When I was starting out as a teacher, just over a decade ago, I knew that only half of my new colleagues would stick with it for five years. It felt like a white-knuckled ride on a roller-coaster in those early days, as I worried about whether I could beat those odds.
New teachers are still struggling, according to a recent survey by the Australian Education Union, “with 39 per cent planning to leave the profession within a decade”. A few weeks ago, I was in the staff room with a few other teachers who had clocked up multiple decades, and we were musing about why and how we were still in the profession.
My job is to teach my students, but I learn from them as well.
One of my colleagues who worked for four decades then retired, but still regularly pops in for contract and casual teaching roles, said that teaching was her “fountain of youth”. By working with young people, she kept up with trends and was feeling spritely. As proof, she wiggled her legs out from under the table and showed us vibrant purple stockings that matched her scarf.
Teaching has been invigorating for me as well, but in a different way. For me, it is a career that has allowed me to be my true self, a privilege I never experienced in previous jobs.
In a classroom with teenagers, there are no coded messages, no doublespeak, no hidden meanings. What you see is what you get. A teenager is in a state of becoming, and in that state, they are completely, and beautifully, authentic. I never have to guess what a student is thinking or feeling; it is there on their face, in their body language, and in their words.
And as a result, over my 11 years as a teacher, I, too, have acquired a state of complete and utter honesty. I do not hide my emotions, feelings, or thoughts. On yard duty recently in an area by the portables we have dubbed Lover’s Lane, I saw two teenagers entwined, and the thought bubble protruded from my head: “Oh, no. You’re traumatising everyone with your PDA!” The two students quickly ended their embrace. I realised it hadn’t just been a thought. “Did I say that out loud?” I said. “Sorry.” The students laughed good-heartedly, and I laughed with them.
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These moments of shared understanding make me realise how special it is to spend most of my day as I truly am. That the more I play up my wacky personality and own my actions and feelings, the more I see my students do the same.
My mind searches back for the time before I became a teacher. The decades where I worked in administration, play-acting to a role of the corporate executive, wearing pencil skirts and pump heels, my make-up my armour, my real identity tightly bound and hidden under layers of paisley. Coming home with a mind hungry for stimulus and muscles craving movement.
