Conversation One – Beginning Conversations

Researcher Introduction:

I knew the three teachers before I started teaching. Eleanor shared my uni days, and both Angela and William supervised me during school pracs. Eleanor, who is only a few months younger than me, finds the experience of sharing our first year tales therapeutic. William seems to make realisations about his choice to change from a public to a private school. He doesn’t understand how a journal can be a

3 _{The following section is presented in a transcription format (script). It is a thematic collage based on six}

interview transcripts, two with each critical reader conducted over a two year period from 2001, as explained in Chapter Two.

PhD. Angela is so daunted by the experience of reading my journal that she struggles to separate her own experiences from my own, saying several times that she cannot remember what happened to her and what happened to me.

Marty: When I think about where to start my story about beginning teaching, I always come back to why I wanted to be a teacher in the first place, the big ‘why am I here’. I tend to only remember the opposite, deciding not to be a teacher! How did you end up as a teacher?

Eleanor [laughs]:

I don’t know, partly because I used to go off teaching with Mum when she used to do relief teaching, and I was sick. Sometimes I just used to end up teaching with her at different schools and I really, really loved it. And I knew I wanted to do something related to Drama. When I got to college, and I told my college drama teacher that, he said ‘whatever you do don’t become a drama teacher’ and tried to do everything to convince me not to become a Drama teacher which pushed me straight down that path of becoming a Drama teacher.

Marty: Why do you think he told you not to do Drama teaching?

Eleanor: Because he’d had such horrible dealings in high school, as a Drama teacher, with people seeing Drama as a Mickey Mouse subject, and having no credos, and being asked to do the extra mile all the time, and all that sort of stuff, and he just didn’t think that it’s a rewarding thing to do, until you get into a college system, where it’s got credit applied to it. So he said ‘you’re going to go through a lot of really hard times before you get to times that you can enjoy it’. And I didn’t think I was going to make it into university. My point score wasn’t high enough. I missed out by a point. But they let me in anyway.

Marty: Why did you become a teacher William? Because when we last spoke you mentioned your mum quite a lot, your family, your mum being a teacher and going to Esprit High school…

William: Well, I’ll be honest…

Marty [interrupting]:

William: That’s right. I went into teaching because one, I got an

educational scholarship which paid my way through university. Then I had to obviously pay that back to the Ed Department, and there was a moral obligation as well, to give back that which I had been given. So in a sense I fell into teaching, and yes my mother was a teacher, my grandmother was a teacher, but yet, she was the first to say, please don’t become a teacher, because you’ll find that after a certain point in your life, that it might be a little too draining, a little too hard, and like all jobs you get in a rut. So I fell into it, and then I became more secure, because of who I was. And I felt that it was an easy occupation, and I’ll be honest, marrying a teacher, having the holidays that a teacher had, it’s awful to say, I sort of fell in to this comfort zone, of not really stretching myself, or pushing myself, but yet, at the same time, being valued as a teacher.

Marty: Why did you move from a public to a private school?

William: After four years I found that the system in the Education Department was starting to lose the plot a little. I’m not a

conservative by nature but I am when it comes to teaching and ah, I feel as though I’m a bit of a stickler for standards. I felt like things were starting to fall apart. Morale was getting, um you know, and this was back in 1984. It may be construed as a criticism, but it was just an objective statement that I was enjoying English, I was enjoying History, why don’t they enjoy it, and they weren’t. And I had to readjust my whole thinking, and at the end of the day, I felt ‘nah, I need somewhere else’ if you like, and I wasn’t expecting the private school system to be that wonderful world of um, academic pursuit. It’s not! It was just an opportunity to get out of the department that I felt wasn’t going in the right way,

Marty: I can relate to your comment about wanting to teach your subject, you love history, wanting to work with people who love history, because I think that’s why I made the decision, because I love Drama… Angela, what about you? Do you have any teachers in your family?

Angela: I’m the first of six to finish university, so there’s your answer there.

Marty: Um, it’s just interesting, because I was trying really hard not to teach, cause everyone said I should be a teacher…

Angela: Oh, Okay!

Angela: Yeah, what do they say? Those who can do and those who can’t

teach, and those who can’t teach, teach teachers…

Marty: I actually had a lot of people at college that I thought were teaching, not because they wanted to teach, but because they couldn’t do their subject, a lot of repressed people who, seemed to want to make their way in their field but couldn’t do it, so were teaching us, like I had that kind of… [thinking of right word] and I suppose it’s sad when that attitude in a teacher comes through, but I had teachers like that at college, and I didn’t want to necessarily end up like them, that’s what I thought…

Angela: I would agree with that.

Marty: When I was an exchange student in Finland, I learned that I liked teaching. I was always getting up and doing the traditional ‘Hi I’m from Australia, and this is where I live’ speech. I tried to make my talk interesting and exciting so I used to draw sharks, snakes and spiders on my map and then I’d say ‘these live everywhere, and they can kill you’, which made everyone laugh. I remember one really nice teacher in my Finnish school who said ‘you’d make a great teacher’.

Angela: I didn’t have a strong connection with any teacher, except one in primary school.

Marty: What did you like about them?

Angela: It’s funny, the old story, what I liked about him wasn’t in the classroom. I remember once I’d left my bag on the bus, and we were like in a housing commission home, and he actually drove me to the depot to pick my bag up. There’s no way I can think of that I would have been able to get it. Then in Grade 5, he had a guitar and let me take it home in the holidays, I hardly owned anything of value, and to have this thing and be trusted with it, little things like that. I guess he just made me feel worthwhile.

Marty: Do you think that’s why you care so much about the worth of your students as people?

Angela: I care about the worth of everybody, and not just in the classroom. People are judged so easily, and summed up so quickly, and dismissed, and I think care in and out of the classroom…

Marty: We’ll stop there for now. Thank you all for writing notes on my journal. Angela, I can see you’ve found my typos for me, which is great.

Marty: So many hours of typing - that is what happens.

Angela: I felt for you, don’t worry. I knew it would be so much work.

~

3. Sunday

(The end and the beginning)

The end of university, and the beginning of teaching.

‘I could be a teacher,’ I muse publicly. ‘Good students want to be teachers,’ Alexander, Chant, & Cox, (1994) concur.

but inside

I

did not.

‘I resent sounding like a cliché!’ I speak.

‘I will NOT teach’. I shout.

And then I do! Full of… hope?

‘Be prepared to be tired’ they nod, ‘and cry’.

‘There is no doubt beginning teaching is hard’ (Doecke, Brown, Loughran, 2000).

I read, and read, and read.

‘I wanted it badly’ Eleanor echoes. ‘I fell into teaching’ William echoes. ‘I cared deeply’ Angela echoes.

I did not. I did not. I did not. I chose, ‘Simply’ to begin. And to see, if I could, teach.

‘I’ll show you!’ I start my own echo. ‘Are you ready?’