Life on the front line of teaching

ABUSED in the classroom, defamed online, bullied by parents… Who’d be a teacher?

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SHE can’t say her name because she’s a working school teacher spilling the beans on nervous breakdowns, helicopter mums, death threats, bad dads, schoolyard stabbings, sexual assaults and how it feels to be called “whore” and “c…face” and “pedo” in the workplace.

I suggest she use a pseudonym that combines her regular title “Mrs” with an adjective that describes her mood after four years in Australian education. “Call me ‘Mrs I’m-Not-Gonna-Take-It-Anymore’,” she says with a thick Irish accent. Let’s call her Mary.

On her second day at the regional Queensland Prep to Year 12 school she taught at last year, a boy in her Year 9 class turned to his friend and said, “Hey Dean, if there was her and another teacher and you only had one bullet, who would you put it through?” Dean was undecided. But the boy looked straight at Mary. “I’d put it through her.” He’d known Mary for about 20 minutes and hated her with a passion that would not bend. “You’ll be gone in a week, pedo,” the boy said. “Excuse me?” she said.

Mary transferred to the school because she relished a challenge. She’s 40 years old and came into teaching as a mature-age graduate. She’d taught with some success in difficult schools on the Gold Coast and socially disadvantaged areas like Inala, in Brisbane’s outer western suburbs. She’d researched this new school on the internet, called up a newspaper article reporting a stabbing incident involving two teenage girls. “I thought, ‘I’ve seen some things, I’ve been in rough schools, I’ve been called “slut”, I’ve been spat at, I can handle this’,” Mary says. “That’s why they employed me.” She shifted her husband and their two ­primary school-aged children to the township. But after two days in her new job, she hung her head in dread: Oh my God, what have I done?

The Year 9 boy repeated himself. “You’ll be gone in a week, ya f..kin’ pedo.” And Mary knew that the boy knew the system, a volatile education system where mud sticks and stains run, where the role of the teacher has never been more complex and more scrutinised, where school teachers in her state over the previous five years were paid more than $10 million in WorkCover claims for psychological damage in the classroom and schoolyard; where state school teachers in South Australia were experiencing an average of five assaults every school day; where 506 assaults and 439 sexual assaults were reported in Victorian schools between 2011 and 2013; where a 2013 Safe Work ­Australia report listed school teachers along with police and prison officers as the nation’s most frequent mental stress claimants. Reading, writing and arithmetic and panic attacks and smear campaigns and online trolling and knife threats and teachers locked in storerooms and false accusations and depression and suicidal tendencies…

For a year, Mary endured. Boys exposing themselves, kids jumping out of windows, ­students destroying bundles of completed assignments, kids eating and swallowing A4 handouts, a boy’s face smashed into a wall in a classroom brawl, Year 9s breaking into the classroom at night to have sex on school desks, kids urinating over verandas. “This was my place of work. I had this naïve idea that they were going to do what I asked them. But it was chaos the whole time. Everything was broken. Broken windows. Broken doors. Broken handles. I resorted to putting my desk at the door to block them from getting out. I wasn’t the only one doing it. They tried to climb out the top windows of the classroom. I thought they were going to kill themselves. At the end of the first week the other teachers said, ‘Oh, you’ve done really well. You’ve done great’. I realised only the stupid people stayed. The brave actually walked.”

She did try to do something about it, to make a difference. “I phoned one Year 8’s mum, I said, ‘Your son is way out of control’, and she said, ‘It’s your job, what are you going to do about it?’ I said, ‘Just letting you know, bye’.

“I thought a Year 11 boy was going to hit me one day and this colleague pulled me aside and said, ‘You have got to not get involved with these kids’. He said, ‘You just can’t think of them as humans’. He actually said that. It was like something out of Mad Max. It was insane.”

