A bit of a shoutout to all the teachers out there on the intertubes - we love youse all!
Today is World Teachers’ Day. I’m sure there are very few of us who don’t remember teachers who made significant differences in our lives. It might be a neat way to celebrate to tell some of those stories on this post - you never know, your favourite chalkies might even be reading.
That might also be a useful corrective to the constant attacks in the political realm teachers have to confront - not to mention working conditions which are far from ideal, and having all sorts of social problems heaped on them to solve when no one else will apparently take responsibility. In Mark’s post the other day, discussing “Wicked Problems” in public policy, he mentioned Judith Brett’s consideration of this theme in her article in the current edition of The Monthly. Brett referred to education as one domain where a whole set of inter-related issues meet which make neat objectives like “better schools” almost impossible to achieve through magical policy transformations pollies of all stripes are in the habit of promising. In practice, whatever you think about the schools policy stuff announced by Julia Gillard recently (and I don’t think much of it), you should be able to agree that teachers are only one part of the educational policy mix. But - perhaps because unions are also a convenient can to kick for both conservative and “Third Way” style pols - they tend to get blamed for everything. I’m sure anyone who’s worked in the education game will agree that it’s a really demanding job, and one that takes a degree of commitment beyond most vocations. Let’s recognise that!
Back when I was in 7th form (year 12 in Aussie coin, now called year 13 in NZ), we had a substitute English teacher for 6 weeks. She had recently retired from the big girls’ high/secondary school in town. She was an expert on Shakespeare - knew it all, off by heart, and loved it. In the six weeks she had with us, she took us through Othello and King Lear, and through some of T.S.Eliot’s poetry, including The Waste Land, where she explained many of the references, but by no means all, saying, “I want to leave some of it for you to find for yourselves, girls, in later years, when you have lived for a bit longer and read a bit more.” We immersed ourselves in the work, even reading it out loud together in our free time in the 7th form common room.
What she communicated to us was a great love of literature and language. When her six weeks was over, we bought her a rose plant, and she invited our class (just seven of us - it was a very small convent school) around to her place for afternoon tea, where she read some more poetry with us, and advised us, “Never marry for love, girls.” My mother later told me that she had had a very unhappy marriage (small town - everyone knows everyone).
What she gave us, so freely, was not just a love of literature, but the freedom to be seen to love it and rejoice in it - no small thing to do in a conservative provincial town. Thank you, Ida Gaskin.
Thank you, Norm Hughes from Narrabundah College. For insisting your full name was Normal, for organising film nights, rock eisteddfod performances, BBQs, formals, N Day, blood-donating trips and ski trips and bushwalking trips, for providing beer to those technically the wrong side of 18, and for giving extra marks to those who drew little cows on our physics exams. I only wish I had applied myself in your class.
A general thank you to all those teachers who inspired and challenged and appreciated me. A general (insert raspberry sound here) to all those who, through inadequacy and incompetence, drove me to despise the very subject you were supposed to teach and instill a love of. Boo to you.
I’d like to thank John Hayes for introducing me to French (and to snappy suits), Mr Tobin (did he have a first name?) for inspiring a love of history, and Kate Abernethy for being a spiffy grade twelve English teacher and bringing Far From the Madding Crowd alive for me in part through schoolboy fantasies which equated her with Bathsheba! And Steve Knudsen for being there when I was really low.
Oh, and Graham Barnes for Grade Eleven Logic, which I’m sure came in handy in the blogosphere. I won’t forget the examples of various fallacies drawn from the public comments of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
There are lots more - but those ones stand out… Fortunately at Kedron High, there weren’t too many bad teachers - and lots of delightfully eccentric ones.
I was lucky. My Sixties public primary school education occurred on the outer fringes of suburban Adelaide. In retrospect, it’s remarkable that I was exposed to such sophisticated & unlikely influences. Among the many competent teachers I had, two stood out: Mrs Bockisch - a cultured postwar migrant from Austria; and Mr Tom Jones - a forthright working-class autodidact from the UK.
