Learning things the hard way
It was meant to be a dream teaching job in a small town. But the reality was confronting.
As I finished my first year working in England, I felt older and infinitely wiser. I had survived my first year of teaching and my rose-coloured glasses weren’t damaged, only clouded. The reality of teaching — the workload, the fatigue and the emotional demands — had been acknowledged. I would go into my next job aware of these things, but my enthusiasm was still brimming; the cup was still half full. Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher?
Returning to Australia, I landed a job in a small NSW coastal town I’ll call Paradise. As a child, I had holidayed near there and knew it to be a beautiful fishing town. My boyfriend Matthew had proposed and I had a solitaire diamond on my finger. After the gloom of my year in England, everything here seemed brighter, lighter and just more sunshiny.
The school was located on a cliff, where burgundy sandstone dropped away like the land had been sliced through. The inky Pacific Ocean yawned and roared below and I couldn’t imagine how I would concentrate on playground duty with such a stunning view distracting me. “This is an interesting place,” explained Peter, the teacher commissioned to show me around the school. “You’ve got very wealthy people living side-by-side with the poorest of the poor.” He told me he’d been teaching for 35 years. “Do you like teaching here?” I asked. “It’s challenging,” he said.
He opened a door, revealing a classroom with a lone teacher working at his desk. “Bro teaches the other Year Five and Six class,” Peter said. “You two will be the Stage Three team.”
“Welcome to Paradise,” Bro said. He stretched his arm out, a gesture that encompassed his room. There was a dictionary propping up the leg of his desk and a squadron of empty drink bottles on the window ledge behind him. The carpet was littered with crumpled Christmas wrapping, shags of tinsel and empty chip packets. His blackboard still had colourful bubble writing scrawled over it from last year’s final day. In the bottom-right corner there was an enormous penis drawn in yellow. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll show you your classroom.”
It was a shed. It was dusty and grimy, with spider webs hanging like decorations and dead flies rotting on every surface. I loved it. This dirty, filthy shed was all mine and I couldn’t wait to make it a space where my students could bounce into each morning, ready to learn and discover.
I took all the desks and chairs outside, scrubbing them for ages with hot, soapy water and a scouring brush to remove all the scribbles and swearwords. I shushed the voice inside me that asked, What kind of child writes that on a desk?
For days on end during that hot January my parents helped me scrub walls and vacuum floors and wash windows. Mum sewed new curtains and I bought a second-hand sofa, along with cushions and beanbags, to create a cosy reading corner. With exhausted satisfaction, I surveyed the room from a wobbly swivel chair. The scene was set. All I needed were my students.
“What’s all this shit, then?” It was the first student to walk in. I scanned my class roll: only 12 students; surely I could work it out. “Ryan?” I asked, and the slight, blond-haired boy who was flicking on the computer looked up at me: “Nuh.”
“Hey, Ryan!” There was a kid at the window, almost hidden in the long grass, which was out of bounds. “Come and check this out.” He held up a crushed beer can. “Some still in it.” Ryan raced out of the room, toppling a chair as he went. I took a slow breath and crossed the room to straighten it.
Voices began to swell outside my classroom door: Shove over, dickhead. I closed my eyes for a moment and reminded myself that I was a teacher. They came into the room like wild cats, darting and lurking and diving and looking. I tried to herd them into the area where their desks were located, but Ryan was going ballistic, like a fire cracker had been let off in the corner. He had discovered the games had been deleted from the computer.
“Well, that’s f..ked!” He stood up and flicked his chair behind him so that it crashed against the wall. “You’re a shit teacher!” he shouted, pointing. “I’m not doing any work you give us!” He picked up a piece of chalk and threw it hard against the back wall. It splintered into pieces and left a white mark, like bird shit.
He was no more than 30 kilos, four feet tall, no more than a boy. “Let’s sit down and get started,” I said, my voice betraying only the slightest tremor. Ryan marched down the classroom, pulled a chair from its ordered place and turned it round so that it faced the wrong way. He sat there, his back to me, staring at the wall. “Thanks, Ryan,” I said. He raised his arm in the air and gave me the bird.
