Australians at work: Meg Jacobs, teacher
Whip smart Meg Jacobs could have been anything. She chose to teach 800 kids from Brisbane’s toughest battler suburbs. Why?
Three small zip-lock bags for confiscated nose rings. School enrolment forms. School re-entry forms. A humming office computer. A framed photograph of her 10-year-old son, Oliver, climbing over her back. Lines across her forehead. Meg Jacobs can point at any given frown line on her face and identify the student who put it there: “Matty, Year 8 maths, 2014; Sophie, Year 10 science, 2012.” A sign on a filing cabinet: A day without laughter is a day wasted. Always something to chuckle over in education. The Vietnamese boy who gave Meg an absentee note in perfect English. “But I know your parents don’t speak a word of English,” she said. The girls who surprised Meg with a guitar-strummed Happy Birthday in the office last Tuesday. Three pinned thank-you cards from the school principal. Thank you for going the extra mile, Meg. Thank you for organising breakfast for those students whose parents are in prison, in overseas refugee camps, in the ground. Thanks for not responding to parental abuse with more abuse. Thanks for bottling your frustrations and maybe even your regrets in service of something bigger. Thanks for keeping them off the couch.
Work long enough in Australian high school education and you soon recognise the true enemy. Two-seat sofas. Five-seat corner lounges. Leather recliners. In the blue corner, a red-haired, quick-witted 31-year-old single-mum maths and science teacher, who was recently promoted to the role of Glenala State High’s Director of Student Achievement. In the red corner, 809 soft-cushioned couches waiting, hoping, aching to rob the futures of 809 promising, nothing-is-out-of-reach students from the battler-class west Brisbane suburbs of Inala, Durack, Darra, Richlands and Wacol. Dreams can’t be reached from couches, but computer game controllers can, and ciggies and plonk bottles and juice bottle bongs and burnt spoons.
Pinned above Meg’s office desk are three sheets of paper entitled: “Glenala State High School Photo Class List”. A collection of head shots of all the students from the graduating class of 2018. One hundred per cent of last year’s Year 12 cohort received a Queensland Certificate of Education; 98 per cent of tertiary-bound students received a Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre (QTAC) offer. Meg calls them the “Year 13s”. Year 13 is a school year that does not exist yet might be the most important in a student’s life. Three weeks into the 2019 year, she’s still closely tracking the progress of last year’s graduates. She phones them and asks how they’re coping with adult life. Then she puts the phone down, takes a blue pen and scribbles words beside the smiling faces of former students on that school photo class list. She writes dreams come true beside the faces of graduates.
“University mathematics,” she writes beside a student named Phuong.
“Diploma of fine arts,” she writes beside James.
“Bricklaying,” she writes beside Jastas.
“Business accounting,” she writes beside Sang.
“Optometry, Queensland University of Technology,” she writes beside Tina.
Meg began teaching full-time at Glenala straight out of university in 2012. She remembers the grillings most of all; a relentless series of deeply personal questions from relentlessly bold students desperately trying to uncover the inevitable weakness in the school’s freshest meat. Something about life — the area, maybe; its disappointments, its social challenges — equips every Glenala student with a finely tuned ability to smell a fake. If they know you care, if they know you came for the right reasons, they will give you their minds and then they will give you their hearts. If they know you’re faking it, they will maul you; they will chew on the flesh of your misguided ambitions and spit you back to the inner-city where you belong.
“Are you married, Miss?”
“Why aren’t you married?”
“Are you divorced?”
“Are you gay?”
“Are you gonna stick around, Miss?”
“Why did you wanna come here?”
“Why did you wanna teach?”
“Why would anyone wanna teach?”
She could have told every one of those students the simple truth: that one day she hoped to scribble their dreams in a few words beside their smiling faces on a school photo class list. But that answer would not have been enough for them. Teaching is never that plain. Teaching is never that simple.
Her mother, Juanita Jacobs, is a science teacher.She’s a 30-year legend of teaching at Villanova College in Brisbane’s south-east. When teachers are in a masochistic mood — maybe after that second glass of red wine on an evening during parent-teacher week — they type their name into RateMyTeachers.com, a public forum where anonymous students and parents rate teachers as everything from “the creep who crushed my dreams” to “I will owe my Nobel prize to her”. “Best teacher at the school,” reads one of the many five-star reviews of Juanita Jacobs. “Inspirational.” “She’s a legend.”
Meg remembers growing up in middle-class Tarragindi, in Brisbane’s south. Her dad, Peter, is a mechanical and space engineer who would often travel overseas to work on projects with NASA and the German Aerospace Centre. She and her older sister, Carolyn — who followed her father into the same career — would walk into rooms where their mother was passionately talking on the phone to parents or colleagues about the welfare of students. Juanita would wave them out of the room some days and Meg would let herself wonder, briefly, if her mum put more energy into shaping the lives of her students than she did her own daughters. Her father was extremely bright but he was too bright to properly explain simple primary and high school maths homework to Meg. He knew the art of mathematics. He wasn’t so clear on the art of teaching.
