Monica Watt has seen a lot of change in Australian education over the past four decades. After 41 years in the classroom, the deputy headmaster of The Illawarra Grammar School will retire from teaching in December.
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Watt began teaching in the Illawarra at SCEGGS Gleniffer Brae just prior to its merger with TIGS in 1975, where she has remained ever since.
She said it had been wonderful to see the merged school flourish from a few hundred students to more than 1000.
Looking back on her career, she said one of the aspects she enjoyed most was interacting with children at critical stages of their lives and helping them launch into the world as young adults.
"It's had its challenges over the years because, as you can imagine, Wollongong has changed, and with financial downturns and so on. We've managed to weather the storm very, very well," Watt says.
The 65-year-old said the move to co-education wasn't universally favoured, and it took a good 10 years for the school community to really be at peace with it.
"It was quite painful and quite difficult," she says.
"We lost students - they'd send them to Sydney so the girls wouldn't be polluted by boys. "A lot of parents found it quite challenging."
Single-sex schools are a thing of the past, according to Watt, as are many other teaching practices. Education is no longer about sitting exams and answering questions on a page, she says, and educators now recognise there are "multiple intelligences".
"We all know stories of people who failed at school but have gone on to become millionaires, or entrepreneurs or very successful.
"We try and build on the skills the kids have, the innate abilities, the loves they have, the passions they have, and go on what the child needs," she says.
"We give students every opportunity to not only be academic, but have skills in the arts, in sports, in community service, or whatever. We try to acknowledge the wholeness of a child."
TIGS now offers the International Baccalaureate, with students able to choose whether to study for the HSC or the IB.
The IB, Watt says, is about "child-centred learning" as opposed to "competition-style learning", where students are traditionally ranked against their peers.
"You're actually looking at developing your own skills and abilities," she says.
"It's much more student-centred and it's definitely for the 21st century, and it's not politically based. I think that's probably the most exciting thing I've been involved in."
Another dramatic change in teaching is remembered with horror. A light-bulb moment occurs, and Watt suddenly reaches into a desk drawer to retrieve something she'd almost forgotten existed: a brown leather belt.
It was especially made for teachers, and ordered via a catalogue when she began her profession in Britain in the 1970s.
"When I did my training in Scotland and did my [diploma of education], one of the courses we did was "Belting", and you had a lesson in how to do it," she says.
"We were taught you had to bring your arm up high, you bring it down slowly at first, and then you're hitting [a student's] hand with maximum acceleration point to inflict the most damage.
"The first time I did it, they forgot to mention that females have hips that come out, so when I followed through I hit myself - I was in absolute agony."
Thankfully, Watt preferred verbal discipline and says she only used the belt a handful of times, and never in Australia.
"Now we have a totally different system, called restorative justice. It's all about the child acknowledging what they've done, making amends and moving on," she says.
"Our philosophy, because we're a Christian school too, we see that forgiveness is important, and you have the opportunity to forgive each other and live in harmony."
Watt is welcoming the next major change to he career - her departure from teaching - conceding she deserves a well-earned rest.
"I've never actually stopped working, I've worked all my life," she says.
"When I had my children there was no maternity leave. I just went off and had four weeks for the first one, and six weeks for the next one."
Travel and study are loose ideas for retirement, and perhaps learning to ski.
"It's actually quite an exciting stage," Watt smiles.
"I might do all those things I didn't do in my 20s because I was married and had kids."