By 11am I had all the students except Ryan sitting in their seats. The literacy activities I tried with them were way too hard. They struggled to give full sentence answers to basic comprehension questions and they couldn’t make inferences from a passage of text. I realised with a sinking feeling that most of my program would need to be rewritten. I had spent two weeks of the holidays preparing that program — hours and hours in front of a computer with syllabus documents bookmarked in a stack beside me. All that time typing, formatting and decision-making. All of that wasted.
The bell rang for recess and they raced out, Ryan leading the charge. “It’s been a nice morning,” one girl said to me, plunging her hand into her bag to bring up a handful of cream-filled chocolate biscuits. Nearby, a boy was foraging in his bag, arm buried almost up to his shoulder.
“Well, thank you,” I said to the girl. She smiled and waved clumsily, dropping a biscuit. “Oops!” She made to pick it up but stepped on it, squashing it like a pancake. “Oh, well,” she laughed, and ran off. I turned to find a broom but as I moved away the foraging boy darted forward, grabbed the squashed biscuit and shoved it into his mouth. I saw him wipe his face and look around like a fox before racing away. I swept up the crumbs, positioning myself so that I could peek into his bag. It was empty.
It was my turn for playground duty so I walked out to the yard, seeking the teacher I was meant to relieve. “Good luck,” she said as I approached. As I crossed the quadrangle, a tiny kindergarten student ran past, throwing his food wrapper onto the ground. “Hey,” I said, but the child kept running. “BURT!” It was another kid, bigger. The boy stopped in his tracks and shouted, “WHAT?”
“You dropped your rubbish there, Burt,” I said, pointing to the chip packet, now ghosting its way across the yard. “You go put it in the bin.”
“F..k off,” he said, and ran away.
After recess, my class had Library and I felt my body flood with relief as I handed them over to the librarian, who had been teaching at the school for years. I went to the principal’s office and knocked on his door. I took a breath. “On playground duty just then, there was a kindergarten boy, Burt Mater, and he … he told me to eff off.”
“I see,” he said, unmoved. “And what did you do?”
“Well, that’s the thing. He ran off.”
“I see. Well, you should have chased him.”
“Chased him?”
“Yes,” the principal said, nodding. “He needs to know that kind of language is not acceptable.”
“Is that …” I looked around the office, saw a set of syllabus documents on the shelf. Their spines had never been cracked. “Is that school policy?”
“Our policy is no swearing,” he said.
It wasn’t until I was home and nestled next to Matty on the lounge that I realised I’d felt sort of unsafe all day. A knot was twisting in my guts and I was already dreading tomorrow. “Some of those kids are rough,” I confessed to Matty. “They scare me a bit. One boy pegged a piece of chalk across the room within the first five minutes.”
“Did you tell the principal?”
“No. But I did tell him about the kindergarten kid who told me to eff off.”
“What?” Matty’s face was so disbelieving, it made me laugh.
“When I talked to the principal about it, he told me I should have chased after him.”
“Then what?” Matty pressed. “You chase him, you catch him, then what?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
The next morning, as I drove into Paradise, I tried to dredge up enough courage and stamina to last the day. There are no bad kids, I reminded myself primly. There’s just bad behaviour. But what does that mean?
“We need to talk about Burt Mater,” said Peter, taking command of the staff meeting. “Why?” It was the principal, his face set in that familiar passive expression. Bro laughed. “Because we’re sick of being told to f..k off by a five-year-old, that’s why.” “Well,” said the principal, “that five-year-old keeps our census numbers up, which affects our staff allocation and our resources.”
“We need to have some boundaries, something consistent for all the students.” It was Rose, the kindergarten teacher — the one who had to deal with Burt Mater every day. I had never seen Rose ruffled or stressed, even though I suspected her class was one of the hardest in the school. Burt wasn’t an aberration. Rose’s class was littered with swearers and biters, fighters and liars. “I’ve been thinking about this,” Rose went on. “I think we should have a three-strikes policy. Three warnings, and on the fourth you’re suspended.”
“We can’t do that,” the principal said. “If we suspend children it’s inconvenient for their parents.”
“Is it?” Rose pushed. “Only two out of my 18 students have parents that work. These kids can have a day at home for swearing.”
“Yeah,” said Peter. “But there’s another aspect to it, Rose. You ever notice how our kids are never away? I mean, sometimes you just wish they’d stay home for the day, but they always turn up. Even when they’re sick. Even when they don’t have a clean uniform. For most of them, they come here because it’s better than being at home.”
