DISCUSION

Thursday 1

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By Thursday, much time has passed. There have been highs, and there have been lows. Ups and downs, growth and failure. The lows are exhausting. There is so much still to do. Will this week ever end? There is still no space to think clearly. Tiredness sets in. Now into the second half of the week, the physical toll becomes overwhelming. The weekend seems to be still too far away. But with the lows, comes recognition that some things are not as hard as they once were. Teaching is complicated, and that is clear. Teaching requires much. But there are now newer people, those who have only just arrived. I have some, only a few, tips to share with newer teachers. The tricks of the trade that help, even if only a little.

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There are periods of fast growth and development, periods of stagnation and sometimes periods of regression for the beginner in their learning about teaching. (Cameron, 2001, p.4).

Teaching is instructing, advising, counseling, organising, assessing, guiding, goading, showing, managing, modeling, coaching, disciplining, prodding, preaching, persuading, proselytizing, listening, interacting, nursing, and inspiring. Teachers must be experts, generalists, psychologists and cops, rabbis and priests, judges and gurus. And that’s not all. (Ayers, 2001, p.4)

1 _{The first layer of this chapter contains two stories entitled Not Another Day and Sinking, Not}

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7.1.1

Not Another Day

I either have chronic Mondayitis or the honeymoon is over.

(Teaching Journal, p.10)

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So I start fulltime teaching. Day one is a dream. The students are wonderful. Lessons are wonderful. Everything is wonderful. I go home at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, dump my backpack just inside the door, throw off my black polished Doc Martins, strip off my jumper and trousers, pull back the doona cover from my bed, slide in, and throw the yellow covers over my head. The support of the mattress, pillow, and snuggle of the doona are heaven, and I close my eyes. Time stops.

Ryan phones for a lift home. I don’t know it’s him, or even recognise that the phone is ringing, but resent being woken from my silent abyss. I bumble quickly out of bed, trying to avoid flashing my undies to the outside world, and lunge for the phone before the answering machine beats me (I swear it thinks we have a competition).

‘What were you doing?’ Ryan asks from his hazy work thoughts. ‘Um, just having a snooze’ I reply.

‘In the afternoon?’ ‘Yeah, I’m just so tired.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ he adds, and I know he’s right. Lots of people work and get tired, but I don’t know if I can convey just how much I needed that doona over my head when I walked through the door.

‘Um, when do you want a lift?’ ‘Have you fed the cat?’

‘Do you want me to pick you up now?’

Neither of us answers each other’s questions, and this soon becomes a pattern in the evenings, as we both develop our working life roles and routines, and try and work out where domestic chores fit into the fulltime working week.

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Morning again. The sun is up already, and I feel completely unprepared for the new day. Tiredness strikes me like a brick, and my 10 hours in bed has done nothing to refresh me. My eyes are puffy like they’ve been attacked by mosquitoes, and my shoulders are slouched with the weight of the books that I haven’t marked. I am in shock that I will be getting up at the same time everyday for most of the year. What I think I am going to find really hard will be the responsibility of getting somewhere on time. It’s already 7:27am, and we’re supposed to be walking today. If I drive, maybe I can snooze for another 9 minutes.

Smack, goes my hand on the buzzer. Up comes the doona.

Seemingly instantly the buzzer is on again, and I throw my feet over the side of the bed. My torso has not followed, and I have to push myself up with my hands. ‘Another day’ I think as I shuffle through to the bathroom.

‘At least you don’t have to shave everyday’ Ryan calls. I’m dramatizing the countdown of the days.

‘Day one, dum, de, dum! Day two, dum, de, dum!’ staring at the North Melbourne Kangaroo’s calendar on the wall. I visually cross off the days of March that have already passed, and count how many are left. When is Easter coming? I plead with the handsome footie player who’s flexing for the camera.

‘Never’ I imagine he sneers.

Teaching while tired sucks! I couldn’t shake the energy into my routine today until the very last two periods when I had my two Year 8 Drama classes back to back. My day begins with a free period, which is normally a good thing as it gives me room to deal with any outstanding issues from the day before. It’s a good photocopying opportunity. I have Year 9 Drama in the second period and either they don’t mix, or I can’t match what I have planned with what they are interested in doing. Maybe I don’t understand what I am doing. We’re working on improvisation. Students are in pairs with a script to rehearse that is simply called ‘He/She’ because there is minimal information in the scripts – no character names, no context, just simply lines like:

she it's the same thing he no, it's not

she yes it is

he let's not go through all that again she right

Unfortunately the warm-up turns into half the lesson, and this is not what I have intended at all. How did this happen? I find myself wondering half way through. Am I prepared for Monday? I am sure I checked my lesson plans on Friday afternoon before I left for our special Friday meeting (the one with champagne)? In reflection, I guess I am not. I fully acknowledged that I am suffering from tiredness, and sadness at how swiftly a weekend goes.

