S111,----110W very smug and parochial is Charles Brand's article 'The
Teacher'sLot'---wire the gram- mar school masters! Has Mr. Brand ever been inside a secondary modern school, I wonder? Despite • first-class honours degree 1 chose to work in a modern school, where I am head of the English department. So we do not need to keep up to date with current intellectual thought? It would only be showing off? In fact I suggest that members of a grammar school sixth form will sooner or later dis- cover for themselves the value of modern literature or literary criticism. I did. But my struggling GCE '0' level group will never make contact with, say, Laurie Lee, C. P. Snow, Lawrence Durrcll or even such a poet as John Donne, unless I show them the way. Also I know from experience how very much more exhausting it is to teach a dull pupil than a clever one. My colleagues and I are not privileged to sit' hack and watch the Tree of Knowledge grow : we have to prepare the ground. plant the seed, water :t, stake it and prune it. We probably Work harder and in less pleasant conditions than grammar school staffs. We probably deserve a higher salary than theLat teachers do with their pay is quite immaterial. No teacher should have more money just to buy books or a new car, The only tenable reason for a salary increase is desert. All teachers whatever their school, earn far more than they receive. Doubters should attempt to keep a class of even ten five-year-olds busy for a day; or try to teach an ESN child of eleven to read; or control Class 4D in a tough mixed secondary modern school for' one forty-minute lesson; or, as Mr. Brand emphasiSes, stimulate a lively scholarship group in a grammar school sixth, Of course teachers, all teachers, should have more money but for one reason only—because they deserve it.--Yours faithfully,
SHEILA M. BROOKS
12 Littledole Close, Bracknell, Berks
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