stunned class and Simon commented: ‘We’re not one of the really good classes, are we?’
‘No, we’re not,’ I replied as the room went even quieter—which was something of a rarity. But, as the importance of this sank in, so did the realisation that for once a teacher was being straight with them.
‘Are we one of the middle ones?’ he pleaded, with a blend of hope and sadness.
‘No, unfortunately we’re not one of those groups …
‘We are working at present on middle-primary-school work … but here’s the plan: this term it will be grade 3/4 work to make sure everyone has the basics. Term two will be grade 5 and 6 work; term three, years 7 and 8; and by term four we will be doing year 9 English.’
I was well aware this would not be an effective method to take them all from where they were to year 9, but by giving them a roadmap and telling them exactly where they were they could at least ask questions of themselves and take some control over their learning. General student behaviour throughout the school was something I found difficult to deal with. While being upfront with my year 9 class had a positive effect on some of them, it also imposed a responsibility on myself to achieve at least a measure of what I had promised. And academic achievement was something many of these students had absolutely no experience of.
Students continued to swear like drunken sailors and expected nothing more from the teachers than detentions and contempt. After-school detention class seemed to be a routine five nights a week for dozens of wayward academics, each with his own Honours degree in Street Life and each hoping to impress fellow club members with an attendance record that in any other circumstance would result in honorary life membership.
I was told the story of a teacher who had thrown a chair through a closed window before walking out of the school never to return. One colleague, Pete, seemed to have the Midas touch in this environment. He was cool and calm with the students, friendly and affable in the staffroom. It would be nearly ten years later when I read of his fate in the newspaper. He received a payout following a court case in which he detailed his breakdown after many years of teaching the school’s toughest classes, despite his pleas to be transferred, backed up with medical advice of his ill health. The court was told he would never work again.
Just as my self-increased load in year 9 English was beginning to bear fruit, the school and the state told me I also had to teach Picnic at Hanging Rock and the other set material for year 9, substantially increasing the pressure I was already placing on myself.
I found my hands shaking on the steering wheel as I drove to school. I was not relaxed when at home with my own young children. My thoughts turned to just walking out, like the teacher in the story I had been told. I saw a doctor; he referred me to a psychologist who gave me reading material designed to help me focus on being ‘in the present’ when not at school.
A position for a part-time music teacher at Belmont Primary was advertised. It was a small school which just a few years prior had faced closure and, after reinventing itself, had managed to reverse this decision. The student population was perhaps 200, many housed in portable classrooms outside of the main brick building. The mood there was positive—exactly what I needed—and I could remain at Portvale three days per week with my year 9s to whom I was committed, for reasons I could not logically explain. Portvale was destroying me, causing me to question everything I knew about teaching, even my capacity and will to keep doing it. Belmont could not have come at a better time.
It was blessed with an excellent principal, yet another Mark, who greeted every student and parent as they entered school in the morning. He knew the names of every staff member’s partners and children. He wanted to know who you were. The mood in the staffroom lifted when he entered. There was a genuine sense of everyone being part of a team. He also made a point of teaching every class in the school at least once a term, when the classroom teacher really needed a break for professional or personal reasons. In short, he made everyone feel that they were important and their opinion mattered.
It was refreshing to feel a part of a positive team again. In the long term it probably saved my career, and possibly a good deal of my sanity. The contrast between the two schools I spent my week at couldn’t have been greater. There was the usual lack of male teachers, meaning that some classes were excited to see me for that reason alone, but that also gave me a greater sense of purpose, knowing that for some of these young men and women you were one of the few male role models in their lives. And I took this role of introducing music as a healthy outlet and influence in their lives very seriously.
Mark asked me to organise a Christmas celebration Mass for the school students in the church across the road. When I realised that the date was not one of my Belmont workdays, he offered me an entire day’s pay for just a morning of work. After the Mass I held extra music classes in the afternoon rather than take the rest of the day off, simply to repay and in some way replicate the goodwill Mark had generated throughout the school. It was truly infectious. Everything in teaching is about goodwill. It is the things that a teacher, or principal, doesn’t have to do but does anyway, that make a real difference. Anybody who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves or lacks the skills and dedication to make it happen.
The next decade and a half saw a return to the private-school system and I witnessed the accelerated tempo of the standardisation push, an experience shared by almost all schools in the country, and in many other countries. As a teacher who liked to tailor lessons to individual classes, watching schools focus everything on an ATAR score at the expense of all else, and of those students not in the market for a particular ATAR, posed a towering challenge, even at a time when I had little idea of the real consequences this change would usher in.
Judging a school, a teacher, a book, or a test on the basis of whether it’s sufficiently ‘rigorous’ is like judging an opera based on whether it contains enough notes that are really hard for the singers to hit.
— Alfie Kohn
THE SMELL OF NAPLAN IN THE MORNING
Testing ‘is a good servant but a bad master’.
— Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons 2.0, 2015
The headlines are hard to miss: ‘Why up to half of all Australian teachers are quitting within the first five years’, ‘Naplan writing test is ‘bizarre’…’, ‘The world’s best teacher doesn’t care about test scores’, ‘ATARs losing relevance for university admissions but students still hooked’, ‘Teachers are more depressed and anxious than the average Australian’.
These are all real headlines. They point to recognition that what we are doing in our schools at present is not working and has not done so for some time.
It was in the midst of this that I visited schools in Finland, speaking with students, teachers and the teachers’ teachers in Helsinki and Tampere (a couple of hours north of Helsinki) where I found that all of the above trends were virtually unknown to them.
When I explained how frequently NAPLAN1 tests are administered in Australian schools, they asked incredulously, ‘So your students have five lots of matriculation-type exams by the time they finish school?… Starting at EIGHT YEARS OLD?!’
They stared at me as though I were a child molester. In Finland children don’t start school until the age of seven. They do not do any form of standardised testing until they are in their late teens.
In a recent discussion with one of my year 8 classes about growth mindset thinking—the premise that learning can help make us smarter—a third of students admitted that the experience of taking the grade 3 NAPLAN test (as eight-or nine-year-olds) had made them decide that they were
