Students
Robert Gurd
I too had the good fortune of being a pupil at Calday Grange Grammar School when Eric Hawkins was headmaster. As well as benefiting from the newly-built heated swimming pool (a vast improvement on the previous freezing outdoor pool), changing rooms and music room - all built during his time - I also benefited from his new ideas on language teaching, but perhaps not in the way that he intended. In the early 1960s one of the first language laboratories was established at the school which entailed the installation of a number of expensive reel-to-reel tape recorders in a purpose-built block. Pupils seated at specially equipped desks learnt the language through repetition at their own pace. They were overseen by a master listening to their efforts from a central console who corrected where necessary. Although the system was intended to teach languages by the then novel method of listening to recordings of native speakers - now taken for granted - I was much more fascinated by the technology behind it thus fostering an interest in sound recording which endures to this day: I still use the skills I learned then when I oversee recordings of volunteers reading our local weekly newspaper for visually-impaired listeners. My French, alas, never progressed beyond O-level!