“The art of it!” says Glenala’s principal, Anne Lawson. “Some teachers just don’t have it. Some don’t ever get it. Meg is a highly intelligent person. She got an OP2 [Overall Position 2, the second highest ranking for a Queensland high school graduate]. She could have done whatever she wanted but she had the little spark you need for teaching. When she teaches maths to students, she glows.”
At her office computer, Meg brings up pages of data that tracks the academic history of this year’s senior students at Glenala. As Director of Student Achievement she uses this data to give students a realistic, achievable goal for their individual Year 13. It’s personal work. She must work these goals into a student’s living situation, which for some might be returning home to violence and alcoholism, or to the younger siblings they are all but raising themselves. It’s Meg’s job, some days, to wade through isolation and fear and depression and find, in all that static, a student’s dream.
“Often they’ve been kicked out of home, or they’re living independently and they’re surviving on their own government payments, or they don’t have parents and they can’t afford school books and they’re only 16 or 17 years old,” Meg says.
She walks into the office of her colleague, Julie Vukovic, the school’s business manager. There’s a towering pyramid of Lowes polished black shoes threatening to collapse over Julie’s desk. Some Glenala students can’t afford decent school shoes so when local stores have shoe sales, the teachers stock up. When the local Lowes store was closing down recently Julie rushed there and filled a trolley with 67 pairs of black school shoes marked down to $13. Walking triumphantly out of the store, she passed a security guard who looked into the trolley, scratching his head. “I have a lot of children,” Julie said, enigmatically.
That’s the stuff you don’t read so much on RateMyTeachers.com. The out-of-hours tutoring. The organised breakfasts. The lunches made for students so hungry they can’t focus on spelling.
“Sometimes when we get to the end of Year 12 and the students know we’ve been the one stable thing in their lives and it’s coming to an end, they start to lose their marbles a little bit,” Meg says. “They start asking, ‘What am I going to do when I don’t have school to come to every day?’”
The school is located on a rise along Glenala Road, not far from the bustling Inala Plaza Shopping Centre in the heart of a disadvantaged community that’s also one of Brisbane’s most colourful and diverse multicultural hubs, with residents from almost 80 different cultures. Teachers often urge Glenala students to consider the school a kind of “lighthouse on the hill”; a true north point for the lost; a place where, for six hours a day, they can abandon the hardships of home and walk the upward slope to a Year 13 off the couch.
Where other schools invested in high-tech buildings, Glenala invested in high-passion people. There’s a whole block — J Block — dedicated to cross-cultural student welfare, peopled with Pacific Islander liaison officers, Aboriginal, Vietnamese, African liaison officers. On the really tough days — community deaths, teen suicide, the time three students were lost in one of the state’s worst house fires — teachers like Meg work with school-based chaplains, police officers and counsellors in what she calls an “emotional triage” for at-risk students.
Sometimes it’s the teachers who need the emotional triage. Meg remembers calling one mum to advise her she’d placed her son on detention for truancy. “You’re an awful person,” the mother spat down the phone. “You’re an awwwwful person!”
“I burst into tears,” Meg admits. “I was like, ‘But, I thought I was doing the right thing’.”
She read an article recently about why school teachers are always so tired. “The article was all about ‘decision fatigue’,” she says. “It’s all the micro decisions you make throughout the day. ‘How do I respond to this question; what do I say about that behaviour?’ You’re making all these decisions so quickly, without being able to think them through, and you’re doing that with so many kids, and every one of those decisions impacts my students.”
Which is why every one of those decisions comes back to her on the drive home to her son, Oliver, and why her mind is so cluttered come dinner time. “I go home to Oliver and I’m like, ‘What do you want for dinner, sausage on bread?’” she says. “I worry these kids get the best of me.” She’s familiar with this phenomenon. She shakes her head, laughs. A day without laughter is a day wasted.
She has only lost it once in eight years of teaching. It was a bully who tipped her over. “Why don’t you just kill yourself?” the boy had barked at a female student. Welcome to high school in 2019, where the spectre of teen suicide is so ever-present it’s used as a classroom dig. “That gets to me,” Meg says. “You don’t say that to another human. So I just lost it. I yelled. I really yelled and, you know, I think I would still lose it at him, or anyone, who said that.”
She shakes her head, in confusion more than anything else. “They can be so likeable,” she says. “They can be annoying. And they can be nasty.” Some students can be so truly brilliant at pushing her buttons that she wonders how it’s possible that a kid with a mind so deft and manipulative struggles with elementary algebra. Some students can be so truly resilient she’s embarrassed by complaints she made about her lot in life when she was growing up. Her parents would make her lunch and drop her at school so often that she begged them to let her catch the bus home like the cool kids.
Meg drops in on a Year 9 mathematics class. One boy has his hat on in class and is painting his left inside forearm with a glue stick. “Heath?” Meg says, in a sharp whisper that somehow conveys surprise, disappointment, compassion and respect all in one syllable. Heath whips his hat off and sits upright in his seat, rubbing the glue from his skin.
In a science class nearby, students shoot their hands up to answer questions about a food chain wheel their teacher is showing on the whiteboard. Not a single kid looking out the window. Full engagement at the 50-minute mark of a 70-minute hot summer afternoon lesson. A minor miracle.