After this dreadful lesson comes to an end I verbalize these self criticisms to Sarah before she zooms off to teach Year 10. Why have I neglected to foresee that the kids might suffer from Mondayitis too? In many ways I think I am being naïve. I am generally feeling down at school at the moment. It’s information and contact with kids overload. I find myself sitting in my office, staring blankly at my notice board – not really thinking about lessons, or units. Just vague, zoning out.

Thinking back a bit, I really enjoyed Friday drinks after school. Oddly, I realise there was not a male to be seen there, and I wonder if this is because they don’t need to collapse in the chair and guzzle bubbly wine like I do, or that they’re off

appear sometimes, though I think we might need to increase the beer instead of the champagne to entice them. We talked about stuff other than schoolwork. We talked about us, and this makes me feel real, like I really have a place, making contact with real people. The school has an overt, structured, and rigid routine, where it is easy to go through the motions and not feel in control.

I’ve decided. I’m not going to Year 7 camp after school this week. I don’t care. Is this because I’m tired, or have I already lost motivation? My personal opinion at the moment - just tired! But I am organising games for the Year 7s at lunch, and volunteering to go on Year 8 camp at Easter, so I can’t be that tired, can I?

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I’m still counting days of the week. Wednesday has affectionately been deemed ‘hump day’. The idea is that the week is like a mountain, which starts slowly with Monday, and gradually makes it up to the Wednesday peek, before sliding hopefully swiftly and briskly into Friday. Unfortunately, it is Saturday and Sunday that seems to go the quickest, especially when there’s a Sunday rehearsal, and then Monday is really like the second day of the week where I arrive in the morning wondering if I’ve ever really been away.

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It’s really hard to teach when you don’t feel 100%.

This afternoon I’ve felt flat, dreading the slow aching potential cold. I actually feel anxious about the thought of being sick tomorrow. The general expression that I’ve heard older and wiser staff members utter is ‘it’s easier to be sick at school than sick at home’. This expression refers to the amount of planning that you have to organise in order to have a day at home sick. I remember Ebony saying that she didn’t understand why you had to provide work for relief teachers considering they get paid more than you and their lessons are basically a ‘write-

someone else’s? Well, I’ve had a little relief experience in the public and private systems (a few days here and there) and basically the private system seems to work much better from the point of view of the supervising teacher coming in to help out. You get the class list and clearly set out work for them to do. However, now on the other side of the fence, I feel miserable at the thought of having to drag myself out of bed, feeling like death, and planning anywhere between two and four lessons before 7:30am in the morning. I don’t like that idea. Thankfully I’m feeling better, but the thought of such a situation makes me sick.

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I arrive home worn out and down because my last two lessons, my back-to-back Year 8s, were not the fun they normally are. The last few weeks I have loved these consecutive classes. The two classes, though very different, have both mixed very well, and all the kids seem to respond swiftly to my behaviour management strategies. Today’s lesson was very teacher-centred with teacher-in-role three times during the lesson. The kids got the chance to work with a partner for a short time, but then they came back and shared their discoveries in role as a group. As this was their first time working in this way I was very tough on appropriate responses. Some were silly (which is a normal response to a new Drama strategy) but I had to listen very closely and think quickly to respond in role using such statements as ‘you must have interviewed the wrong person’ or ‘I think you’ve come to the wrong meeting’. I would have been tired from this lesson even if I had been feeling 100%. The kids were good, and I let them know that I didn’t have as much energy as I needed to.

Also, my voice is croaky and sore. But even though I acknowledged how I was feeling, I still had a role to fulfill and had to push myself. I realise how much of yourself you put out there when you’re teaching, and especially in Drama. The second lesson I made a mistake and started with the wrong role-play. I stopped, and said ‘oh, that’s the wrong one’, and apologised (silently cursing myself at the same time for making such an absent-minded mistake). They reacted very well, and said that I should just have stopped and restarted. We changed, but I still