Reason #75 Why I Love My Job

Where else but in teaching can you experience conversations like this?

Year 7 girl #1 (to me, while she is dancing with friends): What's up? We're gangsterising.

Me (quizzically): Gangsterising?

Year 7 girl #1: Yes, gangsterising.

Year 7 girl #2 (as if by way of explanation): We're singing a song from "Mulan".

Ah yes, that would be THE definition of "gangsterising". I can't think why it wasn't clear in the first place.

The Winter Commuter Blues

(Begins with a musical prelude to the tune of every 12-bar blues song you've ever heard)

I woke up this morning (da-da-da-da)

Had to get out of bed (da-da-da-da)

It was all dark and cold (da-da-da-da)

Thought I'd stay asleep instead (da-da-da-da)

[Something about going to work

General complaint about life being gloomy]

Singin' yeeeeah...

Babe, you know

I've got the winter commuter blues

Yes, that's right folks, life for me at the moment is a bit like a blues song - a blues song, that is, written by an English teacher who lives 45 minutes (in good traffic) away from work and who, therefore, leaves for work in the dark and comes home in the dark. Add to that a goodly (or not-so-goodly) measure of marking, at all sections of the day except for the bits where I'm driving, and you get the idea. So not all that much like a blues song, when I think about it, but I'm maintaining with the comparison because I think it's funny.

Today being Saturday I was able to get up during daylight, and found myself feeling a little like a liberated convict when I went outside and walked around Brunswick to meet friends for lunch, and later on to go for a walk - just a walk - by Merri Creek. It was amazing how much my mind and soul seemed to be revitalised by such a simple act but one which my life of late has not allowed.

My father used to have a saying which he drilled into me from an early age: you change the things you can change, and put up with the things you can't. It's a tad blunt but true enough, I suppose. So in situations like the one in which I currently find myself, I have to ask: what things can I change, and what things must I simply put up with? I can't move closer to work, not just yet - those sorts of things can't be done overnight. I can't change the times of day that the sun is currently inclined to rise or set. I can't do much to reduce my workload. I'm sure, however, that in amongst all the necessity and stress, there's space for change. But I need some sort of distance from the situation to see these things.

This, I believe, is where prayer becomes paramount. Prayer forces us outside of our situation and forces us into God's way of looking at things - very hard when the situation seems all-consuming, but so necessary. Prayer also turns "putting up" with a tough, unchangeable situation into something that might be better called "endurance". Putting up with a situation is done with gritted teeth. Endurance is done with the patient resolve that only the Holy Spirit can fully provide.

So next time I write a (bad) song about my life, I hope it's more like a gospel song, with space for melancholy but also with a heart-lifting chorus about hope and rising beyond my afflictions. But it won't be me writing the song (which may be an improvement in itself). It'll be the power of prayer and the Holy Spirit. It isn't a song I can write myself.

Temperamental Theology

There is a small group of teachers in my staffroom that often finds itself back at school after all other teachers have left. We don't plan it that way. We just all work late. But something happens, when we notice that it's just us left. Slowly at first, then more vigorously, the big theological questions come out. We talk reformed theology without needing to worry about offending anyone.

Of course, I'm making it all sound very clandestine, mostly because it amuses me to do so. It's just that, in a Christian school, it's important to focus on what unites us, rather than thinking about what divides us. Since we're united on the essentials, we are able to put aside other differences without too much concern. And yet, when we do talk theology more freely, we find ourselves getting quite passionate about those topics that we cannot discuss as openly with everyone. We care greatly about what the Bible has to say, and how we can know that we are interpreting the Bible accurately. These things do matter to us, and we wonder sometimes, I suppose, whether these matters that we discuss are what Paul would call "disputable matters" or if instead they are matters of...well...fact.

Yet it has made me wonder also about what factors lead to different people taking different theological positions. Naturally, everyone will say, "I believe this teaching because that's what the Bible says," but quite obviously more is going on than just that, otherwise the same Bible passage couldn't be used to justify two or more utterly different, and quite incompatible, positions. Certainly, some positions are justified when particular passages, and only those passages, are read in a fairly questionable way, in isolation from the rest of scripture, while other positions come from a more holistic reading. And I'm not going to say that "everyone has their own interpretation" as a way of avoiding the issue altogether. But it does make me think about the way that our experiences and personalities can, to an extent, be seen to dictate the theology that we end up espousing.

