Blogging too far: My Incredibly Woeful and Humiliating Return to the Classroom

It was around 2002 and I was working in Central Office, and I had got sick of being fired every other Friday then being re-employed each following Monday. All of this while everyone acted like nothing had happened.  Our teams were the same but had a new name and less money.  But the jobs were still there.

I had been working as a Senior Manager for a while and I’d started getting really cheesed off that the teachers I’d employed to work for me were getting paid more than me. Teachers had better unions and people cared when they went on strike. No-one cared about Public Servants. We’re talking between $10,000 - $15,000 more than me, who was supposed to be their boss. I didn’t care initially but after a few years it started grating on my nerves. Needless to say it was incredibly hard to get teachers to come in and work in Central Office. If they kept their status as a teacher they kept their pay and holidays, which meant working in a government team was nearly impossible. If I was to change their job to being a Public Servant, they would lose money, have to pay the added cost of getting into the city each day, get stripped back to 4 weeks a year holiday, and of course accept the 9 hour 30 minute work days.

So I thought it would be a good idea to go back to where it all started. I remember I hand-picked my school and my grade (I have mentioned it elsewhere). I’d spent weeks and weeks developing the best ever unit of work for my new Grade 7 class. It was all about a simulated visit to Disneyland. Students used multimedia (a popular catchword at the time) to go on all of the rides and explore the theme park.   They were to plan their travel, their costs, a day to day itinerary. I had taken a class to an actual theme park before and it worked well, so I thought it might be a fun virtual activity to do, showing off my computer skills. The rest of the Grade 7 teachers were doing Dinosaurs. I was doing my action based research, outcome based learning, productive pedagogies, lifelong learning something, and a whole heap of computery stuff. If I was to enter this unit into a competition, I would come home with a six foot tall trophy. All of my advisor friends helped me put the unit together. It was planning gold. I had never got any award or recognition of my teaching. I was just a normal teacher holding no special position or claim to fame. This was my chance to get a name for myself.

It went horribly wrong, and I have explained elsewhere in my other stories that I only lasted 4 weeks of trying so hard, before I phoned my old boss and asked him to get me out of there and back into the Central Office immediately. My boss was phoning every Monday morning and Friday afternoon anyway, tempting me back with promises of a real job.

What went wrong in my classroom? I think the concept of going to Disneyland was a bit too abstract and aiming too high. Half of my class would be surprised and thrilled to be provided with lunch for the day or cooked food when they went home that night. A trip to Disneyland was so far out of their reach their imagination would not stretch that far.

What else went wrong? The girls hated the computer stuff. That was for sure. It wasn’t social, it wasn’t real life, it wasn’t living in the ‘now’. Watching someone else’s home video of going through a ride was a really bad idea for the girls. Why would they watch that? 

The boys were just as unimpressed. I was genuinely surprised. Maybe I had grown up with too much Disney and it meant a lot to me, one of the few far off fantasy lands for me growing up (and I am not a Disney person, I just needed some escapism in my childhood).  Anyway, everyone hated it.

And it wasn’t just my curriculum. I was only about 25 years of age, but I had been to more education conferences and professional sharing days than the most senior classroom teachers. So I had so many new ideas I wanted to try out. Like learning circles, when every day we would finish by sitting in a circle and talking about what we had learned that day. I think I did it twice before I gave up. Any activity which meant students getting out of their chairs was a chance for a fight, a push or some teasing.

My groups went back to rows in the second week. By the third week I had dumped any multimedia and I was just writing on the chalkboard with the class copying off it. They didn’t appreciate my sense of humor. They had been at this school for six years so far copying off the board, and in their seventh year they didn’t want it to change. I fondly remembered back when I was in primary school and the amazing lessons my teacher came up with. These kids would be quite content with the sit-in-your-chair-and-shut-up dinosaur unit my esteemed colleagues were dishing up to their classes.

What I think the big problem was, is that I forgot how to teach children. I had been out of the classroom for three years teaching adults and helping them plan. But I didn’t actually teach anything to students. And whatever I had once, even in its infancy from only five years’ teaching, was lost.  Maybe it’s called Factor T or something. If Factor X is for entertainment, Factor T can be for teaching. Maybe I had Factor P for becoming a Pretentious Prick thinking that I was going to be hot stuff. 

I always taught in rough and tough areas, so that wasn’t the issue. I think maybe I started caring a lot more than I did when I was a teacher the first time. One of my pre-service mentor teachers told me her sunglasses trick, to always wear sunglasses when possible so not to show any form of interest to children or establish any type of relationship. Shiny sunglasses were best, so they could see themselves and not you. But after my time out of the classroom, I saw the big picture of high schools and further education the kids could have. These things genuinely excited me, because I didn’t have opportunities like that when I left school. The local university when I was a kid trained teachers, artists and engineers. It was a choice between those three. The students in front of me had so many more choices, but they came from second and third generation unemployed families. They didn’t have role models in their family that weren’t dependant on welfare as their primary source of income.

And then there was the koala. Our school had a family of koalas in the back corner. Now a koala is a cute teddy-bear type of animal that does nothing all day except sleep and sometimes eat. A handful of students in the school just wanted to throw stones at them, probably to get a reaction and to see them move. If you have ever anticipated seeing a koala in a zoo, you will know what I mean. It’s natural to want to pick up a stick and poke it, waking it up. I established myself as the chief koala carer, walking down to the back gate every day after school, keeping the students away from the koala population. It was a hard job, as I was usually breaking up fights at the same time. It seemed every time I was out of my classroom I was breaking up a fight, and inside my classroom I was dealing with behaviour issues.

I have a confession to make, which is just awful. The last Friday I worked, I told the class that I wasn’t going to come back to work on Monday, and that I was leaving. I told them this was partly due to them, and I remember looking at a specific girl as I said it. I told the class that everyone had opportunities to make choices, and my choice was to not put up with their attitude anymore, and leave.  It certainly wasn’t my most memorable moment of being a professional. How many other people in these kids lives had told them they were not wanted anymore? How many of these kids, mostly from single parent families, secretly blamed themselves for their parents’ breakup? It was a really low act. Sorry kids.

About three years ago I forgot to pay the bill for my teacher registration, so I lost my status as a “teacher” that I was holding onto, just in case. I would need to go back through probation and re-apply if I ever wanted it again. But I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next 20 years. I have seen enough teachers in their classrooms doing great stuff and I am quite sure whatever they have is missing in me.

I can remember having a dud teacher or two in my time and I would hate to think that the majority of children I taught might think of me as a dud teacher. Maybe someone should make a tool in Facebook where I can find my old classes and apologise, fishing for compliments, desperate to be told that I was a good teacher and I made a difference in someone’s life. I wonder how many ex-teachers end their classroom careers on such a low? It would be truly sad if there was a large number.