sociable staff still gathered out of hours, but their functions had the feel of wakes, full of dark humour and cynical commentary. The new principal was able to improve some things, but closure was announced just weeks after a fresh intake of more than 100 year 7 boys joined us.
The demise of Charitz was the most tragic experience I’ve witnessed at a school, yet my early years there were also career-shaping as I saw just what a powerful thing a religious-based school could be when it had selfless, courageous leadership and committed staff.
After spending more than a decade in Catholic secondary schools, it was time to find out what was happening in the rest of the education sector.
I was advised to approach one of the agencies that supplied emergency teachers to the region’s many schools. Initially I agreed to go ‘anywhere’ in the spirit of investigation. Schools were particularly enthusiastic when they found that I was male and taught music. Many would completely adjust their program for the day so that I could take six or more music classes, viewing it as an opportunity to make up for the lack of a permanent music specialist. The lack of male teachers in some schools could make of me a somewhat isolated figure among all the females in the staffroom at lunchtime. Many students could not repress their excitement at encountering an adult male: role models were often in short supply in this division.
I would bring my guitar and teach classes current pop songs (U2, Killing Heidi) or Beatles tunes, watching the students walk down the corridor still singing afterwards. For repeat classes I had worksheets for songs like Bohemian Rhapsody and Stairway to Heaven and we’d listen, discuss and complete the sheet, identifying the instruments, arrangements and so on. With younger classes we’d draw a guitar or colour an existing drawing after a short cross-curricular session discussing how and why it worked. Unlike the secondary students I’d spent the majority of my time with, these guys punctuated the sessions with enthusiastic calls of ‘Yeah’ and ‘Wow’ and at the finish of the lesson they’d exclaim: ‘That was the best!’
Emergency teaching is inconsistent, and you often had little idea where you would be the following week and how many days’ work you might have. The students were not always delighted to greet me. At one school in the Werribee area they were so uninterested, aggressive and ungrateful that I had to resist the urge to walk past the staffroom, go to my car and leave at recess! (I was later informed this was not an uncommon occurrence there.)
While umpiring a cricket match—an emergency teacher takes all subjects—at a school outside of Melton, a pupil of no more than nine or ten years of age threw his bat so far I nearly signalled ‘four’ before calling me every name imaginable after his stumps had been knocked over.
‘He always does that,’ a nearby fielder noted, and we continued the game as if it had never happened.
At another two-teacher school out the same way, I was impressed at the team attitude shown in running things smoothly. The senior students—in fact, grades 3, 4, 5 and 6 all shared the same room—would make the teacher a cup of tea and answer the phone in the adjoining office when it rang (there was no-one else to do it), writing down a message which they passed on to the teacher without distracting the entire group. If the weather was nice and the students had been doing well, the other teacher and myself sometimes decided to delay ringing the bell (it was actually a physical bell, not an electronic one) for ten minutes or so and extend lunchtime. This was a true ‘country school’, with not a house in sight in any direction and students who, despite their obvious isolation, were mature, independent and capable of accepting responsibility as they did at home every day of their lives.
Emergency teaching days quickly turned into weeks and terms. It was during a term replacement at Oberon South that I informed shocked colleagues that in more than a decade of secondary-school teaching I had never spent an entire day (8.30-3.30) in the classroom, something they had done more times than they could count. At a private school in the outer western suburbs, a student of perhaps eleven years of age informed me that the Christmas song we were learning—John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War Is Over)—was not appropriate as it included the word ‘Xmas’ rather than ‘Christmas’. This was a deliberate move by Lennon (and for the same reason as I had chosen it) to create a song that crossed boundaries in an inclusive manner, but clearly you can’t please everyone.
On discussing this later, the teacher in the classroom next door told me, ‘You can have my job if you want … I’m out of this place. If you think that’s bad, you should hear what the parents complain about!’
Flemington Primary School was described as a school where music was a key subject, with something like 40 percent of its students learning an instrument, and there being three orchestras—one each in the junior (grades prep 1/2), middle (3/4) and senior (5/6) schools. This was the most extensive music program I have ever encountered in a primary school and the offer to teach music there a couple of days a week was very tempting.
Situated right between the Housing Commission flats and million-dollar-plus inner-city townhouses, the school building was a century-old double-storey solid brick construction that housed nearly every class. And the 400 or so pupils were indeed music-mad. During my first couple of days there they devoured my usual primary-school musical repertoire and called for more.
Yard duty conversations with students were sometimes along the lines of ‘What’s your favourite country in the world? Of all the ones I’ve been to, I love France the most as the food is a class above anywhere else I’ve been.’
As Christmas approached, classes would often finish with students all sitting on the floor for a run-through of some of the songs we’d been learning. Students loved this though it could get a little claustrophobic as the younger classes wanted to be as close as possible to the guitar and the teacher. The sound of the third graders singing Merry Xmas (War Is Over) very nearly brought a tear to my eyes, particularly the chorus section sung by a children’s choir on the recording, when I noticed actual tears from a girl in the front row. She was being comforted by those around her and when I asked what the reason was she explained tearfully,
‘This song … (sob) just reminds me of my grandma … who died just … (inaudible) …,’ at which point half the room seemed to burst into tears, including myself at the sheer emotion the music had summoned. The class must have been quite a sight, all returning to their own room wiping tears from their eyes and comforting each other.
As a teacher, the satisfaction in sharing the moment young students understand how music can affect them—openly displaying those emotions and being mature enough not to be too self-conscious as they did so—was indescribable. While it usually took me nearly an hour and a half to drive to Flemington from my home in the southern Geelong suburb of Belmont, it was worth every minute.
A return to full-time teaching came about at Mandama, a school perched on a valley slope which made much of the play area uneven for the 500 or so students. Being little more than a stone’s throw from where I was living made it difficult to say no to this handy alternative to my long commute.
Not only was it close by, but the principal impressed me and continued to do so as the year progressed. He was genuinely interested in me as a teacher and a person, and spent time in every classroom implementing his own ‘money maths’ teaching method. What also became apparent was how he saw himself and the school’s teachers as part of a broader education system. Despite being on a one-year contract, I found myself doing professional development (PD) days in primary mathematics, child welfare, and merit and equity, among others.
‘This will be handy no matter what you do in the future,’ he assured me as I signed on for another day of training. It was refreshing to have someone who believed in you enough to feel you were worth developing and later in the year I was forced to turn down some of these PD activities as the workload in class was picking up pace.
The