Look, for instance, at someone who is more melancholic, and see which books of the Bible they will most naturally relate to. They will probably appreciate Lamentations and Job. They will find great solace in Psalm 51. They will almost certainly keep returning to Romans 7. Then take an optimist, and watch them gravitate to the parts of the Bible that most uphold their generally positive view of human experience. (Notice that I'm clearly not an optimist. I can't even think, offhand, of what texts such a person would gravitate to!) Certainly, systematic and careful reading of the Bible can do much to counteract these kinds of issues of temperament and inclination. But I quite simply can't see myself becoming a triumphalist. My experiences of disappointment and pain at the hands of God are hardly going to make me preach about the constant, ongoing victory of the Christian walk. Part of this is because I don't think that's a doctrinally right position to take. But part of me just doesn't think that way. I doubt I'd be a triumphalist of any kind, whether or not I'd ever read the Bible.

And so thinking this brings a new dimension to how I feel about those reformed discussions we have in the A1 staffroom after school. Yes, I do feel that there are Bible passages that support our views. Yes, I think they are consistent with the whole of Scripture. But it reminds me of something important: that I am to give my whole person up to all of God to be transformed by all of Scripture, not just the parts that confirm my worldview. And there are triumphant parts just as there are pessimistic ones, and the same God inspired them both. Here's hoping I remember that next week, and the week after, and the week after that.

The ratings are in...

In one of those classic 21st-century moments of "Follow the hyperlinks" while online, I found myself at au.rateyourteacher.com, a website where, as the name suggests, students can rate their teachers. I remember going there in my first year of teaching, finding that I wasn't rated, and moving on. I can't say I've even thought to look there again in the four years since. But there I was, and so I thought that, while I was at it, I'd have a look to see if I now appeared.

I steeled myself, of course, for disappointment - either that no-one thought of me enough as a teacher to even bother rating me, or that they thought of me, but all negative thoughts. Scrolling down the various names of Strathmore Secondary College teachers I told myself that it wasn't a very reliable form of feedback, that kids who went on to rate their teachers would really only bother doing that if they either felt strongly for or against you, that you were unlikely to find a balanced critique on such a site. Well, then I saw my name. Sure enough, I am now significant enough as a teacher to be rated. Phew.

To the ten students, of the several hundred that I have taught so far, who decided to rate me, I would like to thank you. Your average rating of 3.8 is certainly not going to make me seek another profession. But just for the record, my name is spelt "Pullar" not "Puller". A small mistake, I know, but please, our teacher-egos are very fragile things and something as subtle as a misspelt surname can send it crashing to the ground. I expect to see it corrected by the end of the week.

Blah

Well, it's been a while now since I last wrote on this blog, and that's mostly because, outside of the classroom, my brain is scarcely functioning. A bit of an exaggeration, I realise, but I certainly haven't had sufficient brain-function to write anything particularly interesting or incisive (assuming, of course, that what I write here usually is interesting and incisive!). If I'm not marking, or preparing lessons for the next day, I'm eating, or sleeping. That, or engaged in something incredibly mindless, like playing Spider Solitaire on my computer, or trying to achieve the next level of SuperPoke.

A friend of mine who is doing her Honours year at Uni this year responded to my claims of being "braindead" by saying that she was feeling the same way, and said how sad it was that currently both the educators and the educated were braindead. She has a good point. It's that time of year, I suppose, when all involved in education wish they were somewhere else, doing something that doesn't require thinking.

Now the Melbourne Cup long weekend looms, and, much as I disapprove of the races in general, I'm incredibly thankful that they give me four days off. Hopefully we can all recharge a little bit, and go in next week with enough fuel to take us through to the end of term.

And maybe I'll regain the brain capacity to write something more interesting on my blog. Assuming I ever had the capacity in the first place.

2 sir W lov

Well, my fascination with the blogosphere has now taken me into brave new territory - the world of educational blogging.

