Saving Grace: why students get left behind
Grace was in my Year 8 English class and could barely write a word. Wherever she is now, I apologise.
In my Year 8 class was by far the weakest student I had ever taught. Grace was quiet, kind, not the renegade personality often associated with low levels of literacy. This, coupled with some untimely absences (and the fact that she had been at a different school in Year 7), had allowed her to escape my notice in the early weeks of Term One. Now, though, it was abundantly clear.
I wrote some instructions on the board then stood back, watching. Where the rest of the class scratched away in their notebooks, Grace formed the letters with the slow deliberation of a calligraphist. Those letters, though, were no calligraphy. They were large, overlapping, awkward. In the time it took the others to take down four sentences, Grace had finished just one word. Hers was the writing of a five-year-old.
When the rest of the class was getting on with the lesson, I pulled up a chair opposite. “How are you today, Grace?”
“Good thank you.” Her words were like heavy things dragged through water.
“Any ideas on what you might write your poem about?” Already I knew that even a simple poem would be challenging.
“No.”
“Well, what are some of your favourite things?”
She was smiling, thinking, trying. Thirty seconds passed, a minute.
“What’s your favourite place to go? How about the beach?” She flashed a nervous laugh. “I’m not very good at swimming,” she said. I looked at her page. It was blank but for that single word copied erroneously from the board. “How about I give you five minutes to think of your favourite place? Don’t worry about copying down everything else on the board. Just think of that.”
I checked on the other students. When I returned to Grace she had made no progress. What she needed, I knew, was an integration aide, somebody to work one-to-one with her regularly, and not just in English. It is perhaps telling that we refer to such students as “funded” – assuming they are, of course. One-to-one support means money. I wrote a note to myself: Check if Grace is funded.
I soon arranged a meeting with Helen, a tall, grandmotherly woman who worked with our integration department three days a week. I liked her; she cared deeply about the students. Nonetheless, our conversation soon descended into Kafkaesque absurdity.
“Grace in 8G needs an integration aide,” I told her. “And pretty urgently.”
Helen smiled. “Yes,” she said. “But she doesn’t qualify. There aren’t aides for everyone. There are certain thresholds... benchmarks... and she doesn’t qualify.” She spread Grace’s documentation across the table like an arcade fortune-teller. “See? It’s her testing scores. She just misses out.”
“But she can’t read,” I said. “She can barely write. I’ve never met a student as low as her.”
“And you probably won’t again. But look.” She tapped one finger on a bureaucratic tarot card. “This is it. Her visual processing is too high.”
“What sort of tests determine visual processing scores?” I asked.
“Rearranging shapes. That type of thing.”
“But when is she rearranging shapes in English? Or any other subject, for that matter?”
Helen was as aware of the absurdity as I was. “Oh, never, I imagine. Maybe sometimes in Maths. But she’ll need to read the instructions and express her ideas in writing, which she won’t be able to do. Somebody will need to help her.”
“Like an integration aide.”
“Exactly. But she doesn’t qualify.”
I leaned against the boxes, fearing that perhaps I hadn’t outlined the situation clearly enough. “I’ve sat with her and asked her to read to me, Helen. She cannot do it. She might know one in every 10 words, and that’s from the simplest primary texts we have. And her writing is restricted to the narrowest, narrowest vocab. It takes 15 minutes for a ten-word sentence, and even then…”
“I know, darling,” Helen replied. “I’ve been doing this since before you were born and Grace is one of the weakest I’ve seen who isn’t funded.” She allowed a moment for that to sink in. “Probably the weakest.”
“She’ll be spending her days not learning anything,” I said. “She can’t read the textbooks. She can’t read the board. She can’t read the worksheets. The teacher can’t sit one-to-one with her every session. It’s bloody ridiculous.”
“It is. She needs an integration aide. But she doesn’t qualify. It’s a money thing. And a lot of the work our aides do, they never get paid for.” I felt a twinge of guilt. I knew the aides were paid about half of what I was, despite spending their days working one-to-one with the most challenging students. One of our aides had even learnt Braille in her spare time to support a student.
“So what do we do?”
“I’ll have some university students doing their placement with me this year. We can get them working with Grace as much as possible.” A giggle. “Free labour.”
