Posts (page 2)

I went in before the first day of school and moved 18 tables and chairs into my class. I had been told that for the first week I could expect around 5 students. I wanted my classroom to have a community feeling to it so I put the tables in a U shape. This was so that they could all see, but they could not talk to each other. When 25 turned up my U became more like a cresent moon with a milky way of stars shooting off in all directions as I frantically searched for more chairs. Because of the flooding that had cut off the town, and an ordering bungle, there wasn’t enough furnature in the school so students had to share chairs, and write in the same books, bumping each others elbows as they did so.

For the first three weeks the students would jump over tables, climb under them, hide in corners or run out the door. Trying to get them to sit in their seats for a lesson was impossible and I held no hope of changing this any time soon.

I tried giving them all a chart with their names on it and if they behaved they got a sticker. If they got 5 stickers they got a prize. It worked for 2 hours. By the end of it they had stolen each others stickers, taken their own stickers off to stick to their eye lids, or they had discovered my stash of stickers and gone around adding stickers to every chart.

So I tried something new. I made my milky way into ordered rows. I printed and laminted name cards and stuck them to tables and students had to sit where their name was. This was to separate trouble students and get some continuity in the class. It worked until recess, where they scraped their name tags off and placed them where they wanted to sit.

I tried points for the rows that were behaving the best, and not removing their labels. This worked for a whole day, but when the next day dawned, the half of the class that had been absent the day before came to school, and had no where to sit, and the half that had been there didn’t come so they ended up sitting anywhere they wanted. I persevered for a week and had little success.

Then I tried another method. If they got out of their seat for any reason without asking, they got a cross by their name. If they got 3 crosses they would have to stay in at recess. For the first 3 days, most of the class missed part of their recess. Then the numbers staying in began to dwindle, and eventually there were only a couple.

Then one morning, after all my fiddling with seating and stressing about behaviour management the fever broke. They sat down, they listened and they did a little bit of work. I let all of them out on time for their recess and I walked out to do lunch duty. There were tears in the corner of my eyes as I made my way into the play ground and Bec came up and asked if I was ok. I stumbled for words. ‘They sat’ I managed to stutter. I didn’t know what to do with myself. All I could think was that if they manage to learn how to sit, imagine how much they could learn.

And that was how things began to change. 

I was reading a book with one of my more difficult children. It was book about a teacher who was leaving the school and the gifts that children brought her. One child brought a fish, another brought some weaving and one brought a bush turkey.

The boy I was reading to said ‘Miss, I love bush turkey’.

‘I do too’, I replied.

Then he asked ‘does your wife catch it for you?’

Now there are several issues here. Firstly I have never eaten bush turkey, just the cranberry sauce turkey that comes pre-sliced at Coles. Secondly…I don’t have a wife and having to explain why would have been quite complex so we just kept reading.

The students often call me Mister rather than Miss. It could just be gender confusion, not helped by my short hair, but its often when they are in trouble. Im yet to work it out.

Days pass, one much the same to another. Each with little breakthroughs, and setbacks. I would wake at 5.30 and make sure I was prepared for the day. After a breakfast of vegemite toast I would head off to school at 7am. There, I would make sure everything was ready to go. Children begin to arrive at 7.45, and school begins with the shrill blowing of a whistle and bare feet stampeding into lines. Our lines overlook a rubbish strewn oval in front, the main road to the left and the wilderness to the right. Children fuss and fidget while they wait to say good morning. Its usually Julie who cuts the ribbon on the new day by saying Good morning children, to which they yell in unison Good monrning Miss Julie. Then Julie will look at the teachers and the children scream as loud as they can ‘Good morning teachers’, then they giggle and we smile as we say a pathetic, unified good morning back as we do a mental role call and calculate how difficult the day is going to be.

We take the role and then the lunch orders – I still have to hide the fact that I get some of them muddled or I don’t know some of their names. I ask for their last name or get them to help me pick their name from the 40 that are on my list.

