Professional parasite

Last week I joined students on an excursion to my former workplace. As we gathered in the atrium of Melbourne Museum, some teachers went to retrieve the cards that give them free entry. “Down the escalator and to the right,” I said. Earlier this year, I’d visited Immigration Museum with classmates in the history learning area, where a former colleague had introduced us to resources including a video I’d helped produce. Rubbing it in, Oslo said “Philip from the museum” and Jan waved her finger at the very back row.

Teachers view things differently, standing among the uniforms that others skirt around. At Melbourne Museum, being within speaking distance of a student was enough to identify me: without asking, a worker handed me a map of the venue and a large aquamarine tag. “Excursion Supervisor,” it said. Putting it on felt like crossing a river. During a break, I went downstairs to the Discovery Centre. “Philip!” my former manager observed. “Are you studying full time?” I showed her my sticker, confirming something. We talked until she glanced at the clock. In any case, I had to get back to the year elevens.

Careers aren’t linear; I keep circling back. Happily, teaching’s parasitic, drawing on everything I know. Even my work as “the schools guy” at the Uniting Church has informed my teaching practice. In my year ten history class I used the church’s model of consensus decision-making to draft a class statement on reconciliation. Yep, I even made coloured indicator cards to allow whole-class participation, forming a scene eerily reminiscent of a Synod meeting. The students engaged really well with the activity, happily showing blue, orange and yellow to indicate support and dissent. The final statement’s powerful even before you learn that it includes words from many students who rarely contribute to whole-class discussion. We transcribed it onto a poster that everyone signed:

Your rights. My rights. Our rights. We, the undersigned, will endeavour to accept others so that Australia will be the way it should be. We recognise that everyone is human and that everyone has equal rights. We want to show that we know our own human rights as well as those of others. We are going to spread the word.

Hard to fault

The first disappointment of my degree came via email a few weeks ago. I hadn’t been accepted into a subject reserved for a small number of teacher candidates chosen by application and interview. I’d made it to the final round of selection, and the interview had gone really well. So, foolishly, I’d let myself imagine.

The second disappointment came a week later, again via email, in response to a request for feedback about my application. So far I’d only been told how strong it had been. Was there something specific that tilted the decision? Well, yes, according to this second email, namely how strong it had been.

A bit of context. I live in Austalia, within a culture that has been analysed under complementary frameworks of “tall poppy syndrome” and “cultural cringe.” Here, we’re trained to locate excellence somewhere else, partly because we like it that way. But I also attend the third-ranked school of education in the world – despite its location, not the kind of body from which you expect encouragement to be less excellent.

And yet, there it was, cryptic but crystal clear, a sentence-long retrospective justification for non-inclusion in a postgraduate subject because I had too much to offer. “So, a teacher candidate might offer an exemplary set of skills, experiences and orientations to [the subject] that are hard to fault, but might be found as unlikely to gain the same benefits from involvement as other applicants,” the educators explained. In short, stop striving.

I’d heard this before, as an undergraduate student, receiving feedback about an application for a scholarship decided through an interview process conducted by, among other people, the Governor of South Australia. “We wanted to see the real you,” the academic explained. “Even at the level of language, you seemed distant. Next time, choose vocabulary that’s more robust, less – Latinate.” (Confused, I became a medievalist.)

I’m not sure, but it seems that this strategic valuing of mediocrity has become no less ubiquitous in the era of mature-aged students, lifelong learning and multiple careers. Maybe you’d be “bored” in this job, or “overqualified” for this program? (You might be found as unlikely to gain the same benefits from involvement as other applicants.)

As well, substitute “teacher” for [the subject] in the email above and you get the kind of message offered by some members of my family when I announced my decision to become a high-school teacher: wouldn’t my “exemplary set of skills, experiences and orientations to [the profession] that are hard to fault” be better utilised – somewhere else? Well, not according to research that correlates good educational outcomes with high-quality teachers, to which scholars within my graduate school of education have made significant contributions and to which the rhetoric of the institution subscribes.

That’s why my initial feelings about the email have transformed into a kind of sociological interest. If a message of “be excellent, but not yet” is resilient enough to survive the heat of an elite graduate school, we can be pretty sure that it’s still thriving in the real world, including within secondary school classrooms.

But so am I.

Segregated supermarkets

In home room this morning there were the usual announcements: overdue library books, unexplained absences, opportunities to study abroad. But then something weird. “Have you heard about the supermarket ban?” asked my mentor teacher, going on to explain to the whole class that a supermarket in the area had banned all students. Anyone in the uniform of a local school would be thrown out. What’s more, senior staff from local schools would be patrolling the supermarket to identify and punish any student caught shopping there. “Bad for business,” someone observed.

Others laughed, but I was furious. What kind of message was this for students to receive at the start of a school day? In advance, any efforts by my colleagues and I to show respect to them had been thwarted by a more sinister message: that young people are only selectively welcome in public; that even supermarkets can be designated “adults only” at a merchant’s whim. Not to mention the bizarre punishment of a whole category of citizens. Well I’m not banned, but won’t be shopping at the supermarket or its affiliates again. [I can't name the store while disguising the identity of my school, but I've written to the manager and will post any response I receive at this website.]

Funny how these things happen: in history last week, we studied segregation.

