Violence and Love

I wanted to explain things to myself - to see if I could slice through to the truth with that old, old weapon, the battered old sword of story telling
Peter Straub, The Throat

"Can you look after my class for a minute, I have to go next door. She slapped Simon in the face in front of the class yesterday, and she's with the admin." Andrea, in the room next door to my friend Candace, has hit students before, in one case with a book. I hope this latest and most public transgression will lead to some sort of solution: personally, I favour tossing Andrea unceremoniously out of the school.

And of course I forget the mercy that was shown to me as a student when I should have been tossed out - right now I'm on the high moral ground

Arcadia has been founded on a number of key ethical commitments: one of these is mutual respect and caring between students and teachers. I can't understand how Andrea possibly convinced the school's selection committee that she was the kind of teacher this school is looking for: she must have been a convincing liar. Not only is she violent and verbally abusive toward students, she has no image of, and doesn't value, collaborative planning approaches, the attitude of respect toward students or any of the other key commitments on which the entire school program is based. And she's a rotten teacher: unwilling to prepare, unable to extemporise.

It's just so sad: my good friend Emma began the year with this class. They were fractious, full of energy and a bit rebellious. Through a brilliant combination of firmness and respect, by the end of first term Emma had the class cooperative, engaged and enjoying their learning. Her approach was grounded in the language of rights and responsibilities, and in a deep respect for the students' opinions, ideas and choices. The change was remarkable, and I looked forward to my weekly time with the class. Then, at the end of Term One, Emma left on maternity leave.

Within days of Andrea's arrival, the class reverted to their earlier state, and beyond. They became - with good reason - cynical, suspicious, sneaky and mean. Tape appeared on the edges of their desks, delimiting their personal space and daring others to cross it. Graffiti began to appear.

Perhaps the saddest thing for me is the way that my own teaching with the group is changing, against my will. While Emma was teaching the class, I could operate in similar ways: placing the responsibility for the students' behaviour and learning squarely on them, respecting their choices, and applying appropriate consequences for disruption, but plenty of praise for good learning. The students responded well to this regime: even if they chose to misbehave, it was a conscious choice, and they responded well to correction. But under Andrea, I find that my own approach has to become more authoritarian: after a week of being bullied, attempts to allow them to take responsibility for their learning result in chaos.

Weeks later, Andrea is still teaching at the school: the mills of the gods grind slowly. But do they, as the proverb goes, grind exceedingly fine? How can the situation be allowed to go on and on, when it's just so directly opposite to the values the school espouses? It's hard to understand the apparent lack of action from Andrew: if the school administration has done anything about Andrea's actions, it hasn't been reported back to her colleagues in Cowan team, and that gnaws at their morale. We'll see what happens as the year progresses - I wish something dramatic would, just to make the situation tolerable.

One thing, at least, has happened - Simon, the student Andrea slapped, has moved over into Candace's class for the remainder of the year. I think everyone realised that the conflict of personalities was extreme, and that Simon's reaction to Andrea's bullying would continue to land him in trouble. It just wasn't fair - Simon is very bright, and quite mature for his age. He's also very strong-willed: he knows his rights and will stand up for them. But he's not a wilfully disobedient or disruptive kid.

The dilemma, for me, is how to support all my colleagues, and the students. How do I support Candace, without having our entire conversations be about Andrea: there are other things we need to talk about, for the students' sake and our own. Can I support Andrea in attempting to change her attitudes and behaviour? Must I continue to be civil to her in the staffroom, while something within me cries "Abuser!"? Should I provide my own curriculum resources to her? I don't want to: she ought to be doing her own planning work. But I want to support the students, too.

What is the most professional, and the most ethical,

The two don't always coincide, although perhaps they should

line to take with the students?

I can't condone her behaviour, but I shouldn't undermine a colleague. I have to acknowledge the students' anger and frustration, but I can't condone their subversion of her. I don't know what the right thing for me to do is, given that I don't have the power to do the things I think would really help...