We take the class down to do daily fitness – and try to come up with games they enjoy playing. Some reluctantly stumble around like sleep still has his hands firmly clasped around their ankles but most run, like brumbies, their skinny legs and bare feet effortlessly run, change direction and run again. The sound of laughter is more potent than my morning coffee and as I look over the tree studded hills with the sun kissing its forehead, I feel homesick for something but I can never figure out exactly what. When the children have snot running from their noses onto their lips or when they climb the goal posts out of teacher reach, or when they begin to do a mass ‘wander’ its time to go inside. They get drinks then file into the classroom where they fight to be the ones to hand out tissues or carry the rubbish bin. The children blow their noses until there is nothing left, which often takes several tissues. Then we sit down to start the day.

For the first few weeks I struggled to think of activities every day to fill in the time. I would have to stretch things out, read ridiculously slowly, or read several books, asking questions and pointing out pictures. After three weeks of this I was given the training on the program I should have been using and the structure made a huge difference.

We have 20 minutes for recess, which is just enough time to make sure the children have food, run to the toilet and make another cup of coffee. I didn’t get a recess or lunch break for the first 4 weeks of school. I was either on duty, had children staying in for misbehaviour or I was preparing for the next session. There were many times through those first weeks when I would turn to the teachers aid desperately and say that they had done everything I had planned for the day. She would always shrug and I would think of something, thankful that children were too preoccupied to see my panic.

I spent weekends making educational games after that so they would have something to do when they had finished that wasn’t entirely mindless.

After the day has finished and the last foot has scampered home, when the noise escapes with the children down the street I sit. I usually sit for 20 minutes. No thoughts dare to knock on the door of my mind. My eyes fail to see the pencils left on the lino floor or eraser shavings on the tables. For those minutes I am unconscious with my eyes open. Like a parent that has finally got their children to sleep and closed all the doors I steal those precious moments and let peace be absorbed into my skin.

Then, if its Monday I go to get the mail before heading back to school to plan for the next day. If its Tuesday I go to the staff meeting. If its Wednesday Amanda and I go to the store, since the fresh food comes in on Wednesday. On Thursday we have staff training and on Friday I go back to the post office and post things.

We tended to leave school 11 hours after we arrived, at around 6pm. Sometimes later. We came home, whipped up some quick dinner, and settled into a night of more work. I worked until my eyelids had to be propped up with forks...then i would succumb. I would go to bed, knowing there was infinitely more work to do. I would dream about the work, often waking up in the night to write down thoughts or ideas...and before i knew it...the alarm would go off again at 5.30am 

The failure of policy is the result of insisting that illiteracy and non-numeracy reflect an ethnic gap between indigenous and non-indigenous students.

The National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy tests of children in school years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in 2008 proved there was no such gap, but showed a chasm between the literacy and numeracy of children attending remote indigenous schools and all other Australian children.

In Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT where there are no remote schools, indigenous children's results are the same as for non-indigenous children. About 10 per cent of all children did not sit tests or failed them.

But for indigenous students in remote NSW schools, failure rates were 25 per cent; in Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland they were 50 per cent; and in the Northern Territory they were 75 per cent. When the number of children not sitting tests are added to those failing in the NT, almost 100 per cent of children in remote indigenous schools fail all numeracy and literacy tests.

NAPLAN results show that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who attend mainstream schools in Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT have mainstream achievement levels. While a handful of exceptional remote schools work to mainstream standards, non-performing remote schools deprive their students of the life skills that every Australian needs.

Low achievement is not a problem of indigenous children but of non-performing remote schools. Low achievement is not because of non-performing remote schools, it is due to the myriad of challenges that face the remote school.

For many indigenous children standard Australian English is not their first language and they are not exposed to standard Australian English at any place other than school.

Overcrowding in houses means that children don't get the quantity or quality of sleep that they require, and constant disruptions in the home environment mean that children lack routine and struggle with the routine of coming to school.

Violence at home spills over into classroom, and a lot of teaching time is lost to behaviour management.