Mary left the school for good last year. She now works in a secondary school in South-east Queensland and is grateful for the job. “No one wants to walk out on a job. It doesn’t look good for your teaching career, either. But you hear enough crap and enough abuse, there’s a little voice inside your head that eventually goes, ‘Why?’ and you think about the little bubbles of blood going to your head and you’re sure you’re going to die of an aneurism and you go, ‘It’s time for me to move on’.”

But it wasn’t the students who made her go in the end. It wasn’t the violence and the verbal abuse and the sludge of nihilism she swore had spread through the entire town. It was a lack of support from her principal and deputy principal.

“I went to the deputy principal and I said, ‘Could you please get this boy out of my class?’ I thought, ‘If this boy goes I might have a chance’ because he was toxic. I said to the deputy, ‘He’s being rude and disgusting’, and the deputy put his hand up to my face and he said, ‘I’ll stop you there, the kids are not rude and disgusting’. I said, ‘They are rude and they are disgusting’. And he said, ‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t be a teacher’.”

Different postcodes, different pressures. Mrs Gun Shy is a supply teacher who works, she says, in the kinds of middle-class schools she’d ­happily send her own kids to, schools where students dance out of their ­classroom at 3pm not to the sound of an ear-splitting bell but to the hip-swivelling grooves of Pharrell Williams’ Happy. In 40 years of teaching, Mrs Gun Shy has watched Aust­ralian schools shift from austere places of ­learning to something she likens more to a six-hour mathematics and literacy-themed birthday party into which parents have unprecedented input and where it’s perfectly reasonable for a mum to ask her son’s Year 3 teacher to soften the volume of her voice because her son is finding her current pitch levels aggressive.

“I have a firm voice,” Mrs Gun Shy howls, frustrated. “I have a teacher’s voice.” She laughs, presumably to keep from crying. “You might as well dissolve all the schools and just hold birthday parties every month for the kids,” she says. “Just party every day of your life, parties for everything. Dress up days, mad hair days, pyjama days. The word ‘naughty’ isn’t even in the teacher’s dictionary anymore. It’s never used. You cannot say, ‘You’re a naughty boy’. You get to the classroom and the bell has rung and the parents are loitering because they want to hold little Johnny’s hand and put their schoolbag in and put their lunchbox in the fridge…

“Then when you hurry a kid along to eat his lunch you get a complaint that you aren’t giving them enough time to eat their lunch. But the child is being naughty and they’re playing games with me and the parents. You know how kids play mum against dad when they want something? But if mum and dad are a good team they stick together and the kid doesn’t get away with it. Kids are smart and they now play the parent off against the teacher. If they’ve got mum upset about the teacher, they’re laughing.

“Then you shift a child in a classroom and mum comes in and says, ‘Why did you shift them from sitting near their friend?’ ‘Well, I shifted them because they’re naughty’. You do that, you’re mud.”

That night the teacher pours herself a glass of wine at home after another evening of unpaid overtime spent marking and wrangling dated school equipment and readjusting her teaching methods to accommodate the latest government curriculum reform. She finds herself surfing the internet and sees her name on a vicious parent Facebook thread or a public teacher review site like RateMyTeachers.com, where hundreds of Australian teachers are praised or defamed daily:

“Absolutely nasty piece of work at times.” “Some would say she needs gym work.” “Slu_ (fill in the missing letter).” “Useless, useless, useless, useless, ­useless, useless.” “The very moment you enter one of his classes will become a moment of pessimism.”

“It is a war zone and we’re frontline in the trenches and our nerves are shot,” says Mrs Gun Shy. “We’re all just trying to survive because it is rapid fire in that classroom. We only have five hours to teach them something but we have to also teach them their whole living strategies in that five hours, with constant interruptions. A parent came up to me once and said, ‘For the benefit of yourself and your class, if my husband comes up here with a gun, then you’re to let the child go with the father’.” The father never came with his gun. “I drive towards a school now saying: ‘I’m an idiot, what am I going to do this day?’ You keep telling yourself, ‘Something is going to happen and I’m going to end up in court for the next five years’. I’ve had so many last days.”

