Both Alike in Dignity
by Steve Shann, CeCe Edwards, Libby Pittard & Hannah Germantse
published in English in Australia, Vol 48 No 2 2013
Note: The authors of this story, three preservice teachers (at the time) and their lecturer, swapped stories - both orally and in writing - stories of events they or other preservice teachers had experienced about teacher pracs in schools, then a draft was written and subjected to further discussion and changes. This writing project, and the collaboration with these young teachers, was, for me, one of the highlights of the year and the beginning of friendships that continue.
1.
He is sitting here at his desk, surrounded by his books and papers, his various wall posters barely hinting at their vibrant colours in the soft glow of the room’s lamps. Sitting here in the dark early morning in the familiar soulfulness of his flat, the door and windows secure and locked. Sitting here with his poem written and today’s lesson plan just about done, and now feeling so much more settled. It is hard, now, even to remember how awful he had felt during yesterday’s lesson. How impotent. How humiliated. How useless.
From the moment he’d begun to distribute the sheets, each with its one-paragraph story, he knew that he’d misread the mood of the English class at Nullinga High where he was doing his prac. He’d wanted them to think about the way characters, scenes and themes interconnected; he’d wanted, as a prelude to their study of Romeo and Juliet, his students to be able to talk about characters, scenes and themes with some confidence. Indeed he’d been as good as instructed to teach these concepts explicitly, instructed by his mentor Susan, the Head of the English Department, the woman with a way of letting you know what was non-negotiable.
But these 15 year-olds had showed not the slightest trace of an interest in his lesson. The compliant few went through the motions, randomly guessing their story’s theme, characters and scenes, looking abstractedly at his face to see if their responses were the ones he wanted. The bored majority ignored the task, and they ignored him.
The low point in an endless 45 minutes had come with his interaction with the blonde girl. An utterly pointless interaction from which he had found it impossible to extract himself. It had left him with a dispiriting lethargy that had hung on for hours after the school day had ended. He knew, by dinnertime, that he had to do something to shake himself free.
So he had written a sequence of haiku, and writing the haiku had helped.
Allan loved to play with haiku. The uncompromising structure of the5-7-5 syllable pattern always absorbed him. He got lost in it. And again, this time, he found himself becoming less discouraged, more in touch with a self that had temporarily disappeared.
Blonde Versus Teacher
A terrible task here
I have to help them prepare
(Rather throw it out)Fifteen, make-up’d, blonde
Talk about stereotype!
Dumb and popular.She’s not shy by half
Loud, brash, full of questions, jokes
Always in trouble.So, this awful task -
I ask her, “Have you started?”
“Doing it now, sir.”“So what did you choose?”
(Please choose scenes or characters-
Then explore the themes)“I choose characters.”
“And what theme are you choosing?”
She looks bewildered.“No sir,” she begins
“I didn’t choose to do themes.
I just said that, sir!”I try to explain
“You need to choose a theme to …”
“No!” she interrupts.“I choose scenes,” then, sir.”
“Ok,” I sigh. “And which theme?”
She frowns angrily.“I’m not doing that!
I just said I’m doing scenes.
Pay attention, sir.”Thus it continues
Students around us giggling
Teacher versus blonde.Exasperated
“Do you know what a theme is?”
(I thought I’d start there)She leans back from me
Her expression offended
“I’m not stupid, sir.”I’m blushing with shame.
Did I just call her stupid?
How do I fix this?“No, but I’m trying…”
But she won’t let me finish.
“Ok, I’m fine sir.”And then that was that-
She wouldn’t let me help her.
Wouldn’t talk to me.
Ah, words. Words and phrases, sounds and rhythms. How Allan loved them! How he loved to write, to sit alone at his desk, especially like now in the early morning, alone with the muffled noises from the street or the friendly scratchings of the mice in the wall cavities or the warbles of the magpies calling up the dawn. How he loved to lose himself in the worlds created by the sounds and rhythms of words and phrases.
Did he love writing about teaching more than teaching itself, he wondered? Did he love words more viscerally than he loved the students? There were times, like right now, when he thought this was probably true.
He knew that Paul and his other friends would enjoy this haiku, and he had posted it onto his blog at about midnight. Then he’d turned his attention to the lesson preparation for tomorrow.
Well, for today in fact. It is now 5.30am and he is nearly done. More to do, of course, but there is a limit. It will have to do. Lots of loose ends. But it is good enough. He hopes.
This is only one of four lessons he has to teach today, but he’ll just have to wing it for the others. Get the kids writing, or reading. Or he could lecture, blather on, fill in time. He hates doing it–well, to be honest, it is sometimes fun if he gets on a roll and the kids seem interested–but today there is no alternative. He has to focus on this main lesson.