—

UPDATE – text of my letter:

To the Manager,

I’m writing to protest the ban on school students from your store. Not only is the exclusion of a whole category of citizens unjust, but the message it sends to the community will fail to improve the behaviour of anyone, irrespective of their age.

Please inform me if and when you lift the ban, as I won’t be shopping at your store until you do so.

Kind regards,
Philip Thiel

Stolen generations

Students have a way with words. I don’t mean that only as praise, but find myself enjoying the texts made spontaneously in the classroom, when students are given the freedom to think and write as they please. “What made you happy,” I asked my history class, “or sad, or surprised, or confused?” This at the end of a class about movements for rights and freedoms in the twentieth century, including feminism and decolonisation. I asked them to post their thoughts in the relevant quadrant of the board. Who knew that teenagers were so happy?

One of the many sticky-notes I’ll treasure reads: “the groups and different fun engaging work was much better than plain text book questions. It was fun!”

Things became more somber in the next lesson, on the Stolen Generations. Students read one of four personal stories from the Bringing Them Home report, in which Indigenous people who’d been removed from their families speak about their lives. The task was to summarise the meaning or effect of the story, then work in groups to synthesise four such summaries into one statement that connects them all. Again, student language caught my breath. “The Aborigines were stolen, and not only they were stolen, but their childhood and identity,” one group wrote. Another wrote, with disarming concision: “after troubled lives, people are moving on.” I had no words.

Indigenous ed

 

Sally is now arriving late, and has stopped handing in work. When Mr D speaks to her about it she gets quite angry and tells him that there is no point in her doing any work because people like her always end up ‘unemployed or pissed’. She finally reveals to Mr D that she is Koorie and does not want anyone to know as they might treat her differently.

 

I’ve spent the last few weeks with Sally – an imaginary student of an imaginary teacher with challenges that are depressingly real. Last week two colleagues and I facilitated an hour-long think about students like Sally, considering policy documents and educational strategies related to Indigenous students. The class went well and our fellow teacher-candidates seemed engaged by the material. With Victoria’s Aboriginal population both young and growing, it’s more and more likely that all of us will encounter Indigenous families as soon as we’re employed in schools.

 

As discussed in our lesson, preparing for this should be a complex task. In the 1250-word reflective piece below (adapted from a submission within our core subject, “Social and Professional Contexts”) I explore the relationship of Indigenous education to my own development as a teacher. I hope you enjoy it.

Rubrics

When reading textbooks some start with the headings, others with the pictures. As for me, I start with the brackets. This week we’re studying assessment, and I’d be quietly doing so now if I’d skipped over the parentheses. But this, from O’Donnell et al’s Educational Psychology: “(The word rubric comes from religious writings, in which headings, notes and commentary were frequently written in red ink. Rubric has the same root as the word ruby.)” How marvellous is that?

It’s actually heartening that “rubrics” contain an etymological absurdity, because as a student I find them somewhat absurd – not headings, notes and commentary, but the elaborate grids used to show the ways in which work will be marked which take their name (absurdly) from a colour of medieval ink.

Or maybe it’s not so absurd. I’ve observed classes in which descriptions of a mark range have been read aloud as if intoned from a liturgy, their distinctions as mysterious as a sacred riddle. “The discussion includes some links” is sound, ” the discussion demonstrates evidence” is better, but “the discussion is underpinned” is really getting there, topped only by “the discussion synthesises.” Go!

Ironically, these misnamed tools are designed to support literacy. Instead, reading them diverts class time from decoding texts other than the rubric itself, as student questions become more and more preoccupied by assessment. Even the readable ones tend toward conformism, guiding students to like responses that get the highest marks. The more elaborate the rubric, the more precisely it dictates. (We’re almost back at liturgy again. Perhaps, disturbingly, rubrics aren’t misnamed.)

Recently I received feedback on a lesson plan that I’d submitted for assessment. Basically the lesson was great, but at the expense of a subheading given prominence in the rubric – and marked in red ink.

Ekphrasis

Learning to be a teacher is as contradictory as it sounds. In many seminars, we switch awkwardly between three modes: the students we are, the teachers we’ll be, and the students we’ll teach.

An example: last week our English group visited the Ian Potter Museum of Art, where we studied “ekphrasis” – the literary description of artworks. As we took part in the activities, we (a) observed our seminar leader demonstrate the lesson, (b) performed acts of peer-teaching and (c) imagined ourselves as students on an excursion led by ourselves.

This last mode is the funnest. Among Polish posters we projected ourselves into the images – what can we hear? what are we thinking? Then, in groups, we combined our answers into poems, lifting and pasting fragments onto card.

Disturbing

I cannot help see, try as I might
the Lady in Red, mouth wide shut,
smiling on the inside.

Muted silence.

Teeth gnashes like guns of war!
A voice that’s not there:
“Take me home, country road.”

Out of place – is this the past?
Wind blowing through my empty mind
helpless, cold longing.

Is our conspiracy worth it?

Later, in another room, we stand around Tim Jones’s Covert City, collecting our words by observing the artwork and listening to what others have said. Then, silently, we form our own poems.

Melbourne

Wood dark as dirt; thread sharp as steel.
Like a Gothic window, towers lift my gaze
from unseen foundations of this buried city -
its heart a tinderbox, ready for the spark.

“Places exchange their form,” mutters Calvino,
flying up through the dust-storm
like a crane.