I discovered gradually that though she could not write, Grace could draw like no person her age I had ever seen. Perhaps it was because she had redirected the energies she might otherwise have spent writing; perhaps it does not need to be analysed. Her favourite subject, I saw, was the griffin. Their great eagle heads peered over the sterile margins of her exercise books, their wings so meticulously detailed with individual feathers that the curling pages were perfumed with biro ink. She still had no aide, though, and it was clear she wouldn’t get one. Helen’s suggestion was that, next year, she could be put in the same class as a funded student. That way, at least, the aide could be shared.
My anger at this situation had been exacerbated by something I found when I read Grace’s mid-year report. The first thing I noticed was that she was recognised as exceptional – gifted, perhaps – in visual arts. Second was that her abilities were in the junior primary range in all other subjects but one; in that subject, the teacher had put her at the level expected of a child of her age.
Given her literacy challenges, it was immediately clear to me that Grace’s result in that subject was wrong. So what had happened?
I will be blunt: Grace’s teacher was not doing his job. Call it laziness, call it incompetence, but this teacher did not know Grace at all, and had simply placed her “at the expected level”. In all probability, he had put the student at the top of his roll at the expected level, then simply selected the “fill down” option. Reports done literally with the click of a button. This frustrated me beyond words. Any slim chance Grace had of getting an aide in the future would be based on a range of data, including reports. One lazy teacher could cause her to miss out.
That morning, I found the teacher in the main staffroom. He was tall, grey-haired, confident in a blustery way. On more than one occasion I had heard his voice rumbling from behind the principal’s closed door, challenging him over some point or other.
I waited until he had wandered over to the water cooler to pull him aside. “It’s about Grace’s report,” I said. “I’m not sure how this didn’t get picked up in proofreading, but you’ve put her at the expected level.”
He didn’t look at me. “Sure. She doesn’t make a sound. Isn’t disruptive. Great kid.”
“Well, I’ve got her for English and she’s essentially illiterate.”
“Illiterate? Grace?”
“Yeah. I’d be keen to see what she’s been doing in your class.”
He looked at me for a moment before shaking his head. “Listen, mate, I’ll have a look back over it when I have a spare minute.”
But I knew what he was thinking. He had been teaching for years, probably since before I was born. In his eyes, I was an upstart.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Any time. But worry about your own reports first. I’ll take care of mine.”
Like bad police, plumbers, doctors and dentists, there are bad teachers. They’re a fractional minority, but they exist in all schools, public and private, primary and secondary. It would be all too easy (and self-indulgent) for me to write of teachers as unassailable martyrs. It isn’t the reality, and nor am I perfect myself.
Some teachers are bored, some teachers are angry, some teachers are lazy. Some are simply unwell. A few use the classroom as a stage upon which to parade their egos; some dislike children, or only warm to certain types of children. And for those of us who are teachers, we must be honest and admit that we all fall into these traps occasionally, in one way or another. Usually it doesn’t last long. Any teacher who claims to be perfect all of the time is lying to themselves, and unlikely to grow.
Still, every one of us has a story of a truly bad teacher, encountered perhaps as students, perhaps as parents. I will speak plainly: it is extremely difficult to get such teachers out of schools.
Administrators work hard to help underperforming teachers develop and improve. This is exactly how it should be. Support must precede harsher measures, provided the teacher’s shortcomings are just that – shortcomings. Many a struggling educator has grown into an asset to the profession through mentoring and guidance.
But what about when that fails? There is a lengthy process that administrators must follow. It takes months, sometimes years. Some school leaders choose not to follow this path due to the emotional toll it takes on all involved.
I should stress that I am not talking about teachers guilty of egregious failings, who principals always act swiftly to remove. What I am talking about is the ordinary, run-of-the-mill Bad Teacher, the type trudging wearily (and often bitterly) through year after year of tedious mediocrity. In some cases, I think the thing stopping administrators from acting is pity. But what do we value more, the feelings of such teachers, or the learning, curiosity and passion of their students?
Grace’s teacher has been out of the profession for some time now. He never did make the slightest adjustment to her report.
The school did the best it could with Grace in the following years: we put her in classes with funded students so the aides could be shared; we gave her all the class time we could spare; we gifted resources to her family; and, of course, we retreated to the time-worn teacher strategy of working for free, tutoring Grace during lunchtimes and recesses and for long hours after school. Our work gave her a protective standard of literacy but it was not the standard she deserved or what her parents’ tax dollars should have provided. Wherever she is now, I can only apologise on behalf of a system that let her down.
Edited extract from The School: The Ups and Downs of One Year in the Classroom, by Brendan James Murray (Picador Australia, $34.99) out now.