Mind you, focusing on Romeo and Juliet is, for Allan, hardly a chore. And not just because of the language, though there is that. Right from the beginning of the play, there is that:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life ...
The language rumbles on. Allan loves the steady beat of the iambic pentameter, worked so subtly byShakespeare: fury and vitriol one moment, tenderness and melancholy the next . One moment the civil hands are covered in blood; the next, Romeo walks ‘with tears augmenting the fresh morning dew’. Juliet’s father laments that ‘the earth hath swallow'd all my hopes but she’; then Tybalt fumes at the slave (Romeo) who comes to his house to ‘fleer and scorn at our solemnity’. And so it goes on. Allan has, for the past hours, been learning lines like these by heart; lines that he hopes are going to be a part of a dramatic lesson which will thaw the cold heart of his mentor, she-who-gives-no-praise.
It isn’t just the language of the play that Allan is in love with. It is the existence of a secret, a dangerous secret. Romeo and Juliet’s is a forbidden love, a love that no-one must discover. Will he be able somehow to convey the frisson of a dangerous secret to the 15-year-olds tomorrow? Surely they will know all about dangerous secrets. Everyone has them.
This lesson needs to work. Susan will be watching. She’ll be sitting up the back there with her pen poised above the paper, noting down all his wrong moves, just as she no doubt did yesterday. I mustn’t make eye contact, he thinks to himself. Whenever I make eye contact, I feel the confidence seep out of me.
The thought of her cold eyes brings to mind, suddenly, a very different pair of eyes, the wide-open eyes of the silent girl, Rebecca, sitting yesterday in the front row, looking at him so steadily as he passed round the sheets in the lesson. What was she thinking? At first he thought she was just opening herself up to his teaching, that she was trusting he knew where they were going and was wanting to absorb it all; it had seemed such an open look. But then, as the lesson suddenly curled up its toes and died and she kept those soft eyes looking meaningfully at his face, he thought maybe it was sympathy. Maybe she was just feeling sorry for him as things spiraled out of control. Or disappointed that her hopes of learning something had evaporated so quickly.
Allan stands up. The lesson plan is good enough. Time for an hour or two of sleep.
2.
Susan stands at the window, car keys in hand, and watches her mother in the vegetable garden. Her mother is still in her dressing gown, which is on inside out and bunched around one shoulder, and she is staring at something that Susan cannot see. Perhaps she’s just lost in thought. She is holding a hose, but the hose is pointed aimlessly into the air and there’s a fine spray making short-lived rainbows in the early morning light. Susan notices that a mist is settling on the back of her mother’s neck and beginning to wet the dressing gown, but her mother is not bothered, maybe not even aware. She’ll soon be soaked, but Rosie will be here in a minute, should in fact have already arrived, and Rosie, wonder woman that she is, will patiently fetch Susan’s not-so-elderly mother from the garden, towel her down and, while talking to her about what a lovely morning it is and aren’t the veges doing well, will soothe away the distraction and bring her back to the now. In fact there’s Rosie’s car pulling up outside, and Susan turns from the window, picks up her bag with her school materials, then knocks on the window to get her mother’s attention, wanting to wave goodbye. But her mother just frowns, as if resenting the disturbance, and continues her search for what isn’t there.
‘She’s outside’, says Susan as she opens the door for Rosie. ‘She’s out there getting soaked. I have to go, sorry. Thanks Rosie, again. Really, I don’t know what I’d do ...’
Rosie pats her on the arm, puts down her things, and opens the back door.
Once in the car, Susan is again visited by that sense of relief she often feels as she backs down the drive; work has always been a welcome world away from the worry. There are challenges there, of course, running an English Department in a time of constant and often pointless change, but she protects her staff from the worst of it and has set up routines and procedures that actually work. The previous Head of Department, Winnie with the orange hair and the loud smoke-affected voice, was an inspiring teacher but a chaotic administrator, and Susan knows that the staff appreciate the order and predictability that she’s managed to bring to their work.
She has a preservice teacher in her classes at the moment. Allan. Other Heads of Department farm out the preservice teachers, but Susan likes to take them herself, partly out of a sense of duty, partly because she doesn’t like cleaning up the mess when it’s not done well.
She wonders about Allan. He is difficult to pigeon-hole. Keen. Obviously intelligent. But a bit arrogant too, as if he knows best, as if he knows the young in a way that an older teacher can’t. A bit groundlessly optimistic, thinking that his youth, his wide reading, his enthusiasm and empathy are enough to transform her class from its usual well-behaved but limited collection of strugglers into some dynamic community of thinkers and readers and writers. She smiles, remembering the interaction yesterday with Mel. ‘You calling me stupid, sir?’ Poor Allan. He looked so lost.