From a personal perspective, both were important in that they expressed great faith in my potential: that’s something that has remained precious to me over the decades. More broadly, I remain in awe of their efforts to expand our horizons. After all, we were just another bunch of barely middle class kids in an undistinguished suburb at the edge of a provincial city.
Mrs Bockisch provided my first encounter with non-Anglo European culture, most memorably with her efforts to convince us that women were as equally capable as men. I clearly remember her telling my class that she couldn’t understand Australian attitudes regarding gender, and telling us that where she came from women could be surgeons or politicians or university professors if they had the ability. We were 9 years old - ‘The Female Eunuch’ was still several years away - and Mrs Bockisch read Pippi Longstocking to us as an antidote to our cultural milieu. I can’t speak for my classmates, but I can attest that she changed my attitudes.
Mr Jones was your classic loose cannon who took joy in antagonising and/or outwitting Education Dept administrators. An avowed atheist in a nominally Christian setting, and an habitual maverick in a decidedly conformist society, Mr Jones brought his wartime experiences as an NCO in North Africa to the classroom. Not that we were militarised; more the opposite. In his classroom discipline, application and independence of thought were virtues; conformity and reflexive patriotism were not.
At every opportunity, Mr Jones would tell us - and our mothers, should we perchance meet at the local shops - that he had no truck whatsoever with religion, but that he had the greatest respect for Muslims for the sincerity of their religious practice. This was quite an outrageous message for a primary school teacher to be publicly promulgating in 1970, and I can’t imagine any contemporary equivalent surviving long.
In terms of life-lessons there were two sets of messages of value. First, that sincerity and intent in others should be respected even if one believes the fundamental premise to be faulty. Second, that one’s own opinions are deserving of respect as long as they are sincerely held - even if they run contrary to mainstream thinking. There’s a third message too - that one should be prepared to spend the energy and to take the risk to place one’s ideas in the public domain, and to expect of others that those ideas are considered with respect and argued on their merits.
The fact that I survived any type of school experience whatsoever is no tribute to any latent ability I possessed, but rather entirely creditable to some excellent teachers.
So big ups to Frank Smylie, Craig Moore, Fr Alan Courtney, Richard Smith, Jo Collis and the unfortunately named Paul Paulenas…
…Frank Smiley, who made History accessible and alive and interesting, and to whom I date my love of the thing….Craig Moore, who hammered an understanding of AG into this decidely un-farm head of mine with a shrwed understanding of 14 year old boys’ pyschologies…Fr Alan, who laughed at himself, made us laugh too and in so doing managed to teach us all about economics and once again, make me love it…Richard Smith, who loved English just as much as I did, and who empowered us to be as good as we could be….Jo Collis who did exactly the same….Paul Paulenas, who saw merit even in the private, scribbled poems I used to write in the back of my English books, and was shocked to see he’d a) found them, b) read them, c) marked them and d) not only marked them highly but understood the confusion behind them.
Youse is all bloody legends.
Funny I was just packing some things away & came across my life supply of report cards so have been thinking about some of my inspirational teachers.
Thanks Ms Burns (grade 5), Mr Giese (the teacher who made me think of doing an Arts degree rather than going to teacher’s college), Ms Morton (clever, passionate and compassionate in economics who woulda guessed), Ms Saaroni (for letting me know it books were a great place to be), Mr Rose (who cared enough to confront me one day and ask if I was on drugs - I was just tired from part time work), Mr Chirico (a passionate dynamo who may like to know my job entails interpreting and teaching law) & Mr McCormack who let me laugh hysterically before sending me out of the room and then joined me for a good laugh, often. When I grew up it was you who I wanted to be.
Graham Tobin - I remembered!
And I also meant to mention Mlle. Bonnetaud, our French French teacher who gave us all lovely Nicois accents!