Read an extract from Teacher by Gabbie Stroud
Teacher: One Woman’s Struggle to Keep the Heart in Teaching by Gabbie Stroud is a powerful new memoir about Australia’s education system and what it is really like to work within it. You can read an edited extract from the book here.
By this time in my career, I had come to understand that staff meetings were a special kind of torture. Without a judicious Principal or Assistant Principal or middle management person to keep things on time, on track and on task, things could and would degenerate quickly. Teachers in a meeting will generally behave about as well as their third most disruptive student. (I am exaggerating, but only slightly.)
Staff meetings at Belmora were no exception and I came to think of them as my first line of attack. They were theoretical spaces where our future workload was bandied about, existing only as ideas and words and imaginings. Part of me was always on high alert during these meetings. I was fearful of a workload I couldn’t sustain.
‘Is there funding?’ I would ask.
‘Is it compulsory?’
‘What research supports this?’
‘Why do we have to do this?’
Somehow, over time, I became the person – the idiot – who voiced what everyone was thinking.
*
‘Is everybody here?’
The staff meeting was about to begin and the Assistant Principal was doing a head count. I slid into my seat and produced a pile of Brenex squares – shiny coloured papers that are a staple for junior primary Art projects.
‘What are we cutting?’ asked Madge, slipping into the seat next to me. She took up the extra scissors I had brought and slid a blue square off the top of the pile.
‘I need two hundred and fifty equilateral triangles ready for tomorrow’s Art lesson,’ I told her and held up a sample. ‘See, here: they need to be equilateral so the kids can fold them like this.’
‘Why so many?’
‘My class,’ I said, ‘and Soph’s class. That’s forty-eight kids, plus a sample for each class – that’s fifty projects. Each project needs five triangles.’
‘You making the boat thing?’ Lana slumped into the chair on my other side.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It always turns out well.’
I sat and snipped triangles with Madge as we waited for the meeting to begin. Teachers arrived and then left, remembering a phone call they had to make, racing back to their classroom for paperwork, dealing with children who had missed the bus, speaking to parents. By four o’clock we were ready to begin, but then the Principal discovered the digital projector wasn’t working.
‘You start,’ he said to the Assistant. ‘I’ll try to fix this.’ He crawled under the table to check the leads.
‘Alright,’ the Assistant Principal said. ‘Item number one. We need to start meetings on time. We are officially twenty minutes late. Let’s work on that for next week.’ She pulled the lid off a pen and made a tick on the page. There was a grunt from under the table and the Principal inched his way out and sat down.
‘Bloody cord had come loose,’ he nudged the mouse and we all looked at the wall where images were supposed to be projected. ‘What’s wrong with it now?’ He stabbed angrily at his keyboard.
‘I’ll go on,’ the Assistant said. ‘What we want to talk about today and what’s going up on screen is the new model for reporting that’s being implemented. We’ve agreed to be a trial school.’
‘I never agreed,’ muttered Madge under her breath. I tried not to snort. Last term, Madge and I had been banned from sitting beside each other. We were supposedly a bad influence on each other. The truth was we shared a low tolerance for bullshit and a chronic addiction to humour.
‘From now on, A to E graded reporting is going to be the way we report to parents,’ the Assistant Principal explained. ‘It’s being introduced to make things standard across the state so all schools are speaking the same language, and when a child arrives from another school we know where they’re at.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Lana, older and wiser than the Assistant Principal. ‘I’ve been here and ridden this donkey. And you know how it ends? Eventually we realise that you can’t quantify what a child knows with a single letter. So, let’s short-circuit this and stick with what we’ve got and save ourselves a whole heap of work.’
‘She’s right,’ Jule said. ‘Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. A to E is a grand idea in theory, but how do we agree on what constitutes an A and a B and a C? And what about the poor bugger who tries his guts out but still performs at an E level? The thing I never liked about A to E was that we never acknowledged effort. Surely the student’s effort is of as much value as his or her achievement.’
‘I think that’s one of the best moments in teaching,’ Sophie said, looking up from the sample Art piece she was making for tomorrow’s lesson. ‘That moment when a child understands that they can exert effort on their learning, that they can try hard to learn.’ She paused. ‘It warms my heart.’
‘No, no, no,’ the Principal said. He flicked a switch on the projector and the thing blazed to life, filling the wall with an image so bright we couldn’t see it. The Assistant fussed about with the curtains, creating darkness, and the first PowerPoint slide came into focus.
The Common Grade Scale will be used to report student achievement in both primary and junior secondary years in all NSW schools.
The state’s education logo was plastered above the statement like a royal decree.
‘So, this is going to be mandatory?’ Jule asked.
