Pook at College

Book excerpt: With an ever increasing number of men and women taking up teaching as a career, it is fitting that Pook should reveal his own startling college experiences for the benefit of students about to join and for the delight of teachers whose college days are among their most vivid memories. The excellent work being done by our Colleges of Education is so well known both here and abroad that Pook decided to dwell chiefly on the lighter side of scholastic life, displaying the humour of lecturers, students and those unwitting guinea-pigs of our educational sorties—the school-children, who have to bear the brunt of the student’s endeavours in his new world of Teaching Practice. Against his customary accurate background of the profession, Pook stumbles through the whole range of college activities with characteristic enthusiasm, undaunted by the novel circumstance of being the only man among the six hundred girls who attend Dame May Boyle College of Education for Women. Understandably, he has to seek psychiatric treatment to face such a task, the results of which lead to one of the funniest books in the celebrated Pook series.