Children are often sick with illnesses rarely seen in cities such as boils, scabies, malnutrition and other infections. They miss school and are sometimes permanently impaired because of these illnesses. In my classroom 87% of my students have hearing loss due to poorly treated ear infections. They also miss large amounts of school if caregivers are sick, for funerals, and due to wet season flooding. 

Many children come to school without food.

Teachers are over worked in a system that clearly does not function, and our recommendations regarding change in the system are not listened to, which is one factor in  the high rates of staff turnover.

Separate, substandard curriculums and limited teaching capacities are a characteristic of non-performing remote schools. Dumbed-down curriculums do not develop literacy and maths skills by building on successive blocks of knowledge.Children rarely attend school for sucessive blocks of time so building on blocks of knowledge is impossible.

I find the assumption that part reason that Indigenous students are underachieving is the limited capacity of the teacher. I have never seen a group of such committed teachers as the ones I currently work with. They arrive at school at 7.30 and most dont leave before 4.30 and we are back at school on the weekends. We constantly think, hope, dispair. We sit together discussing how we can put this great jigsaw of mismatching pieces together to form an education. We have travelled state lines to be here on the front lines of education in Australia to find that we dont get back up, we get gunned down. We are gunned down by simplistic answers put forward by smooth talking politions and journalists who have not spent any time in these remote schools.

Many children are not learning English in early school years, although worldwide research indicates that young children learn languages more easily than older children. Many bilingual programs are thus, in effect, non-lingual, with children not becoming literate in any language. Incentives that reward school attendance have a role to play, but truancy is a matter of law and attendance must be enforced.

A few exceptional remote schools that follow mainstream curriculums exist. Some dysfunctional parents fail to send their children to school, but many concerned parents are aware that their children are not being educated. The implication is that the majority of parents send their children to school every day. This certainly has not been my experience. It is estimated in my community that only 2/3 of children in the community are enrolled at school and even then there is only a 60% attendence rate. There are 38 children in my class, but on average about 20 attend school, and only 6 of those children would come every day. Parents, the community, the police and the school must work together to change this, as non-attendence is the fundamental reason for failure in school. The school can have exciting programs and attendence charts but if parents do not send their children, how can the school be blamed for their lack of education? This is not to say that the parents are solely to blame, it is infinately more complex than that.

They see that their children are at school only a few hours a day, a few days a week, and that the remote school year is much shorter than that of other schools. This is not true. The remote school year is only one week shorter than that of most states and that is primarily due to the difficulties in acessing some schools in height of the wet season.

Prolonged funerals take children out of school, but so do festivals scheduled in term time. The reinstatement of permits has hidden non-performing schools from most Australians, but not from parents.

Early last year the federal government provided nearly $100 million in additional funding for NT education. Fifty of the 200 funded teachers who were to be added by 2011 were supposed to be in place by September last year. The states and the NT also have increased funding for indigenous education. But there have been no substantive policy changes.

The failures of remote education are systemic. Present government approaches fail because they are not evidence-based. Homeland Learning Centres in the NT clearly indicate that separate is not equal.

Alternatives must be found for smaller groups of children. If they cannot be taught by distance education, like other small groups of Australian children, they will have to be bussed, boarded Monday to Friday or during term time, or their parents must move to larger centres during term time.

Throughout Australia, policy reform must tackle inadequate buildings and equipment, introduce mainstream curriculums and teaching standards, and apply standard administrative rules in 200 non-performing remote schools that are only a very small proportion of Australia's more than 9600 schools. But departments of education must take back the responsibility for running their schools from unqualified staff and community activists to ensure that education priorities are met.

Assistant teachers cannot be left hanging. They can be employed as teachers' aides or enrolled in courses that will give them nationally recognised qualifications.

School choice is essential for raising standards. Where communities chose to establish an independent school, their decision should be supported by education departments. And the federal Government's election promise to publish individual school-by-school results must be implemented so parents are able to evaluate schooling alternatives.