Not that that's so new for me. I do, after all, have my own personal, rarely updated educational blog. But now I'm experimenting in a blog that my students, and other students at the same year level, can use. The theory behind it as that the web has a magical power over our students, that some who are completely unwilling to talk in class will happily talk online for hours. Is this something we can harness for educational effect? Quite probably. Is it easy to do? Yes and no.

Setting up the blog itself was a breeze. It took a mere five minutes on learnerblogs.org to set myself up with a username, password and blog. Getting the site functioning as something more than a personal vanity project was a bit trickier. Initially I planned on making it something that all students had to register for, to avoid any unwanted e-traffic. (Which is, I regret to say, why I'm not going to put a link to it from here, because, while I theoretically trust you all, I don't know who most of you are, and am not sure that I want you hanging around my students.) However, given how few people actually have the site's URL, I doubt it will get out of hand. If it does...well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Ultimately, it was too much of a hassle to register other teachers, let alone students, so in the end I gave up. This shouldn't be a problem, unless we start getting e-stalked by someone particularly unsavoury, but the main shortcoming is that students can't write posts. They can only respond to the posts that we've written.

Neverthless, as far as student-centred learning goes, the site's doing pretty well now. Students are chatting enthusiastically about Arthur Miller's "The Crucible", using punctuation and grammar that would make Miller cringe, but they would have done that in their essays anyway.

The one dampener has been the handful of students that have just HAD to be immature about it - the kind, of course, who would have been immature about most things we did, but it's still a nuisance, particularly when their immaturity is now theoretically open for the world to see. It's also just a bit sad when some of the students who this was most designed for - kids who are into computers but not brilliant at English - treat it as a joke or a waste of time. And, of course, there's the kids who haven't even got a copy of "The Crucible" yet, and no amount of technology is going to help them write intelligent comments on a book they haven't read. It's a sad reminder that, no matter how much effort we put into being engaging, there's still a need for students to try being engaged.

But on the whole, it's been a roaring success, at least for its first two days of active existence. Certainly the number of intelligent and useful comments being made far outweigh the idiocy of some other comments, and, at the end of the day, I'm the site administrator, and can block any comment that I deem inappropriate. On the plus side, students from different classes are communicating readily with each other, and with a range of different teachers - a real community of learning.

Pity some kids still have to be idiots, but you can't succeed with everyone. Technology's not the all-purposes answer, but it's certainly helping.

John, I'm only dancing

Not wanting to add to material already covered more than satisfactorily in Dave's post on "guys who don't dance", I have to say I've been forced to think a bit lately about the politics of dancing in public. I've also been forced to recognise that the majority of the people that I work with are very immature. When you remember that I'm a high school teacher, and that I work in a school of 1,400 teenagers, it shouldn't sound surprising, but it is from time to time. Just bear with me and I'll tell you why.

At the request of some of my Year 11 students, on Saturday night I went along to my school's Debutante Ball, a thoroughly anachronistic institution that, amazingly, many teenagers, both male and female, are still quite attached to. I guess it's an opportunity to dress up and get trashed at the expense of parents and school - or maybe there's more to it that I just don't get. Anyway, it seemed important to some of my students that I go to support them, so I was the dutiful teacher, paid my $55 and went along to the Melrose Ballroom in Tullamarine for what my mother would call "an interesting cultural experience".

Now, there was a lot of sitting down, talking, and watching countless teenage girls walk across the dancefloor with their partners and curtsey before the official party. There was also a reasonable amount of dancing. At a few points I contented myself to sit and talk, rather than dance, but when some of the women from work asked me to come out onto the dancefloor, I didn't want to be an uptight pain and say that "no, I didn't dance", which would be a lie - I do, but I did feel uncomfortable at the thought of dancing in front of students, because, when you work with teenagers, you never know what will win you more respect and what will just provide them with scope to laugh at you. Anyway, I decided not to be self-conscious and got out onto that classy Western suburbs dancefloor - and found myself being the token young man dancing with a bunch of (lovely) middle-aged women. Nothing wrong with any of them - they were all very nice. But it was amazing to realise just how much my status as a teacher influenced where I danced, how my dancing was received, etc. Despite being far closer in age to the students than I was to any of these colleagues and spouses of colleagues, I was clearly designated as one of the slightly daggy old people. A bit unsettling, but not an issue for me unless it was an issue for others.