“Prep is everything,” Meg says. “Humour helps. Picking your battles. Never attack them without understanding them. If you’re fair and consistent they’ll respond. You set your expectations and you tell them, ‘My class, my rules’. They will rise to your expectations. Set them low they’ll stay there, too.” She laughs. “Teenage boys!” she says, shaking her head. “They will do the bare minimum if they can.”
Four lessons a day; 70 minute lessons. “And you are on,” says Anne Lawson. “It’s a performance and you have 25 kids with vastly different abilities and personalities in the audience. Some are happy and some are in a foul mood and you must perform for them for 70 minutes straight.”
Engage. Break a lesson up into 15-minute blocks. Give them brain breaks. Encourage investigative learning; let them discover the thing you’re trying to teach. Seventy minutes of “chalk and talk” at 2pm in high summer is a recipe for sleep, or a riot.
Be patient. Be kind. Remember the words, “Let’s wait three weeks then make a decision”.
“I want to change classes, Miss, this isn’t for me.”
“Let’s wait three weeks then make a decision.”
“I want to leave school, Miss, this isn’t for me.”
“Let’s wait three weeks then make a decision.”
After three weeks it’s always: “I’m fine now Miss.”
Be strong. Be resilient. Watch for that perfect moment when the light switches on inside and they see the formula, the equation, the future.
Kyle Ryan. Local Aboriginal boy. The greatest switched light she ever did see. “He was pretty awful in Year 8,” she says. “So very bright, naturally gifted, but he could just pick teachers and press their buttons. He’d tell you that he chose to be naughty. Then, one day, the switch flicked in his mind and he just said, ‘I’m gonna get an OP1’. He was determined.” Kyle got an OP1 and was Dux in 2016. He’s been accepted into the University of Queensland’s Doctor of Medicine program. His life plan is to return to Inala as a GP, show a thousand kids just like him how to switch their own lights on.
The 3pm bell sounds and 809 students pour outof the Glenala classrooms. Meg stands in the centre of the school grounds, all this hope and promise passing around her. “Hi, Miss Jacobs,” one girl says. “Bye, Miss Jacobs,” says another.
School captain Lite Togia shuffles up to Meg: “Hey, Miss Jacobs.” Lite has the kind of smile every teacher would hope to close their day on. She’s from a hard-working Samoan household of seven siblings. “I don’t know what Glenala would be without Miss Jacobs,” she says. “Honestly, she pushed me to find the goals I have today. I’ve been building myself as a person. I’m a gladiator now. I feel like that.”
Lite looks around her. “You find family at a school like this,” she says. “I’m not gonna lie to you. There’s students here who feel shamed by what’s happening at home. There’s financial situations, there’s domestic violence in their homes. It’s good to have a second family because sometimes students find their own family isn’t supportive.”
Lite wants to be a lawyer. “The first Samoan lawyer in my whole family,” she says. “I feel like I can achieve this. Miss Jacobs believes it, so I believe it.”
Meg walks to the school library. Inside, some 40 students are attending the after-school homework club. It’s run by Glenala teachers, working rotationally well outside their paid school hours.
At a bay of computers sit three students from west Africa learning about Viking mythology. Amie is 13 years old. She was born in Liberia, came to Australia aged 10, and now lives with her two older brothers; the rest of the family is back in Africa. She comes to homework club because her brothers can’t afford to buy her all the resources she needs to complete her assignments. Amie juggles her schoolwork with cleaning and cooking at home. “Everything is good,” she smiles.
Meg remembers her path to teaching. “I always told myself, ‘I’m not going to be a teacher like Mum’,” she says. “My sister was already an engineer like my dad and I went and did a science degree and I hated it. I didn’t know what to do. Then I went and did business and that was worse. And then I got pregnant and I was like, ‘Uh oh!’”
She knew early on she would be raising Oliver on her own. “I enrolled in teaching and I was 36 weeks pregnant in the first week of my teaching degree. I had my son in the second week. And I still remember someone at the uni saying to me, ‘Is there any point in you even being here?’, and I was, like, ‘Well, I’m gonna prove you wrong’. But I had family. Really good family. And that’s the big difference between me and some of the kids I see here. I couldn’t have done it without them.”
At uni she was tapped on the shoulder to be part of a new program called Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools. That title makes her cringe today. It’s laughable. To think a school filled with students such as Amie could be disadvantaged.
Across from Amie sits her 13-year-old cousin, James, also from Liberia. He’s writing eight paragraphs on the daily life of a Viking king he’s made up and named after himself. He reads his title and introductory sentence aloud to Amie, testing how it sounds, but he talks so enthusiastically that other students in the library hear him loud and clear. “Life of a Viking Named King James the Great,” he announces. “My name is King James the Great. I am the top of the Viking hierarchy triangle. I am before the Thralls, the Karls and even the Jarls!”
Few students at the computer bay seem to know what James is talking about but all mouths beam wide because King James the Great sounds the business. Amie nods her head approvingly and something switches on inside James that flashes through his eyes like a lighthouse.
Read the full Australians at Work series