Australia’s Best Teachers: Ashfield Boys High School’s Alex Whitting turns students’ lives around

Alex Whitting is a teacher at an ordinary school achieving extraordinary results. And her students have revealed why.

The first thing you need to know about Alex Whitting is that she doesn’t think you should know anything about her.

For weeks her principal and even the Education Department had to literally beg her to let us showcase what she did over the course of just one day.

She’d been identified as a perfect candidate — an ordinary teacher at an ordinary school achieving extraordinary results.

Her principal gushed: “Her bottom result in HSC Advanced English last year was Band 5 (the second highest). We are not a selective school! Alex is a force of nature and an inspiration.”

But this force of nature wanted no part of it. She didn’t want the publicity or recognition — she just wanted to teach.

And she didn’t want anyone to think she was special or to detract from her colleagues.

And she is also incredibly self-effacing and shy — except in the classroom, where she shines.

All of this was true. The problem for Ms Whitting was that it only made her even more perfect.

When we meet one Friday morning at Ashfield Boys High School she has already been working for hours and the school day has barely begun.

English school teacher Alex Whitting at Ashfield Boys High School. Alex photographed with journalist Joe Hildebrand. Picture: Julian Andrews

Principal Dwayne Hopwood is supposed to be on medical leave but has come in especially to support her — and to lovingly frogmarch her to her fate. Then the crying starts.

Ms Whitting worked as a writer before coming to teaching 14 years ago. She has taught English at Ashfield for about a decade.

I ask her why she became a teacher and she is immediately choking back tears.

“I think of my little Year 7s,” she says.

“They’ve got lots of little learning challenges and you just think people might give up on them.”

Not her. Not here.

“Everyone needs that opportunity,” she says.

“Everyone needs to have high expectations for them and champions for them. And our school really calls us to do that.”

Alex Whitting at Ashfield Boys High School during her Year 11 English Extension Class. Picture: Julian Andrews

They are literally Great Expectations. As we find in her first class these Year 7s are studying Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer and Shelley.

“She just explains stuff really nice,” says 12-year-old Ali Ozel.

“She understands where you’re at — and she knows how to write!”

After lunch and another round of class prep we head to Year 11 English. It’s here I find out the crying is contagious.

I ask one student what makes a good teacher.

“What makes a good teacher is really Ms Whitting,” says Mahmoud Zraika, a 16-year-old from Silverwater.

Mahmoud has had her since Year 7. He is immediately emotional.

“When I first came to the school I could barely put two words together,” he says.

“I’m being very serious. I hated English. I hated reading. But there was something about Ms Whitting. She made me want to push myself.

“If I didn’t have Ms Whitting things could have turned out differently. You get that from every kid.”

If that’s an ordinary teacher there must be a lot of extraordinary ones out there.

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Originally published as Australia’s Best Teachers: Ashfield Boys High School’s Alex Whitting turns students’ lives around