Teacher by Gabi Stroud

All the way through Teacher I had a conversation with Gabbie (in my head) so I thought I would use my blog to pen her a letter because her book seemed to be written about me! Here is my letter:

Hello Gabbi,

First off I am sorry I have been so slow to read your book. I know these are only excuses but when all my friends, many of whom are teachers, raved about your book I had two thoughts. Perhaps one of my friends might loan me their copy (this has now finally happened) and secondly, would I be able to cope with reading this book. I had read an extract from your book in a newspaper. Classrooms are raw places. I may not have met kids with the extreme behaviours you describe but I have met complex kids, kids who broke my heart and kids who almost broke my passion. I survived for a little longer than you only because I found my true home in the school library. I am certain if I had not moved into the role of Teacher-Librarian I would have found a different career away from classroom teaching.

If we were sitting together chatting I think I might begin by telling you about the parts of your story that echoed my experiences. I will begin with your words about the HSC (page 48) and your TER - well that's me!

" ... when I look back at my reports I wasn't as smart as I thought I was. I did well on things I could control, like bookwork, homework, behaviour and participation. In areas of understanding or knowledge I was consistently  average ... it's clear I wasn't always getting it ... I didn't have a deep conceptual understanding of the concepts being covered."   YES that's me in a nutshell!

You loved your Year 2 teacher Mrs Read. For me it was my Year 3 teacher Mrs Woods. At the end of Year 3 the names of the kids were read out and my friends moved off to their new class. I was left standing alone in the classroom. I started to cry. Perhaps I was staying down in Year 3. Then came the magical news I was going up to Year 4 and my beautiful Mrs Woods would move up to Year 4 with me. I love the way you remember Mrs Read's hair. I remember Mrs Woods had beautiful dresses and she gently taught me to play a simple percussion rhythm for our school play.

Class Photographs. You were up the back because you were tall. I was in the front or second row, not by choice, but because I was the second smallest kid in the class. I didn't want to be in the front row with my "squinty" eye which I had in every photo partly due to the sunshine but mostly due to my lazy eye.

Miss Jenny, the class teacher for your first prac, sounds wonderful. When I read this section of your book I wished this had been my experience.  My first prac teacher was working at such a ridiculous pace with weekly individual contracts for each child made using a 'purple horror machine'. I knew I could never aspire or even want to manage thirty kids using her program. My final prac teacher (whom I visited every week for a whole year) was the opposite. She loved having student teachers because they did ALL the work for her. She had two of us on her class in 1980. Years later I met her. I walked up with a big smile and said hello.  She had NO IDEA who I was and had no memory of my name or time on her class. I can honesty say I learnt virtually nothing working on her class except on the day my uni supervisor finally came to watch a lesson. The supervisor gave me some wonderful advice about how to use my voice and I thank her still, years later, because I think this is my real talent. I love to read books aloud using voices, soft and loud, in my role as a teacher-librarian. In 33 years of face to face teaching I never suffered laryngitis or other throat issues.

At the end of University we had a similar session to yours with students expressing panic. Not over how to teach reading (page 55) but over how to manage everything else - class roll marking, pupil record cards, discipline, playground duty, etc. I remember the atmosphere of panic at this final session. We felt we had be taught nothing over the last four years that could actually prepare us to work in a real school, with real kids!

I totally related to your description of your first classroom (page 95). Yours was a shed. Mine was an old wooden room with bare walls and no air con in a town where  nearly all summer days were over 40 degrees. Like you, I enlisted my mum to come and help. We covered the notice boards and cleaned up the room. I still cringe when I think how I carefully saved money to buy hessian to cover those brown notice boards. I didn't know then about flint paper. My mum and I climbed ladders, measured the boards, covered them and stapled with an upholstery stapler. The Deputy Principal arrived (it was the school holidays) I don't remember exactly what she said but her tone was so negative. She scoffed at our stupidity. What I had not realised was you could only use pins on that hessian and so hanging up the kids work was a real struggle. I did laugh though, years later, when I visited the school and saw my green hessian was still in place.

High School teaching is so different as you discovered.  It was different for me too working in a high school library (page 149).  I did a year of teacher exchange to a senior high school in Alberta, Canada. You watched the clock to time your 52 minute lessons and I watched the clock praying for an end to my 67 minute lessons. My grade 9 kids, in this rural Canadian school were very challenging. I won't go into details but four of the boys had 50 hours of community service orders each (this is one step away from juvenile prison). No one told me about the horrendous crimes of one boy until I was about to leave. In retrospect it was probably good that I didn't know.

Staff Meetings (page 208, 273, 321)
What can I say - everything that happened to you, every thought you had, every objection to impractical theory, every sigh over a ridiculous directive from on high - all of that happened to me. I wish now I had been more vocal but perhaps that would only have resulted in longer meetings. Ours were often in the morning so the finish time was set but time after time I found it so hard to 'pick up the pieces' and smile at groups arriving in the library after a particularly harrowing morning meeting filled with poor or 'cute' Powerpoint slides. Oh and yes, our staff meetings were in the library and think about this - it was my CLASSROOM! Chairs, left over coffee cups, papers, and a class at the door with their teacher tapping her foot because precious RFF minutes were slipping away. The only time I valued staff meetings was when I was 'allowed' to talk (at least for a short time) to the teachers about the treasures to be found in our school library. I hope the staff found these sessions useful and more importantly practical and possibly even inspirational.

