After 20 years as assistant principal, students and fellow teachers farewelled Pamela Dixon at a surprise assembly Friday, April 12.

The new library name - the Pamela Dixon Centre for Learning - was also unveiled, much to her surprise.

"Normally you get a building named after you when you're dead, well I am not dead, but it was probably because I was always in the library.

"I fought strongly to keep the library, some schools are getting away from a central learning area, but it's really good that children know there is information in books."

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Always a teacher at heart, the 65-year-old has decided to spend more time growing her driving school, reading, tending to her bees and attending Rotary events as the treasurer.

"The children keep asking me why I'm leaving, but I haven't really been able to give them a clear answer, as I think I was born to be a teacher.

"I have always wanted to be a teacher, since I was four. I can remember back to having a blackboard in our garden and even though I didn't know all the numbers, I worked out then you don't have to know all the answers."

The decision to retire was one of the most difficult so far, she said.

But running wild in the playground with small balls of energy was starting to take its toll.

"After a couple of little accidents around the school, I thought maybe it was time to be doing things that were a little less active."

Arriving at the school in 1999 to take up the position of assistant principal, one year after it opened, Mrs Dixon is the one to approach with a question.

She remembers a school half the size, with not quite enough rooms to accommodate the amount of students.

At the time there were two teaching blocks and eight teachers. One class was set up at the stage.

"The school opened in 1998 and they were ready, they had the full amount of children, but then towards the end of that year more children came in as it's near the RAAF base," she said.

"It filled up and it filled up so they had to do something.

"They created zoning and they hired me as assistant principal.

"It was a small school - but everyone wanted to send their children there, that's what happens when you get a new school, everyone thinks it has to be better than the one I'm sending my child to."

Casuarina Street Primary has now swelled to more than double the size of 20 years ago.

Humbly considering herself as "just an administrator", Mrs Dixon was the one to ensure the school was at the forefront of education, and involved in most of the school's biggest projects like the school-wide positive behavior program.

Over her 44 year career as a teacher, which started in England and took her to one of the remotest places in Australia - Numbulwar, she has seen technology change the most.

"When I first started teaching, to copy things you had a Gestetner copier and a Roneo copier.

"If you wanted to make a worksheet for a student you had a carbonised wax sheet with a white piece of paper over the top and you had to draw or type on that sheet. If you made a mistake you couldn't get rid of it, so you had to be very, very careful with your teaching resources.

"If you were careful with your sheets you could get about 20.

"Nowadays you have photocopiers. When I first started teaching in the Territory there was no central computer system... now there is a help desk, teachers have laptops.

"Education hasn't really changed, we are still teaching students to read and write - those are the most important things, but how that is happening is totally different."

She said she will miss the kids in the classroom and teaching most, now that she has retired.

"Children are beautiful beings, if you're feeling a little bit down you just go into a classroom... it is just a great environment, a school.

"You talk to them and their little faces light up."