She shouldn’t smile. She’s been teaching for the best part of thirty years now, and she still remembers vividly her own first years as a teacher and that feeling of helplessness in an out-of-control classroom. She still has nightmares, actually, and last night there was a particularly unsettling one.
In her nightmare Susan was standing in front of a class of secondary students, sensing their mounting restlessness and desperately trying to hold their attention. But none of them were paying the slightest notice, none of them seemed even aware of her presence. Desperately she tried every trick she knew:cajoling one sub-group, trying to beguile a second with a story or an interesting fact, threatening a third. But increasingly she felt weak and underprepared. She sensed that the students were about to riot,or walk out. There was one particular boy, the only one in the class who seemed aware of her presence, who started to taunt her, suggesting Susan was a fraud, that she read rubbish and couldn’t write. He was looking up at her, a supercilious knowing grin on his face, taunting Susan, making her feel inadequate and ignorant. There was a stick in Susan’s hand. A cane. In her dream Susan lunged at the boy, trying to get at him, bringing the cane down firston his neck, then on his arm, but he hardly flinched, just continued looking up at her and smiling. The cane then turned to cloth. Susan kept trying to hit him, but he just laughed. Susan was suddenly aware, as she lashed out with her pathetic piece of cloth, that she was now naked and that all the class was watching and laughing.
It is strange that, after all these years, versions of this nightmare recur. Susan takes a deep breath as she drives, trying to calm the disquiet left over from the dream and from the morning at home.
An hour later and Susan is sitting in the back row of her own classroom, as the adolescent students she’s been working on, and with, for the best part of a year now, amble into the classroom for their lesson with Allan. It’s not easy to sit there and watch her students test the robustness of the classroom routines she’s established, routines which have contained tearaways like Mel and kept others on track. There’s noise and aimless bustle now, and Allan is lost in a conversation with two of the boys at the back, swapping comradely opinions about some cult movie they’ve all recently seen. The sense of order she’s established with these kids is in the early stages of disintegration. She thinks again,momentarily, about her distressing first years as an English teacher, and of her nightmare.
She’s never acted on her first-year-out frustrations, of course. She’s never come close, in real life, to giving in to the desire to lash out, to inflict physical pain. Instead she has established a reputation for being thorough and uncompromising. In one sense, she’s reverted to her eldest sibling self: a planner, a stickler for the rules and procedures. She’s turned off the warmth, except when she can be warm on her own terms, without risk, with students wary and respectful of her.
Sitting here, watching young teachers like Allan, is always unsettling. His enthusiasm reminds her of how she’d once been. His apparent earnest engagement with most of the students – Mel’s quiet demolition job yesterday notwithstanding – reminds her of how hard she’d once tried to form strong relationships with students. Susan dismisses what she knows at once is the irrational thought that Allan’s attempts at rapport with the students might just succeed and show her up.
No, Allan is raw. He might learn, but at the moment he is just raw. The really good preservice teachers are rare, the ones who understand that you learn to be a teacher from being in schools, watching real teachers, working with real kids, coping with real problems. Developing effective strategies. Setting up routines and expectations that help the students relax and get on with things.
Allan, she’s noticed, has this submissive veneer, full of outward respect, listening intently, thanking her profusely for taking him on, professing to be so nervous, so grateful, and so on and so on. But it’s an act. She can tell. He thinks he can reach students because his ideas are current, because he has the students’ interests as his main focus, but really he’s just raw and struggling.
Suddenly Allan’s voice rings out.
‘Two households,’ she hears him intone from the front of the room. She looks up. Allan has his eyes fixed on an imagined audience in the balcony at the Globe Theatre. His voice is deep and confident.
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene ...
‘Today, folks,’ Allan then says to a class that is suddenly still and quite, ‘Today I know, you’re going to really enjoy this introduction to Romeo and Juliet! Today you are going to be surprised!’
Susan realizes, with a little shock, that she is disappointed at the sudden quiet. She wanted it to be harder for him than this.
3.
The students file out, noisy again, but the noise this time is different. There’s a buzz in the room. Allan stands at the door collecting their final pieces of writing. He is finding it difficult to keep the smugness out of his smile. It has worked. Just as he’d hoped, the students have been caught up by the fast-paced lesson, the zipping from writing to listening to acting to talking, all in such rapid succession that no-one, even Mel–even Mel!–had time to distract him and them from this ripper of a play, this ripper of a lesson.
