completely foreign to me at this stage and my colleagues’ professionalism at Mandama and Flemington primaries was testament to its effectiveness. In a nutshell, it meant that all interview panels for positions in the school had to include a merit-and-equity-trained teacher and should a candidate believe the selection process had treated them unfairly, they could appeal. Members of the selection panel were required to keep notes that adequately explained why one candidate had been preferred to another.
On arriving for the first day I was surprised to find a couple of dozen parents waiting for me. After initially wondering what I had done to upset so many, I soon saw that they only wished to welcome me and tell me how happy their son or daughter was to be in my classroom. Some of them even volunteered to assist in the classroom during the year. All of this was refreshingly new: in the secondary-school environment you can go the entire year without sighting some parents.
I had been given a wonderful class. We read stories, sang songs, played games and learnt about the wonders of the world. I revelled in this new environment and the students soaked up the music and enthusiasm I brought. Meetings and training sessions could extend many hours after class and the primary teacher attended all subject meetings. This included the science meeting, even though I was not teaching science that year. Remarkably, this was the first time I’d attended a science meeting at any school.
One sunny afternoon I was taking a sport class for a game of tee-ball, a game much like baseball but in which the ball is stationary on the top of a pole rather than thrown to the batter, removing the coordination issues some students face in hitting a moving target. Soft helmets were being worn by the batter and the backstop, although I’d twice found it necessary to ask the latter to retreat a few steps as his creeping forward to take the ball, which had rolled to the ground after the bat only grazed it, put him in danger of being hit.
As I stood in the centre of the triangle, the backstop crept forward again … The ring of the aluminium bat striking his head echoed across the valley, a sound I’ve never forgotten. He hit the ground before the echo had finished and I ran straight to him, scooping him up and carrying him directly to the medical office, about 50 metres away. My heart was beating so fast he seemed weightless as I carried his unconscious body into the building, my brain racing through all the possible injuries he might have sustained.
Upon my arrival at the office, the principal asked me to describe what had occurred and I ran through the sequence of events as best I could. He listened without interrupting, and assured me I had taken all necessary precautions. I returned to class, assured the students that all was going to be okay and, soon afterwards, dismissed them for the day.
The principal kept me informed via phone as the student made a full recovery despite missing a few school days. Only when I bumped into one of the school’s office staff some time later (when I was no longer at Mandama) did I discover that the student’s father had threatened the school with legal action and continued to vent his dissatisfaction for some time after the incident.
Shocked to hear this, I asked the office lady why I’d heard none of this and she replied, ‘Mark (the principal) didn’t want you to be worrying about what was going on behind the scenes …’
Once again, here was an excellent principal doing excellent work that I wasn’t even aware of. Had I known, my mind might have become preoccupied with the ‘what ifs’ and ‘whys’ of the entire episode and impacted on my teaching. I have seen cases where teachers have been accused of something and the principal laid the case out to the teacher in a manner that suggested ‘guilty until proven otherwise’, leading to a distraught teacher taking sick leave and doubtless struggling to teach to the usual standard. The loss of trust in such a case can have immeasurable consequences.
Portvale Secondary College (not its real name) was something else again. As working-class as you could get, the school of around 1000 students comprised almost entirely of portable classrooms was arranged as impressively as any maze I’d ever encountered. At the centre of the maze the staff offices—from which laptop computers were frequently stolen—lent the place the feel of a military bunker.
One imagined the secret order being issued in a breathless whisper: ‘You see if you can make it to T Block. I’ll cover you and call for reinforcements if we come under fire.’
This may have been a slight exaggeration, but the sensation was real. Coming from Mandama’s grade 3/4 class, where I would have had students in tears if I’d so much as raised my voice (I think it happened once in an entire year), I was really not prepared for this dramatic change of atmosphere.
On my first day I found that my seventeen-pupil year 9 English class was also occupied by ten adults. Being from a mainly private-school background where I’d never had more than one teacher’s aide in the classroom, I had to ask who these adults were and why they were in my class. I was quite shocked to find that these pupils warranted so many aides. Some had an aide assigned to them for the entire day, five days a week!
That wasn’t the last of the surprises. Another teacher ‘came clean’ with me when I mentioned the poor literacy level of the above-mentioned class, disclosing that the school applied a form of streaming that neither the students nor the parents (nor, indeed, some of the teachers) were aware of. On hearing this, my initial response was a feeling of guilt at being a part of the organisation keeping this secret from the students and their parents. Some in this class believed they were doing well academically—and some had been getting good results on the third graders’ work I gave them once I realised that was the standard they were at, including one (Simon) who spoke of a career in IT.
My year 9 English class was the lowest-achieving of fifteen or sixteen within the school. The very same material I had been using for my third and fourth graders the previous year was appropriate for the stronger students in this cohort. As the year progressed I became aware that they all had home lives that were television drama (often crime) scripts in themselves. Drugs, abuse, assault, under-age sexual ‘activity’ and neglect bordering on homelessness were all present in the room. So-called learning difficulties were the least of their problems.
Morning briefings at Portvale often felt like speeches at a wake as the rap sheet for the week was read out to waiting staff. Apart from the bad news about students and their families, there was always a list of staff comings and goings. One morning I was surprised to hear a positive report of a graduation night function. Well, up to a point …
‘We’re pleased to report that the year 12 graduation night proved to be a wonderful end to the year for our senior students, their families and staff, with dancing, good food and much revelry being reported by all at the community centre … before the fire.’
For the last month or two of the year I had to move Wednesday’s and Friday’s year 9 English class to the un-charred half of the classroom, a new low in my teaching career. Needless to say, students were not keen to sit at blackened desks and the message sent by a school administration which determined they would continue to use this room was not lost on them.
Getting back to the first term, I immediately dispensed with as much of the year 9 English curriculum as I could. The whole class being at primary-school level, I had been adjusting the difficulty of the work to suit, enabling some to answer comprehension questions and do better in spelling tests, leading to a sense of achievement.
But they were blind to the fact that this achievement was years below year 9.
A few weeks into term one I announced to them one morning: ‘This school does a thing where they divide all students up into different groups, based on how good they are at subjects like English.
‘There are some classes which have all of the students who are really good at English, some which have students of medium ability, and some with the rest of the English
