Barbara's Reflections

Written by Alicia Brazell & Lucy Danaher, Year 6 Students and Digital Team Leaders. 

The Memories of a Past Student 

A few weeks ago, two people from the digital media team were lucky enough to meet a former APS student. Her name is Barbara Whitehurst, and she was a student at APS in the 1940s, when the fire burned down our school. In this section, you will find a reflection from a past student about what school was like back then.

Barbara loved school. However, the school was very different from how it is today. Only two buildings—the Team Kids building and the staff room—survived the terrible fires, and even then, those buildings have changed and been renovated a lot. So Barbara’s Aberfeldie would have been very strange for students of today’s Aberfeldie, but it’s still the same school.

Now, I have heard this question a lot: What did the students do back then, when there was no Wi-Fi or video games? Many people assume that kids did boring things, but in reality, they actually did some pretty cool things. Barbara shared that students did things like skipping, hopscotch, basketball, drawing, and playing on the playground, which are actually pretty similar to what we do today.

School was very different back then. There were punishments (we’ll go into those later). Barbara shared that girls had to wear dresses and that there was no real uniform. Wait! No uniform! I don’t want a uniform! Lucky them ... well, moving on, what were the classrooms like? Barbara’s classroom had rows of desks, the kind that lift up their lids, with inkwell grooves for writing because they wrote with ink and a quill, a tool they used instead of a pen. Barbara took history, geography, art, and the four R’s: reading, ‘riting (writing), and arithmetic (math). There was one classroom per year group, with 200 kids in the school at the time. What a school! Wait, that’s ours!

Have you ever been scared in your life? Well, Barbara (and the rest of the school) at APS in 1949 was. They faced pretty much the worst year in Aberfeldie history—the year the school burned down. Barbara was only in grade 5 at the time, and she was devastated when the milkman came around and told them what had happened. The fire had taken place at about 3 - 4 a.m., so no one was hurt, but nonetheless, the fire had been terrible. The only things remaining were the army hut, the place where they hid during World War II, which is now the Team Kids building! The staff room also remained, but that was about it. Most students were sent to other schools in the area, but a few stayed, having lessons in the remaining buildings. The grade 6s searched for anything that survived the fire—exercise books, desks, ink. Pretty much nothing. Definitely not our top year.

When you think of olden-day schools, one of the first things you probably think of is the punishments. Compared to today's consequences, Barbara thought the punishments were pretty full-on. Luckily, Barbara was never hurt or punished too badly, but sometimes she saw one of her classmates having this ‘treatment.’ Shudders. Being from the past, it had things that we banned years ago. During 'Back in Time Day,' your teacher may have done a role play of a student sitting in the corner with a big cone with a “D” on it (the “D” stands for dunce, a word they used to use for someone who wasn’t very clever) or made you stay in and write lines. Now, if those punishments sound bad to you, that isn’t even the worst of it. There was another way they enforced discipline back then—corporal punishment. This is where the teacher may hit you with a cane or ruler. If you were a male teacher, you would take off your belt and basically whip the child. Ouch (this was something we definitely didn’t do on Back in Time Day).

Well, that ends Barbara’s reflection. We thank Barbara and anyone else who helped make this article. We hope you all learned something new from reading this, and if you ever want to find out more about your history, there are plenty of places to go. Thank you once again for reading.