In
many shipwrecks, survivors are often occupying deserted islands as
castaways with nothing. I cannot recall the details but do remember
two men who, after losing their shipmates and vessel to a devastating
storm, made their way to an uninhabited island. With only each other
for company, they soon found that their fishing skills without
equipment was negligible, their supply of cigarettes quickly ran out,
and that they did not enjoy the nightlife of carnivorous insects.
While I do not feel particularly seaworthy, I submit to understanding
these men in regards to their feeling nothing. As I write this, it is
exam week for my school which means that the seniors have gone off of
leave. Through the luck of the draw, I have no scheduled junior
classes and so while I informally observe classes, I don’t have any
grit to do while the senior students are away. More closely, as I
write this, it is actually night time and I am in the middle of
writing lesson plans by the light of the moon and a computer monitor,
with my sole companion- my last tin of spaghetti.
It
has been a tough week, faced with the ever-edging reality that soon
this career will soon be ignited and I will move from the unpaid
intern to something quite startling- a professional. For indeed, a
teacher is a professional and the more this week has gone on,
the more I have grappled with this fact. I don't mean to gripe about
Epsom Campus as if this were a running gag of a sitcom, but the staff
there often talk about how teachers go to work to change lives and
instil a sense of wonder in students. My sense of wonder is how
teachers with this mentality survive the first five years on the job.
Certainly, the variety of achievement that practicum demands have
reminds me of the Hegelian master-slave dynamic (or, more cynically,
of the prisoner-warden relationship). It has become my practice as of
late to say to inert students “at least give me the courtesy of
pretending to work” as opening their exercise books is at least a
bigger step to the possibility of studying than a closed book. While
teachers have a huge onus on the learning experience, I feel like
some professional distance is required when students refuse to work
and no amount of coaxing or pedagogical rationale will change that
fact. We're teachers. We're not Jedi (I actually looked this one up
and the plural of those heroic lightsaber-wielding freedom fighters
is the same as the singular).
One
of the Graduating Teacher Standards is “demonstrate
commitment to and strategies for promoting and nurturing the physical
and emotional safety of learners” and I am pleased to see that I
have jumped another hoop in this puppy parade of assessment. During
one of my informal observations, I spied a mutual loathing
(adulterated loathing) between two adolescents which eventually
flared into an emotional meltdown for one of them. Although it was my
first time in the class, I was quickly able to diffuse the victory
party the bully had thrown by sending him out of the classroom.
Talking
with him, I discerned that he engaged in such a conflict for no good
reason other than that he saw it as fun, and upon the bare facts
being laid out, it was something he was embarrassed about. The Church
of Neo-Classical in Doctor
Who don't
have a devil- just the things that men do.
Another
GTS I remember hooping is “demonstrate proficiency in oral and
written language (Māori and/or English), in numeracy and in ICT
relevant to their professional role”. The former is quite a boring
story- as a threat to a few students who wouldn't do formal writing,
I would teach them math
(I
know, I know- I shouldn't use one subject as punishment for another).
Following through with my bluff, I laid out the Euclidean proof of
Pythagorean theorem, and the use of triangular numbers in calculating
two-point connections in polygons. Perhaps not a conventional piece
of evidence for the GTS, but I must say, it does count
(sorry-not-sorry,
as the kids say). The ICT came in the fact that I was able to use the
DVD function in the class projector while the reliever teacher was
confused about it. Again, a weak show (but you haven't come here to
hire me as an ICT teacher unless there was an ICT Teacher conference
in Dunedin, and there's been a cataclysmic disaster in Dunedin).
A
third GTS (I promise, this is probably the last one I talk about) is
“demonstrate respect for te reo Māori me ngā tikanga-ā-iwi in
their practice”. My practicum school had, in its tutor group time,
the daily notices (yellow pages in the school) read out. One such
notice was a scholarship being advertised solely to Maori students.
“That's just racist” says the trio of white students who I
genuinely enjoy talking with during the form time. I then seemed to
be possessed by the Spirit of Educational Professional Studies
612A/B, and went on a rant about affirmative action, achievement
equality, historical disadvantages that Maori students have had. The
matter was dropped, though if it sunk in is impossible to prove.
Finally,
I hesitate to go back to this well but I would like to talk about the
fact that I am still living very much a threadbare existence as a
student teacher who is unpaid
and
still with expenses like rent and food and power. Okay, maybe it
seems stupid but I like a roof, and meals, and light when it goes
dark. “Get a job perhaps” said my Visiting Lecturer the last
school I was at. My answer was to bite my tongue, because the
response would likely have been “oh, why didn't I think of that?
You are a clever person. I see why they made you a lecturer!” It
did, in fact, cross my mind to get some work this year to tide me
over financially but I already have a job. I am at school for six
hours every day and doing university assessments or school prep for
three more. If you think I have energy for another job on top of this
one, you must think I have a superhuman reserve of it. So, like the
castaways I mentioned at the beginning, with seemingly nothing, I
must conjure up a rather impressive existence. I must metaphorically
turn palm fronds into beach hammocks, stones and sticks into fishing
spears, and small twigs and hay into a fire in which to send smoke
signals (SOS). This marooned status has, I know, been entirely
voluntary, and so I posit that this should only prove to demonstrate
even more that I desperately want to be a teacher for this miserly
living is easily something I could have opted out from for something
that might have fed me. I shall proudly write my lesson plans and
university assignments by the light of the moon with my last tin of
spaghetti for a friend, though like most castaway stories, I'm
probably going to have to eat him.
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