“Call me Mr Entropy,” says the 61-year-old high school teacher from Central Queensland on leave on WorkCover compensation after ­suffering a back injury while subduing a 14-year-old boy in class. The specialised PART (Professional Assault Response Training) course he completed was not enough to quieten the boy that day. “A lot of executives and principals go through that training,” he says. “It shows you how to physically deal with children without necessarily harming them. But this young bloke was losing it and some of these 14, 15-year-olds are as big as me. It was like sub­duing a gorilla that’s losing its mind.

“I’m 61. Why haven’t I retired? Because I’ve got a big fat mortgage. Otherwise, I’d be gone. The shit I’ve seen.”

“Just go with ‘Ms Heart Palpitation’,” says the junior history and geography state high school teacher based in a working-class suburb south of Brisbane.

“A particular student with learning difficulties tried to stick a broomstick handle up my ­rectum,” she says. “I don’t know how many other workers in Australia expect assaults when they go into the workplace. I went on stress leave in 2011 after an assault in a classroom. I was ­trying to get the students under control and I kept them in past the bell for 60 seconds as a consequence of their behaviour and they didn’t follow my directions and about 10 of them just rammed me. The whole class just walked out and 10 of them just rammed me as they walked out, pushed me up against a wall. I’m five foot seven. En masse they just rammed me.

“You don’t feel safe. It’s like a prison mentality. The school starts to feel like a juvenile detention centre. I’ve started having panic attacks. Heart palpitations.”

She’s getting out. She’s studying a law degree by night. She has coped with fear for 13 years in education but what she can’t stomach anymore is what she calls “the pretence of mild concern” from deputy principals and principals. “In most instances they’ll put it back on you,” she says. “They will imply that somehow the teacher’s classroom management skills weren’t up to scratch.”

Robina Cosser is a former Queensland and NSW school teacher and current vice-president of Whistleblowers Australia. She’s a tireless blog-writing, email-sending, letter-penning advocate for teachers who, she says, have become “the whipping boys in our schools” slowly ­making their way to “ill-health retirement”.

“Children can complain, parents can complain, but teachers cannot complain because they are continually under threat of being in breach of the Code of Conduct,” Cosser says. “We become the garbage dumps of society,” says Mrs Gun Shy. Adds Ms Heart Palpitation: “You start to feel worthless. Really crushed. And you want to tell them to stick it but you don’t because you’re scared of not having a job. I’m fearful all the time. I feel sick in my stomach. I’m not a ­suicidal person but I could see how someone could be driven to that.”

In his Brisbane city office, Michael Fay stands clenching his fists in a boxer’s stance as he re-enacts one of many traumatic encounters he had with school parents through 30 years as a school principal. “A fellow grabbed me by the tie and tried to choke me in my office,” he says. He bounces briefly, fists raised. “And I did the dance around the office while he’s holding on to my tie.”

He sits down and shakes his head at an inbox filled with requests and queries pertaining to his role as president of the Queensland Association of State School Principals. There are always two sides to a story, says Fay. The greatest challenge for a principal is getting teachers as well as ­parents to see that. “Relationships, relationships, relationships,” says the man sitting opposite.

Earle Taylor is a former principal who now supports and coaches overstressed principals through the minefield of an average school day. “About 15 years ago I woke up to the notion that the job’s a stressful job,” he says. There are roughly 10,000 school principals in Australia. Between 2011 and 2013 some 2005 principals responded to Monash University’s extensive Australian Principal Health and Wellbeing ­Survey. The survey found principals experience six times more physical violence at work than the general population. Some 82 per cent of principals said they found support in their ­partner; only 6.4 per cent said they found ­support in their “department/employer”.

The study’s author, Dr Philip Riley, says a “surveillance culture” caused by Naplan testing and a national curriculum has led to bullying of educators by parents demanding better results. “Forty years ago educators were rated the least stressed population across a number of professions,” Riley says. “Today they are the highest stressed. Principals are incredibly stressed with sheer quantities of work and a lack of time to focus on teaching and learning.