Aboriginal and Torres Islander children in remote communities must not be viewed as different from other Australian children. So long as cultural traits justify the removal of children from mainstream literacy and numeracy, science and humanities classes, remote schools will fail. Other children in Australia for whom English is a second language are given seperate literacy programs to assist learning. The curriculim has not been 'dumbed down' for indigenous students, rather it has been adapted for their zone of development. The students in my school are not considered mainstream. We are considered a 'special school' however, unlike other special schools with a teacher student ratio of 6:1 we have 20:1 and are expected to achieve the same results. 

A three-year timetable is realistic if there is the political will to transform non-performing schools and bring remote indigenous literacy and numeracy to mainstream levels. Non-specific targets and decade-long time frames are no longer acceptable. Australia has the resources and it must find the political will to transform non-performing schools.

There is no doubt that education in remote areas needs to change, and that indigenous Australians are severly disadvantaged in getting an equal education.  The cycles of non-attendence, failure of students and teacher burn-out need to be broken. Class sizes should be kept to a maximum of ten students. A home liaison officer needs to be employed to work with centrelink and the police to ensure enrollment and school attendence. Teachers must be valued and allowed to do their jobs, and appropriate measures should be taken to support them in this endevour. Indigenous assistant teachers should be given the oppotunities to study to become full time class teachers.

All Australian children deserve the same high standards of education.

Finally - to my 38 intelligent, cheeky, bright, smiling children - it is my hope that you will receive an education that will open the world up to you. You have some of the most remarkable history surging through your veins, and some of the most horrific, but it is you who will take yourselves into the future.

Kindergarten here is called Transition...and Trannies for short. There is something that seems so wrong with that and still everytime i hear it and watch those lovely children toddle off, I have to laugh.

Sheree is their teacher and she does a fantastic job. She was telling me about a dialogue she had with one of her children. It went something like this... *Language warning*

"Miss, I wanna shit"

"You mean you want to go to the toilet?"

"No miss, I need to shit"

"We try not to speak like that, we say 'I need to go to the bathroom or I need to do a poo"

The child became agitated, and began bouncing from one foot to the other...the way children do when they about about to let their bodily waste loose on the world. "But I just need to shit miss" he groaned.

Sheree told him to go to the bathroom.

A few moments he came out. Sheree asked "have you been to the bathroom?"

"What miss?"

"Did you do a poo?"

"Huh?"

Sheree sighed and reluctantly asked in a hushed tone "did you do a shit?"

"Oh yes miss...its there in the toilet".

I had overcome my breakdown and felt much better by Tuesday and it was just as well. I blew my chewed black whistle until I were red faced to signal to the children that school was about to start. 27 little darlings lined up for my class and my assistant teacher was away. By the end of the day pencils were strewn over the floors and tables, books looked like dead butterflies, lying wings out on the mat and there were muddy footprints on every surface including the tables from when one child tried to see if the fan would take his weight. I was ecstatic...I survived another day.

On Monday I got ready for school and noticed that I was feeling a little teary. I was at school early and had plenty of time to get ready. When the tears began to flow I went to the bathroom to gather myself but they kept coming. I heaved and sniffled, trying to cry silently in the staff bathroom, feeling stupid and embarrassed and very unprofessional. Then when the embarrassment of appearing constipated outweighed the embarrassment of hiding out and crying in the toilet, I unlocked the door and sheepishly stepped out still quivering. No one was in the corridor, no one knew I was there, no one thought I was constipated…so I went back in and burst into tears again.

When the sounds of children laughing and yelling at each other began competing with my snorts and sniffles, I checked my watch and realised that I had no time chance of getting myself together before I had to start class, and the pressure of that realisation set me off again. With no other option, I took a deep breath, sucked up all my snot, wiped all those tears with the back of my hand and walked through the corredore, my face firmly facing the floor and knocked on the assistant principals door.

I managed to stammer ‘can I…’ before my words were once again inaudible. She motioned for me to sit and then she waited…handed me a tissue…waited some more until finally I said ‘I don’t know if I can do this’.

She told me to go home and call my mother and my mother, as wise mothers can do, gave me the combination of the ‘oh my poor darling’ talk and the ‘suck it up princess’ talk. I got back to school within the hour and went to retrive my class from the poor soul who had to take them without notice but the assistant principal saw me and told me to sit in her office.

