For the past 40 days and 40 nights I’ve been teaching in our Victorian regional town’s only state secondary school. It has been hard. Very hard. Or for want of a more interesting word than hard, as I might have told my English students, it has been eye – opening. (Or is that 2 words?) I might then go on to tell them to cut the word ‘very’ because if in doubt kill your adjectives first because they’re usually redundant, and the reader’s usually more than happy to see them go.
In Sacred Scripture, the number 40 signifies new life, new growth, transformation, a change from one great task to another great task. In our new post pandemic, post truth, post ‘respect for the authority of knowledge, experience and verifiable qualifications’ world, nothing is sacred. Well, nothing inside the school classroom that is. But it’s true that working as a secondary school teacher again for the first time in many years has been ‘a great task’ for me, yes, and one that I admit to having not completed all that well. I tried hard. Very hard. But today with reports written, boxes ticked, exams marked, I just feel sad. Very sad. And very tired.
After surviving, no, enduring, no navigating with the thinly disguised terror of an old pro sailor still trying valiantly to look like she’s in control but finds herself all at sea, her ship heading fast for the rocks with twenty young passengers on board, all rowdily oblivious to any impending disaster, I tried my best, my very best to teach my passengers. I tried my best to be a good teacher to these passengers, none of whom I’d met up until the first day of term 4. All having already developed relationships with their ‘real’ teacher and most of them demonstrably unimpressed, if not downright hostile to this latest ‘sub’ (substitute teacher) who’d admitted to them first up that she was looking forward to learning from each other because having not taught in a secondary school for ages she was sure that whilst she could teach them what she’d learnt in the intervening years, she was sure that she too had much to learn from them. Mostly such an unorthodox admission of vulnerability was met with a mixture of amusement and disinterest. Occasionally someone would Google me – they were always on their screens – and read out a WIKI entry or something or other I’d done or written or appeared in or whatever, and for a moment, a tiny moment, a handful of these kids would erupt with questions:
Were you on television Miss? How come you’re doing this shit job now Miss? What a come down Miss? Nah, you know I’m only joking Miss?
Are you married Miss? Can I go to the toilet Miss?’
It wasn’t all bad. Not at all. I did learn a lot from these students because they were largely lovely. Sure, they were teenagers out of control, out of Lockdown and out of their comfort zones but amidst the chaos of the usual mental health and academic delay issues, the behavioural and self-regulation issues, the self-evident day-to-day under resourcing, there were moments where these teenagers shone brightly and beautifully and when I felt a connection.
Like, apparently Romeo is a ‘simp. Simp is slang for a person (typically a man) who is desperate for the attention and affection of someone else (typically a woman). Excellent. I got a way in. They can teach me new words. Like Shakespeare did.
‘So, are you saying then…’, I ask the Year 10 English lad who’d offered up his analysis, ‘… that Romeo is a simp for crushing on Rosaline at the beginning of the play when she’s clearly not into him?’
‘Ha-ha, Miss. Yeah, he’s a simp at first and then he’s like a total hypocrite cause he falls in love at first sight with Juliet as soon as he sees at the ball and that.’
And yes, they persist in teaching Romeo and Juliet at Year 10 English level even though it ends in a teenage double suicide. I’m not into cancelling literature but in this case, I reckon it’s tone-deaf teaching this text to 16-year-olds in our current climate.
A Year 7 Maths student declared fiercely, ‘I’m going on strike cause my needs aren’t being met.’
I can’t teach Maths, but I could maybe teach him something about industrial relations, enterprise agreements and the right to strike.
‘Great. Okay’, I said. ‘So, before you go on strike, let’s try negotiating. What do you want?’
‘What? Nah. Want? I just want out of this class.’
I met the so-called ‘pick me girls. This is a sub-culture of Year 9’ers who sport long thick eyelashes, mega baggy PE tracksuit pants, hair long and bouncy – sort of Taylor Swift but way less energetic. The purple-haired self-identifying non-binary girls hate them and visa versa. There were more sub-cultures currently operating in this sprawling all-inclusive secondary school than you could poke a stick at. It was illuminating. It was confusing.
And then there were the other teachers, the well-being and teacher support staff; all extraordinary. All pushed to their limits. All working their arses off. All at near-breaking point. All wanting the best for their students but also hating what it was doing to their own corroding sense of self, their wellbeing, their self-efficacy. I admired them and I often felt inadequate. More like a spy than a teacher. An outsider. They were helpful, supportive but ultimately, I was on my own. They didn’t have enough time to do their own job let alone show me how to do mine.
I did develop a tentative but solid relationship with a girl who was always reading and who even managed to read her latest whilst sauntering from one class to the next. How she remained so separate, so calm, I wanted some of that. Every week a new book and every week something I’d read or wanted to read. She was one of those old-fashioned kinds of girls who are sort of misfits at high school, but you know are going to be okay. Yep. She was going to be okay.