flour bags. Her older brother had his first pair of shoes when he was 15. In her sister's memoirs, she wrote that their first schooling was by correspondence and they were average students except for May, who won a scholarship to teachers' college. She spent some years teaching in Europe before getting her assignment to Fort Street OC.
Did her early childhood affect her teaching behaviour? She could be so cold and controlling and even mean. Questions we might consider today, such as why she did nothing to stop us from bullying Dorothy and why she showed truly reprehensible cruelty to Ray. Was she herself a damaged personality who today would need therapy to heal? Were her periodic near-fainting spells not related to anaemia but anxiety attacks which today might be labelled PTSD?
On the other hand, she did not know much about us either. Certainly, she had the results of our IQ tests that were taken right there in the school to select us as meeting the requirements for admission to our opportunity class. She would have known that many of us had IQs over the norms of 85-115 and also if any of us were truly high IQ geniuses. We did not know these things.
But she hardly knew anything about our own families or childhood traumas. As war babies born in 1941- 42, sometimes called the worst years in history, many of us endured fathers sent to the battlefields who, if they came home at all, were scarred by appalling wartime experiences; they would today be diagnosed as suffering from PTSD. Alcoholism, anxiety and depression were normal but never spoken about. We have never known the number of us who endured these family burdens.
And she knew nothing about our medical and mental health problems. For example, she did not know that Brian was born with a congenital hernia that prevented him from exerting himself; in the Christmas holidays at the end of 1952, he spent two weeks in hospital recovering from major surgery. In those days it was deemed impolite to discuss our many varied health and family issues. When one classmate was just 5 years old, her mother suffered from a stroke leaving her severely disabled and requiring much help getting dressed before leaving for our school each day. Aco had visited her mother and was aware of the student’s burden but never made any allowance for this in her treatment of her at school.
The Real May Acason, however, was finally revealed to some of us who were lucky enough to keep in touch with her after we left Fort Street for our various high schools. She organized some group picnics with a few. And she even visited Andrew’s parents after they moved to Oatley to make sure he got into Sydney Boys High. Much later on May helped with Janet and Dorothy’s babies.
We wonder whether these “classroom unknowns” persist in today’s schools. Do Sydney’s schoolkids know any more about the private lives of their teachers? Quite often many now call their teachers by their first names. And do teachers know much now about the family lives of their students? We had no school counsellors.
Opportunity classes still exist today, with huge competition - and frequent coaching - for entry. We don't know whether they still have one teacher for two years, as we did, but we know that those two years created a bond that still exists with many of us today. Not all have good memories of those years but looking back we feel we were lucky to have had that unique experience.
And our memories of Miss Acason continue to grow fonder as we become wiser and know more about her true character.