“Even if you do know what you’re doing and you know the curriculum, that doesn’t stop ­parents who are out of control and there is an emotional cost of that. The parents who indulge in offensive behaviour are on the increase and the principals have no training in dealing with that stuff because it’s not part of their training and it probably needs to be.”

Jim Cooper, 61, retired 18 months ago as a primary school principal in the Illawarra region of NSW. He was an executive member of the NSW Primary Principals Association in 2009 when the then-principal of northern Sydney’s Beecroft Public School, Jennie Ryan, successfully sued a parent, Dr Rajaratnam Premachandran, for typing a widely circulated email describing Ryan as “incompetent, dishonest and untrustworthy”. Ryan’s lawyer said the upstanding and highly educated school dad ran a “malicious” year-long campaign against the principal. Premachandran represented himself in court, saying his intention was not to harm Ryan but to “improve the school’s standards”. He said Ryan was a legitimate target of criticism because she was in a public position. He was forced to pay his children’s principal $82,543.

“The bottom line is, compared to 30 years ago, parents don’t have the same level of respect anymore for teachers,” Cooper says. “That’s the basis for a lot of this. When I went to school, if I got into strife, there’s no way I would have told my parents because if I told my parents I would have got a clip over the ear: ‘Why aren’t you doing the right thing at school?’

“Now, with the helicopter parent syndrome, the response is, ‘My child is perfect, they can do no wrong, therefore an adult has attacked my five-year-old child’. They don’t think rationally. They don’t think clearly because they’re emotionally involved in the fact their child is unhappy.

“I would have to say in a significant percentage of cases the parent will fall on the side of the child. I had a classic case where a parent came up and complained that one of my senior female executives had kicked their son in the back in the middle of an assembly. And I had to say to this parent, ‘Do you really think a senior female executive teacher is going to kick a child in the back in front of 300 kids and teachers at assembly?’ We investigated and, of course, it was a kid behind him that belted him. And eventually the five-year-old agreed with that. That’s what happens with five-year-olds. They will say anything. They will make anything up. What you have to convince the parents is, ‘Come and talk to us about it before you make any irrational decisions or comments because 90 per cent of the time they’re not going to be accurate’.

“Respect for authority is part of the reason why there’s a greater incidence of all these issues occurring. For young kids to attack a teacher would have been unheard of 30 years ago. Now you’ve got five-year-olds standing up and saying, ‘I’m going to sue you’.”

Cooper is, however, convinced there are more positives than negatives in the Australian education system. Indeed, the intensity of the national debate over primary and secondary education is sign enough of a sector hell-bent on getting things right. He hopes teachers like Mary are in the minority, “but those things you are talking [about] are realities and in some cases they are becoming worse.

“In my position with the principals association there were a number of instances where principals in schools had been verbally attacked and abused, particularly in smaller communities where they had to be moved out of those ­communities because of the abuse,” he says. “I can assure you it happens. A small community takes up against a principal because they don’t like the way they deal with things, their policies. They have driven those people out of town. In a small community you have nowhere to go.”

Before she travelled to her living hell in regional Queensland, Mary taught at Glenala State High School in Inala, in Brisbane’s west, a low socio-economic multicultural community long considered the wrong side of the tracks by those who have never crossed them. “Everyone told me not to go there,” Mary says. “Everyone was warning me about how rough Inala was. But I had the best teaching experience there because the principal kept saying, ‘We’ve got your back, we’ve got your back’. Corrine McMillan, the principal, and the deputy principals are on it. They are like what every school should be like. They have just turned that school around.”

The school made national headlines early last year when then-prime minister Julia Gillard praised all 10 of its OP-eligible 2012 graduates for gaining an OP1 to 15. (The OP, or Overall Position, is a tertiary entrance rank, on a scale of one to 25, used in Queensland for selection into universities.) State education minister John-Paul Langbroek commended Glenala as “a wonderful example of a school that takes a whole-of-community approach to learning and improving student outcomes”.