I sat there, feeling like I was back in school, getting into trouble. I prepared myself to be told that I can’t behave so unprofessionally, or that I’m underqualified, or should just go home. She came in, put a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door and closed it firmly.

She looked serious and stern and asked ‘Did you talk to your mother?’ 

‘Yes’

‘What did she say?’

‘She told me to suck it up and get on with the job’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think that’s a good idea.’

Then she smiled and told me that I obviously have a wise mother. And then, with all the craziness of the first few days of school, with construction happening outside, with students running riot, with the school grossly understaffed, and everything she needed to do, she took time out to sit and chat to me. We talked not about school but about life with all its triumphs and its challenges.  

I left her office encouraged and with a huge amount of respect for her. It was partly that respect that later tipped the balance when I once again faced the desperate desire to leave.

We wandered over to a party at Charmaines…one of the other teachers houses. Mum had packed me a ‘special box’ full of things that I might need when everything got too much. I had a hunch that there may have been alcohol in the box so thought that now was a good as any time and I took the bottle of Monkey Bay, white wine along with me. There was something about having that wine…maybe it was the knowledge that there would not be anymore for a while, no ducking down to the local bottle-o that made me protective of it. I didn’t chill it, so that people may be turned off having some, and I kept it close by my deck chair.

I had a couple of drinks and was having a lovely chat with the head of the high school when I felt the sudden urge to leave. Mid sentence I stood up and stumbled down the road, painted silver by the moon. It may have been my selfishness, the heat, lack of sleep or the lack of food, but I became very drunk, very quickly. Charmain ran after me, and walked me back home. I gagged as I walked and mumbled appologies and told her to go home incase I threw up. She just walked beside me, opened my door and put me to bed. I think I was asleep before I lay down. I didn’t even hear my flatmate stumble in, hit her head on the door and pass out on the floor in a puddle of vomit. Nor did I hear her get up to clean it, only to pass out again in another puddle.

The next morning, she was very much sicker than I was but I was feeling sorry for myself, and locked myself in my room for the day. I had planned to work, to get organised, to get my head around the class and the week ahead but I could do nothing but sleep and curse myself for my stupidity.

My 20 boxes arrived at the post office on the second day of school, and Amandas 30 arrived the day after. We had to fight to get through the door, and getting into the kitchen or laundry was not a feat to undertake lightly. We would have used protective clothing if we had any in all those boxes.

Those first few days of school can only be described as a desperate scrambling, and I didn’t know exactly what I was scrambling for but to stop meant certain death, being eaten alive by children. I was at school at 6.30am, and would leave at 7pm, only to go home to fight with boxes to get to the fridge which safely housed the cheese and crackers that were keeping us alive with the help of copious amounts of adrenaline. Then after a ten minute dinner break, we would be back working and we would work until 11pm. It would be time for a shower and to get into bed, where I would keep planning through my dreams and often nightmares.

I had been warned that new teachers to the school tend to cry in the first three days so I had refrained from wearing makeup as a precaution. As Friday dawned I felt strong. I was sure it was going to be a tear free day, and although it was as insane as the other days I remained stoic and very proud of myself to have made it through my first week tear free. I resolved to have a good weekend, and to begin wearing makeup on Monday.

During our first day at school all of the new teachers got introduced to the school at the morning assembly. There was one new male teacher transfered from another remote school with a fair bit of experience. His name was Mr Graham but when he was asked what he wanted to be called he said 'Mr G'. At this, all of the younger members of the staff stifled our giggles as we had mental flashbacks of 'Summer Heights High' and could not help but mentally make tough Mr Graham act out the ultra feminine and ridiculously flamboyant part of Mr G on the show.

Unfortunately Mr G only lasted until recess...He came into my room which was next door to his, told me that the school was out of control and advised me to leave as well. As my kids jumped around on their tables I nodded sympathetically and told him i might try and stick it out a little longer. With that he jumped in his car and we never saw him again.