To infinity and beyond: reflections on teaching
For the past three months I’ve been working in secondary school and it’s been wonderful. I’ve had plenty of hard days, but no truly bad ones, and I genuinely like my students, though to be fair I tend to like most people.
In 1999 I was 13 and started high school. I truly did hate it and had many bad days until I found my people. It took most of the year for our group to form and luckily enough of us stayed until the end of our schooling so we always had a friend or two in class. I cannot tell you what made our group stick. I was really the only book worm, some of us were church kids (most weren’t), some of us were more academically minded than others. My best friend was Simon, who almost never did work unless it was a practical subject (which was good because he would do my work for me instead). When I have students in class who aren’t off task but certainly aren’t working either I think of this weird dynamic the two of us had in which one of us would work hard in English (me) or basically do the work of two people in Woodwork (Simon), and I can’t be too mad.
In my mind 2001 was only a few years ago. Which is great for thinking like a teenager, not so great when my own children refer to the “nineteen-nineties” as the “olden days”.
I had several favourite teachers and most of them were English teachers. We had an English teacher when I was in Year 9 who tried some innovative things and worked hard to engage a group of girls who were really disinterested in even turning up to class. She set up a project for them to document their friendship group and they literally started turning up to every lesson to work on it. The same teacher also set me up with a novel study Looking For Alibrandi as a independent study task. I was in my element for that semester. I also loved my Italian teacher — she always made learning fun and provided so many opportunities for us. Sher made me care about Eurovision and played any Italian movie she could find (including one about Sabrina the Teenage Witch)
The past month I’ve taken on an extra contract and while I don’t know the plans for next term, I already feel sad about saying goodbye to my “big kids”. I hate goodbyes — though I’ve learned it is weird and hard to visit after you leave, so it’s best to be proper about it and not promise to come back to say hi. This world is a small one, there are students everywhere.
Earlier this year I thought I would TRT my way through 2024, and while the work is there it’s hard to find job satisfaction. And to be fair, having had my own desk in an office again, it will be hard to go back to carrying my little basket of TRT stuff from class to class and asking if I can borrow a yard duty vest (who washes these things? Does anyone?). Now that I’m out of TRT land I’ve been working harder and thinking more strategically about my career in a new way. I start uni again next semester — Masters round two, here we go.
In 1999 when I hated school and everything about it I realised there was one job I could do that encompassed everything I loved — being an English and Drama teacher. My love from Drama has fallen by the wayside, but my love for the written word has not.
In 2003 I finished Year 12, applied for uni but I was accepted for a Bachelor of Arts which I declined. Whether God’s hand was upon me or whether it was just good fortune, I made much better choices like repeating a subject to increase my ATAR, side-stepping my way into my teaching degree by doing a Cert IV at Tabor, transferring universities (hard but worth it career-wise), teaching contracts around the state, having children, letting my teaching registration lapse (bad move but unavoidable), doing my Masters in creative writing, divorce, realising I needed to put food back on the table with a big girl’s job, retraining again, becoming an ECT, deciding to go back to the classroom, more ECT work, more TRT work, contract, contract.
When I look at all of that in a chunky paragraph, I cannot be angry at myself. It’s been a journey.
When I first started my teaching career my motto was ‘make a difference’. It’s easy enough to track and at times I believed I made a difference to some of my students. I used to write in my cover letters that I was a passionate teacher. That’s not untrue either — I am passionate about the subjects I teach, and about making impactful change on the lives of the students I teach. Passion to me has always been represented by purple. And of course, my favourite colour is pink.
When my daughter was born and started to reign I kept seeing a quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘And though she be but little, she is fierce.’
I might be passionate about writing and so dedicated to reading that I have too many books and not enough storage space. But I am more that that — I am fierce. Fiercely protective of my kiddos, and my students. Do the work, don’t do the work, but please, show up and we can sort the rest while you’re there. I am fierce about the curriculum. This stuff matters. Maybe not right now, but in two weeks or two decades, you’ll understand in context exactly what is happening and why. I am fierce about wellbeing, about respecting each other, about life beyond the classroom.
A few weeks ago I was talking to my students about their after school jobs. My teacher heart said so quietly, I hope everyone there is nice to them. As I was marking later on I remembered something my Italian teacher had written. It was a six question homework task which she diligently marked each week, with the same comment:
‘Good.’
‘Good.’
‘Good.’
One week there was a harder task than usual. I think I got 4/6 — it certainly wasn’t full marks.
‘Good girl.’
My teacher’s flowy writing reminded me of something significant. In my eyes I was pretty much an adult. I had a job, I had my own radio show, I was very independent and walked anywhere I wanted to go. In my teacher’s eyes I was still a kid. Sometimes I just wanted to be a kid, and that day when I had tried really hard and still hadn’t got it right, I was fiercely held by those two words. I was battle weary from parole nuove and my teacher stood before it, shielding me from the horror of verbs. I’ve never forgotten her kindness, she was both little and fierce too.
Make a difference.
Be fierce.