Jesus said "There are only two rules: Love God, and love each other." Sounds simple, doesn't it, but I find it impossible. It's easy to love Sue - she's beautiful, she loves me, we share our whole lives.

Well, it's easy most of the time, but when we're busy, and I'm tired and stressed, and she's being unreasonable... And besides, loving her fully doesn't only mean flowers when I come home and phone calls from work and boxes of chocolate. It means stubbing my toe and cursing naked in the night as I get up to the children for the third time, it means scraping the greasy dishes and emptying the bin and cleaning the toilet and not buying the CDs I want. I fail to love her as fully as I want to, almost every day.

And she's easy to love. But Jesus wasn't just talking about Sue - he was talking about Andrea too. I can't even start loving her - liking her is a tough enough proposition.

But that's what God is for. God is an infinite reservoir of love, just waiting there. When I have the guts and the mind and most of all the heart to remember, I don't have to love Andrea myself. I can let God's love for her flow through me to her. In the end, it all comes down to Jesus' two easy

impossible

rules, and to keeping my heart open. But sometimes even that's more than I can manage...

"I hadn't thought there'd really be any major dissonance between what I was trying to do - you know, integrated curriculum, student centred learning and negotiation - and what the rest of the teachers at Arcadia were doing."

In Peter's office, Thursday morning, we're reflecting - or at least, I'm reflecting, and he's listening - on my expectations of the school, and some of the frustrations I'm already starting to feel with the progress of my research.

"I expected a fair bit of freedom in developing curricula for my classes. Listening to the discussion within the school last year, I expected the curriculum to be much more fully integrated than it is: the various learning areas inform one another more than they would in a traditional high school, but there are still separate sections of the day dedicated to particular disciplines in many classes. You know, it's like 'Put away your maths books now, it's time for science'."

"Why is that, do you think?" asks Peter. "Is it because of constraints on the timetable, or demands from the Education Department? Or is it the hegemony of the technical rationality reasserting itself?"

"I think one reason there's not much integration of science with other subject areas is that Fred Simmons, the Head of Department for science, has a really strong content-based view about what's important in junior secondary science. He's had years of experience in traditional science teaching, and he talks about 'non-negotiables'. These are supposed to be the things students need for upper secondary science, and he defines them in terms of particular facts and pieces of 'content', rather than skills and attitudes. Because these content lumps are usually pretty scientistic and abstract, it's almost impossible to integrate them with the particular module the students are studying."

Peter listens and nods. "What will that mean for your teaching, and your work with the team and the other teachers?"

"My role in the school becomes ethically problematic: I want to improve students' learning opportunities, and I think one important facet of that has to be discarding most of this 'non-negotiable' stuff. I mean, really (1) students don't retain it anyway, and we re-teach it in upper school, (2) it wrecks their positive attitudes toward science, (3) it gives them a very positivistic model of what science 'is'...do I have to go on? I'd far prefer to concentrate on the integrated modules, and draw in scientific ideas and ways of working and experiences when they're relevant and when they'll fit neatly."

"Can you go ahead and do that? Surely you've got a fair bit of autonomy within the five classrooms, and even in the whole team?"

"Yeah, I guess I can do some of it, although not as much as I'd like to. I guess I feel like I'm a guest in the school, and it wouldn't be appropriate or fair for me to attack Fred's approach or subvert it. I need to continue a dialogue with him and try to broaden his approach, but my own teaching will still be constrained by his influence."

"That is a bit frustrating," agrees Peter. "How will that impact on your research? Does it make it impossible to do what you wanted to do?"

"No, not really - well, maybe. But I think it can also be seen as a positive thing. If one important 'use' of this study is to explore what it means and how it feels for a teacher to innovate in the classroom, to improve students' learning opportunities, then it's realistic that there be some constraints and opposition. The interest comes in trying to develop ethical, effective, creative solutions."