“It was so community-driven,” Mary says. “If somebody said something nasty to me in Glenala the other kids would pull them up and say, ‘That’s not on, that isn’t us’. And they’d be apologising on their behalf. Great kids. Great sense of community.”

Says Michael Fay: “It’s about enabling those who are at the coalface to do the best job they can. To do that you need all levels working together. You can’t have one part working in ­isolation to the other.”

Jim Lazzarini is 67 years old and a retired principal with some 40 years’ experience in education in South-east Queensland. At least once a month Lazzarini has a dream where he’s standing again in a primary school classroom at the beginning of his teaching career, suffocating all over again under the weight of the “academics, politicians and bureaucrats” who, for decades, he watched dump increasingly complex ideas and expectations on students, some of whom could not problem-solve a full bladder much less a mathematics equation.

“We had a child come to school and the teacher said, ‘Take off your shoes’ and the kid simply laid on his back and put his feet up in the air,” Lazzarini says. “That was referred to as ‘the dead fly impersonation’.”

For much of his career as a principal, ­Lazzarini kept a small sign he created in the drawer of his office desk. It was a reminder to himself, a tenet, inspired by the “It’s the economy, stupid” sign Bill Clinton had strung up in his presidential election campaign headquarters to keep himself on message. “My sign said, ‘It’s the classroom teacher, stupid’. It is the classroom teacher, as opposed to all the specialists and bureaucrats and peripherals, who makes the difference. It’s that magical relationship that good teachers build… That is no longer recognised and the classroom teacher is often just seen as the bumbler down the bottom of the chain.”

Federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne says his government believes there is nothing more important to a child’s education than having great teachers. “There is much riding on the work teachers do and they face an increasing pressure to deliver a quality education,” he says. It’s not just the quality and “professionalisation” of teachers that has to be lifted in Australia, says Pyne, but the “status of the teaching profession”.

“We encourage parents to take an active role in their children’s education,” says Pyne, who is working on education initiatives that “move towards greater [school] autonomy and encourage increased parent and community involvement”.

“Teachers are trying to make things work that are imposed from above,” says Lazzarini. “But if a school has a team, structures to support that teacher, they can start working on that bond with the children and if they have that bond, with a network of supports from the school and from parents, things can work in difficult situations.”

But there’s always one thing standing in the way of such harmony, says Earle Taylor. “People are people,” he says.

Norman Hart pushes his swivel chair back from his desk and reaches down into an office cupboard cluttered with education textbooks and reports. He’s searching for the secret to ­quality education across Australia. He knows it’s in there somewhere. Norm is President of the Australian Primary Principals Association. He’s been educating Australian kids since 1975 as both teacher and principal. “The stress of being confronted by extremely irate people is great,” he says. “I’ve been attacked by adults, I’ve been kicked by lots of kids. But I find it very understandable. We’re talking about their children here. Of course ­parents are emotional.”

He finds what he’s looking for. “Aaaahhh,” he says, retrieving three display folders with the same title running down their spines: “Warm and Fuzzies.” It’s a collection of handwritten notes and letters and cards from parents, teachers and students spanning his career in education. Endless thank-you notes and letters of gratitude, some so old they’re fading to yellow:

“You never knocked an idea even though most of mine were crazy.” “You always made me feel you were behind me 100 per cent.” “I always felt I could go to you if I was in trouble.”

The “Warm and Fuzzies” folders carried Hart through his career. “Respect and recognition,” he says. And he’s struck by the memory of a young boy who tapped on his leg one day in the school playground. “Mr Hart, I found this ­beautiful diamond and I want to give it to you,” the boy said, placing his diamond in his principal’s cupped hand.

Norm looked in his hand to see an ordinary piece of granite speckled with some flashes of quartz, a worthless playground rock that became one of his most treasured possessions, a reminder of the wonders that can come from seeing things through other people’s eyes.