Rose: “What if we did in-school suspensions?”
“No,” the principal said. “We can’t have that. Parents will be outraged. They’ll go above us and complain. They’ll take their kids out of the school. Send them down the road. We’ll lose numbers.” He glanced at his watch, suddenly keen to wrap up the meeting. “Let’s all think about it and we can discuss it again next week.”
“Well, Gabsie,” Bro said after a moment, “I reckon this meeting’s over. Come and have a drink?” He nodded in the direction of the pub. “You look like you need one.” I’m sure I must have protested, but by 6.30pm I was on to my third glass of wine at the Paradise Grand.
“What’s with Ryan?” I asked.
“Ah, that kid,” Bro said, his voice lowered, softened. “He was abused by his stepdad. Sexual, you know? And when he spoke up about it, his mum told him to get out. Disowned him. Been in foster care since the start of Term Three last year. Poor little guy.” I felt an awful sobriety wrap around me. “Hard to get them in foster care round here, too,” Bro went on. “Specially with a damaged kid like him. He’s been in three different homes that I know of.” A sense of misery began fermenting in my guts.
The boy who ate the squashed biscuit on my first day was Ed, one of my Year Six boys. He had the brightest smile of any kid I’d ever taught. He was curious and attentive, ready to learn about the world, about books, about music, about art. He loved to draw and his artwork was detailed and intricate. I had started giving him old art supplies from the storeroom to save him the indignity of looting from the classroom rubbish bin. I even bought him chalks and pencils, telling him I’d found them at the back of the cupboard. There was something about Ed I hadn’t seen in other kids, a gritty determination and indomitable spirit. It was like he understood that school could offer him something that he wouldn’t get anywhere else. And he was going to take everything on offer.
When we were trawling through the long grass on Clean Up Australia Day, the kids started talking about their fathers and the things they did for work. Ed and Jerry were straggling behind. “What does your dad do?” I heard Ed ask Jerry. “Don’t have one,” Jerry said. “What about yours?” I watched Ed move closer. “He sells drugs,” he said quietly.
That afternoon, I asked Bro about Ed’s father. “Yep,” he confirmed. “He works on the boats too, but he’s also a dealer.” He shrugged. “I’m amazed at what a great kid Ed is, considering his dad. He’s a real rough fella, you know? Scary. Beats up his missus.” Bro shook his head. “She tries to leave and takes the kids and they spend a fair bit of time in the women’s refuge.”
“We should be able to do something,” I said.
“You know what, Gabsie? Best thing we can do for that kid is to keep him safe here at school.”
“Howdy, Gab. Thought you might like to see mylatest designs.” It’s an email from Ed — we’ve kept in touch. He’s a graphic designer now and has a business in London. I click open the link and catch my breath. It’s a drawing — inks, perhaps — of the ocean roiling beneath a tall ship. The picture appears technically perfect, but there’s character in the image too, in the way the shapes are made to taper, how the waves appear like mountains. I study it with awe, privileged to know this artist.
I type my reply. “Amazing, Ed! You are so talented and I am so proud of you.”
He replies with an email longer than anything we’ve ever exchanged before: “Hey Gab, I just wanted to say I’m so glad I was taught by you. My little sister is battling through her last year of high school. She needs a teacher like you right now. You were a guide, a teacher and a friend. I remember all the things you did for me (thanks for covering my books, by the way). My childhood was such a tumultuous time. But school was my great escape and it felt more like home than anywhere else. So, thank you. Cheers, Ed.”
I reply a few days later; his message stirred feelings I am reluctant to dwell on. I have worried about Ed over the years, berated myself for not doing more when I taught him. I send an email of thanks and promise him that I will always hold memories of him like treasure. I close by asking if he knows the whereabouts now of Ryan. He’s another one I have worried about over the years. I often wonder what became of him.
The next day, Ed replies: “I’m not sure about Ryan. Last I heard he was in jail.”
I close my laptop, shut down the thoughts before feelings can come, and remind myself: you cannot save them all.
Edited extract from Teacher, by Gabbie Stroud (Allen & Unwin, $29.99) out June 27. Names have been changed.