But then you see the looks that some of the students give when they see Sir dancing, and, of course, you know that, to them, seeing you dance is like (to borrow an expression from "Mean Girls"), "seeing an animal walking on its hind legs". You are no longer just a young person dancing. You're a teacher dancing.

A Year 9 boy who I've taught in the past and coached for Debating charmingly told me at school today that "apparently there's a video circulating of you dancing". I refused to react, and showed no interest whatsoever in the situation, which I think was the appropriate response to have, but I went away feeling like somehow I'm no longer just a person. Not in the eyes of my students. Even the kids that like and respect me are a little amused to think that I might dance, or be in any way human. I mean, to give them further ammo today, I arrived at school having had a hair cut (gasp!). I got my fair share of compliments on the hair (it badly needed to be cut, so it was probably an improvement), but was also acutely aware at how much I'm being watched and surveyed. I guess it's just part of life as a teacher, but it's been quite an adjustment this year to realise how much I am on display all the time - and by people who, lovely as they often are, still sometimes delight in identifying faults in you, such as being a slightly dorky dancer. And then there's the ones who are vindictive and cruel. Every school has them. We have to put up with them watching us and laughing at us too, because for them it's about power. We have it, and they resent that.

It just reminds me of how counter-cultural a career teaching is. Normally in life, we go through the various stages of immaturity that everyone goes through in growing up, then, reaching maturity, we spend the rest of our lives (mostly, aside from kids) only with mature people. But in teaching, we willfully return to the often frustrating awkwardness of youth and live alongside it, tolerate it, bear with it every day. It's well worth doing, but also irritating at times. I wonder if it ever gets any less frustrating? As one group of students grows up, we always have a new bunch of Year 7s coming along to replace them. There's no cure for it - just continual patience, and a willingness never to take yourself too seriously.

I'm sure I'll learn. And I'll probably come to embrace how my dancing seems to them. I'd always rather that than be a teacher who doesn't dance.

Togetherness

It's an occupational hazard of the "caring" professions (teaching, nursing, etc.) that you get so caught up in caring for your "clients" that you a) forget to care for yourself, and b) forget to care for your colleagues. Teaching is an amazingly collegial (is that a word?) profession, and I am in a very collegial school. We share resources; we share student-specific tips; we share germs and illness, thanks to school central heating systems; we also share stress at Report Writing times. All jokes aside, I've been amazed by how well the staff at my school get along, aside from the standard, only-to-be-expected workplace politics. We like each other. We like working together.

That being said, when you work in a high-pressure environment (and teaching, whatever they might say in the media, is high-pressure), it's easy to get bogged down in what you have to do, and not to take the time to enjoy the relationships you have at work. It's also hard, when you have so many students demanding time and attention to remember that your colleagues deserve time and attention too - and not always school-related attention.

This really struck me today for a number of reasons. The first reason was when I found out that one of my friends from work - a fellow graduate who sits with me in the staff room - had some sort of seizure/collapse at work late yesterday afternoon, after I'd left. Fairly distressing, really, and a lot of us were quite worried about her. Needless to say, she wasn't in today. Then, later in the day, I found myself in a number of quite meaningful and personally important conversations with colleagues who sit in my section of the staffroom.

Now, I was hardly lazy today. I taught five classes and got quite a bit of marking and preparation done. But I also took the time out to respond to the situations that arose with colleagues. I took the time to call my friend to see how she was. I took the time to have those important and valuable conversations with colleagues in the staffroom. And no, none of that counts as time spent on developing my teaching practice, or on actual teaching. Does that mean it was unimportant? No teacher worth their salt would say that time spent building relationships with students is less important than time spent "teaching" them. If that's the case, then time spent building relationships with colleagues is also essential.

I know that my day was enriched greatly by these experiences. And it was good to be reminded that our lives are more than what goes on in the classroom, and to see that our relationships as colleagues can go beyond sharing lesson plans, and can, at times, enter into the realm of helping each other personally, in ways that we may never full