Best Start (page 245) While I didn't ever administer this test I saw the pressure it put on wonderful, experienced, talented kindergarten teachers and the hours spent collecting and reporting on data. This time surely should have been used to work with their students, get to know them and then organise appropriate individual and group work.  Poor little kids - your first day at school and you are hit on the head with a battery of tests and YES it is true some parents even try to teach their kids so they don't fail.  These kids coming into Kindy are perhaps 4 or barely 5 years old. And now teachers also have the Professional Standards to comply with and the writing of their PDPs. I was so distressed to see young staff in my final school, as you say, devoting "their time to the accreditation paperwork" instead of preparing meaningful and creative lessons. And instead of visiting their school library to source materials and especially picture books to enhance their lessons. I have strong reservations about the ideas of 'google' a lesson activity and making a subscription payment a lesson service.

Your principal who told you to go paperless! (page 261) I think he worked at my school too.  Mine banded text books and then complained when everyone spent hours at the photocopier copying worksheets! And yes schools go in cycles. We abandoned the commercial spelling and maths programs and spent hours writing our own only to discover they were ineffective and so we went back to commercial programs which at least sequenced the skills especially in spelling. I kept asking why we were re-inventing the wheel but in the frantic rush of school no one had time to listen.

The part of your journey, that I had forgotten, was the grading system (page 213) awarding an A-F but with the expectation that nearly all the kids were awarded a  'C'. I remember my outrage and I wish I had spoken as eloquently and passionately as you at the staff meeting in my school when this madness was introduced. I could hardly read your description (page 220) of using a rubric for your beautiful art lesson.

Before NAPLAN the test was called BST.  I was working in a low socioeconomic school in a rural town. I couldn't directly protest against this test by withdrawing my actual children because I don't have any but I certainly said, loudly and often, that my kids (if they existed) would NOT sit this test. You said this too!(page 278)  The idea of kids as widgets continues to horrify me especially when all the analysis focuses on terms like value added.  By way of anecdote, we had a little boy in Year 3 at our school back in 1987 who was working below a kindergarten level. He was assessed as needing a special education placement.  The parents did not believe his K-2 teachers. When he sat the BST in Year 3 this little boy just did patterns by colouring the dots on the test paper.  He scored really well on the 'test' and so the parents' views were vindicated - their little boy was not behind, he was going really well.  This is sad on so many levels.

Casual teacher experiences. I wish I could copy page 285 of your book and post it to all Principals and other school executive staff. Time after time I have seen casual teachers given extra duties and the worst classes. This needs to be reversed. Schools could not survive without casual teachers who are prepared to come in at short notice and fill in for staff who are unwell or on leave. Teaching is not like an office job where you can call in sick. At school someone has to replace you and teach actual children! They should be thanked and treated with kindness. The regime at the moment feels like abuse.

Things you mentioned that I had forgotten:
Coils of phone cord twisting back into that familiar tangle.  (page 49)
Teflon toilet paper. (page 80)
Climbing under furniture to get those pesky computers to work in staff meetings. Principal mumbles the Powerpoint took him 2 hours to prepare!

My favourite part of your book was the letter you shared from your student Ed (page 128). I don't have a precious letter like this but I do meet parents from time to time who tell me I helped their child discover a love of reading and that warms my heart. When I retired two years ago a little girl wrote me a letter

Miss Lindgren,
You've helped us to discover the wonderful world of reading ... You've always been there for me when I've been upset and helped to cheer me up and keep me calm. You are kind and considerate and very calm in difficult or tricky situations. No matter what! Manaia G

This letter, out of all the hundreds I received after 33 years of work in NSW Primary schools, made me cry.  I found Manaia and asked her what I had done to deserve this praise. I must have really helped her.  It seems three years earlier, when she was in Year 2, she had been upset during lunch. I had sat down beside her (on the silver seats outside her room) and talked about friends and, well heavens knows what I said -  but for this one little girl it helped and I am proud of that.

Oh and thank you SO much for giving every child a BOOK for their birthday (page 319). How completely wonderful.

Educational philosophy
I cheered when I read your thoughts about:
Stickers and reward charts (page 202) In my final years I just refused to 'buy into' the whole school schemes of reward tickets especially when kids wanted to receive them for simple tasks like pushing in chairs! And don't get me started on house points which I see as pointless.
The importance of seizing the moment (page 251) It makes me so sad to see teachers feeling their is no time for this. I used to rejoice in my school library when a message would come could Mrs ... please have all the books about rocks, sunflowers, chickens, Vincent van Gough etc. Topics and activities coming from show and tell or news in the real world. In recent years I noticed this no longer happens.
A school is NOT business (or a factory - my words). "You can't put them in a graph. You can't capture them in a test." (page 272)

Your words on page 91 should be a chart in every classroom. Here is my abridged version:

• I want to be an organised teacher who is bubbly and happy ...
• I want to be thoughtful ...
• I want to wear bright colours to brighten my student's day
• I want to be knowledgeable and prepared (I would add flexible to this)
• I want to read with the children each morning ...
• I want to bring the newspaper into the classroom each day and make the world accessible
• I'll let them do their spelling test on a Thursday and then again on Friday if they need another go at it
• I won't go back on my word
• I want to show my students that I'm a learner too
• I want to make children feel fantastic about themselves.

If I could be bold and add to your list I would also include:
I will visit my school library and talk to the Teacher-Librarian as often as possible
I will take an interest in what my kids borrow from the library and the books they are reading
I will fill my classroom with books which I will display in an attractive and inviting way

Thank you Gabbi for your book. Reading it has had a huge impact on me. I think old and new teachers should read it along with all school executive and those elusive State and Federal Education ministers.

Best Wishes in your future with your precious girls
Margot