Carolyn and I are sitting at a large round table, discussing ideas for science in Cowan 3 this term. Her mane of dark brown hair has lighter highlights in it, and falls across her shoulders in spiralling curls that give her a vaguely exotic look. Her lips are full, impeccably outlined in a darker brown and filled in with a lighter colour, and her green-brown eyes beneath arching brows have a bright yellow ring around each pupil that gives her gaze a real intensity. She's one of those girls who has been pretty since she was very young, and has had to meet men's grasping eyes for so long that she's put up a wall of hardness between herself and the world. The hardness has just begun to erode the prettiness, but when she drops her guard and laughs for a moment she's gorgeous.

Another teacher, Helen, who is teaching in the school two days each week but was a full time teacher at Arcadia last year, is sitting across from us, marking work, but occasionally joining in our discussion.

"So how are you enjoying the place, Carolyn?" Helen asks, out of the blue.

Surprising me, Carolyn says "Honestly, off the record? I hate the place. I'm a secondary teacher, an English specialist, and I think I'm pretty damn good at that. But I feel really uncomfortable having to meet the complete learning needs of a Year Eight class, across all learning areas."

Carolyn goes on to say that she's not at all confident in maths and science, and is very pleased to have me there to help with the science learning of the students. Her argument is that, if the same structure and culture could be maintained within the school up until Year Twelve, that would be OK - the students would be assessed in the same educational culture where they'd learned. But social and political constraints on the school will force students to attempt the statewide, external examinations for the Tertiary Entrance Rank (TER) at the end of Year Twelve. This means that they'll need to be acculturated to a much more traditional, specialised, abstract approach to learning by the time they reach Year Twelve. Given this situation, Carolyn feels strongly that it's impossible for non-specialists like herself to adequately prepare students.

"I really feel like I'm responsible for all this stuff I don't know that well - you know what I'm like in science, " she looks at me, "and that I'm really letting these kids down."

"What about the other things they're s'posed to get more of?" I ask. "They might have less actual facts and bits of information, but the rhetoric at least is that they'll have more generic, transferrable learning skills that will make them 'life-long learners'."

"I'm not really sure about that, but I think we actually spoon-feed them a lot more than we would in a normal high school: it's more like a continuing primary school where they expect you to find their folder for them and pretty much do everything for them, where in a traditional high school they have to sink or swim. I don't think they're being prepared to be independent learners."

Helen agrees - although the intentions of the school are good, and in an ideal world it might be possible to teach this way, in the real world the TER is looming, and the students should be prepared: if they're not, that's inequitable, because the TER is the gateway into university and the privileges that flow from a university education.

"That's not the only thing, though," adds Carolyn. "I think it's less satisfying for me as a teacher too. I really enjoy teaching Year Eleven and Twelve, where you can actually have a bit of an intellectual conversation, and play around with ideas. That's what I find most stimulating about teaching. Now I have one Year Eight class all day, instead of a situation where, if you have a difficult lesson or a painful kid, you know they'll be gone in 40 minutes. Now I have to look at Tony bloody Case all day. At least when I was teaching in a normal high school and I had Year Eights I could think, 'Oh well, I've got the Twelves soon' - here it's just unrelenting."

By this time I'm really wondering why Carolyn is teaching here at all. She may not have known about how well, or otherwise, the school would prepare students for Year Twelve, but surely she knew that she would have one class all day, and would have to teach outside her 'comfort zone'? As if she knew what I was thinking, Carolyn said that her decision to come and teach at BCC was mediated, not by a strong commitment to the principles on which the school was founded, but simply because the only other jobs available at the time were in country areas.

"Do you think you'll stick it out next year?" asks Helen.

"No, I really doubt it - if I can get another job I will."

Thinking about the conversation later, I felt that Carolyn's frustration mainly arose from her ethical commitments as an educator. These made her really uncomfortable with what she saw as her half-baked attempts at teaching maths and other subjects. Perhaps it was also her discomfort with the challenges of teaching outside her subject specialisation - with no longer being able to feel like a professional, in control and possessing all the knowledge that might be required of her.

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