‘Yes, very soon,’ the Principal said, stacking a wad of home readers beneath the projector’s stumpiest leg.
‘We’re a pilot school. We’ll trial it.’
‘What if we don’t like it?’ Lana said.
‘Then we’ll put that in our review,’ the Assistant said. ‘And it’ll all go ahead anyway,’ Madge said, not under her breath this time.
‘Well, at least we get an opportunity to have a say,’ the Assistant replied. ‘We might be able to make some recommendations that improve the reporting.’
‘Who writes the review?’ I asked.
‘We’ll do it together,’ the Principal said and I groaned, loudly and rudely.
‘Another hour of my life I’ll never get back.’ A few people laughed.
The projector shat itself again and we were in darkness. The Principal headed back under the desk while the Assistant made for the lights.
‘Why does that become my job?’ Madge whispered, jabbing her scissors at the screen.
I shrugged. ‘Here,’ I said, handing her a red square.
‘Just cut another triangle and try not to think about it.’
‘Oh, before I forget,’ the Assistant said, ‘is someone taking minutes?’
This time there was a collective groan.
A roster was produced, a name called out, and someone threw a notebook in their direction.
‘I can do it for you,’ I suggested, but from under the desk came the Principal’s voice – an emphatic NO!
I had been banned from minute-taking early in Term One after I wrote additional comments next to each minute. Honest, childish things like:
This will never work.
Bags not doing this.
This will probably suck.
I had been told off, publicly and privately: These are official documents and We need an accurate representation. The other staff had thought it was hilarious and my notes had been read aloud over recess when the Principal and Assistant were out on duty.
‘I can’t seem to get this projector to work,’ the Principal admitted. Defeated, he plopped back into his chair. ‘I’ll just talk you through it,’ he said, his finger hovering over the mousepad. ‘I spent all afternoon preparing this…’ He sighed.
He clicked through slide after slide, telling us about the need for standardisation and the A to E model that would level playing fields and bring clarity to our teaching.
‘An important thing to understand,’ he said, ‘is that under this model, a C is like the new A.’
‘What?’ I paused my cutting, looked up to find most of my colleagues were bent over marking, preparing lessons and hiding behind computer screens. Only Jule, who was taking the minutes, appeared to be following the thread of the discussion.
‘Go back,’ I insisted. ‘What does that mean? C is like the new A?’
‘Well, under this model this kind of grading is about what the student has learned and how well they’ve learned it. A student scoring a C grade has’ – he squinted at the screen – ‘a sound knowledge and understanding of the main content.’
‘So, what’s an A?’
‘The student has an extensive knowledge and understanding, and they can readily apply this knowledge.’ He looked up. ‘Make sense?’
'Yes and no.’
Something inside me wanted to rage against this imposition. I wondered what the letter E would mean for all the Warrens and Ryans of the world. I thought of a younger me flipping herself inside out to achieve an A and hating myself when I didn’t get it. I glanced at the clock. It was nearly five. Shut up, Gab.
‘Parents are going to struggle with this,’ someone else said. ‘The last time we had the A to E grades, A was always quite achievable. It doesn’t sound like it would be with this model.’
‘I’m struggling with the words “readily apply this knowledge”,’ Lana said. Up to this point, she had been marking books – the open pile on her left gradually shifting to a closed one on her right. ‘If I teach a child how to measure out liquid amounts and how to weigh things, how can I be sure that child can apply that knowledge in different contexts? I can’t follow them home and watch them bake a cake.’
‘No, no,’ the Principal said, his tone placating with an edge of patronising. ‘And that’s to do with how we’re assessing students more broadly. We’ll need to review that. We’ll need to establish rubrics. Our assessment processes need to become more rigorous, more standardised, more professional.’
There was a quiet then. It happened most meetings when the Principal said something with such perverse ignorance that we were all offended. So, what you’re saying, I wanted to rant, is that what we do now isn’t rigorous, isn’t standard enough and isn’t professional? How would you know? You never come into my classroom, you’ve never seen the way I assess. I cleared my throat and swallowed down my inner scream. Only fifteen more minutes until we could all leave.
‘Anyway, we can talk about all of that next week,’ the Principal said. ‘Let’s have an early mark today.’
‘No, we can’t leave yet.’ It was the Sports Coordinator. ‘We need to run through the procedure for the carnival. It’s this Thursday.’ She pointed to a bunch of papers on the desk in front of her.
‘And I have a few items I need to cover as well,’ added the Assistant Principal. She pointed to the diary, tapping her finger against the page.
‘Alright,’ the Principal said. ‘Let’s move on to those.’
We didn’t finish until 6pm.