‘So what do we know already?” he’d asked, after reciting the first lines of the play. “After just six words! Hell, this Shakespeare knew how to start a play! How to grab the attention of half-drunk layabouts standing in the front row.’
He’s had their attention from the beginning, and it has all gone so quickly, exhilaratingly quickly.Maybe he is a teacher after all, and not just a writer!
The lesson had been full of surprises: students who before had barely said a word chatting away in pairs or small groups; the too-excited-for-hands-up contributions when they sat around as a whole class; their honesty; their laughter; their ‘thanks Sir!’ grins as they left the room. He’d ended it with a three minute writing task, inviting thoughts and feedback on the lesson.
As the students now file out of the room, he allows himself to peek at the one on the top of the pile.
I liked that leson. I thout shaksper was crap b4, but it was good 2day talking about stuff. It was good when we had to sweer and pay out our mates in the group. I hope all our class r like this.Sry about the speling. I suck at speling. But mebe I coud like shaksper.
Allan looks over towards Susan, still sitting in the back row. There is something about her tight smile that is unsettling. Allan isn’t sure whether to stay standing at the door or walk over and sit down next to her.
‘The students certainly seemed to be having fun,’ Susan says. Allan’s not sure he likes the way she says the word ‘fun’.
He stays standing, frowns, searching for clues as to what Susan is implying.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘they seemed to. Do you think it went alright?’ He is struggling to keep his tone appropriately open, as if her opinion matters to him. Which, in a way, it does.
‘That was OK for a first lesson on a topic,’ Susan says in the same careful way. ‘But I wouldn’t get carried away. It will get harder when they’re not just having fun.’
OK? It was just OK?? Allan feels something between panic and anger. He tries desperately to think of the right question to ask her, but he is tangled up in thoughts he can’t say out loud.Does she think it was bad? Is she stupid? Couldn’t she see how good it was, how engaged they were?He resists the impulse to justify himself, to show her the comment he’s just read. She’d just criticise the spelling.
‘There were some fun activities in there,’ Susan continues. ‘I was wondering, though, in your normal lessons, is that how you would conduct them? That many activities?’
Allan had divided the lesson into more than half a dozen segments, the longest fifteen minutes and the shortest two. He’d wanted the students to be on the move, to be alert, to feel physically involved. Shakespeare, he was convinced, needed to be experienced with the whole body, not just from the neck up. There was the brief introduction where he’d played them a short extract from Shakespeare in Love which showed what an Elizabethan theatre and crowd looked like. There was a writing activity getting the students to freely-associate with the names ‘Romeo’ and ‘Juliet’. There was some sharing in pairs of a first experience of being attracted to someone, appropriate or otherwise (there was laughter during this, and also intense listening to the stories being told). Then, together as a whole class, they’d talked about what the opening sonnet in the play might be trying to achieve. Allan had then used the lines he’d learnt by heart the night before to get the students representing, in a light-hearted but active way, twelve key moments from the play, and he could sense them now coming to grips with the plot. Next, he’d got pairs to stage an argument of their own choosing, the more violent and loud the better, as a prelude to looking at the first scene when the Capulets and Montagues confront each other. The lesson had concluded with the written reflections he was holding now in his hand.
That many activities? Wasn’t that what made it work so well?
‘I’m ... I guess not,’ Allan stutters, though it is hardly a question he’s been thinking about, intent as he’s been in just getting a first lesson done. ‘It would depend on the lesson topic.’ He is just mouthing words now; he has no idea what he is meaning. ‘I plan to use those activities quite often,’ he hears himself saying, though he’s thought no such thing.
‘I wouldn’t use them too often. And not so many. It sets up expectations that will be difficult to fulfill. Makes them unsettled.’ Susan pauses, then comes in at another angle. ‘How were you planning on introducing content?’
Again Allan feels stumped. Hadn’t there been content in today’s lesson?
‘Uh... well, I guess I would explain a scene or a theme and then use those sorts of activities to explore them.’ Again this is so unlike him. He’s talking drivel.
Susan frowns. ‘I’m not sure if I see how that would work. You need to give explicit instructions, you need to continually explain to the students why they’re doing what you’re asking them to do. They need to know the learning outcomes and where the lesson fits in. That’s why we do lesson plans.’ Allan had given her a lesson plan before the students arrived, but he can’t now remember anything about it. It had seemed like a dead official document. His lesson, he felt sure, was alive and engaging. It was unpredictable, but wasn’t that a good thing? Wasn’t it full of animating surprises?
‘And Allan,’ she adds, ‘don’t be afraid of using the whiteboard and having students take notes. They need to have some concrete notes taken down to help them revise.’
Allan mentally flails through his memories from uni, trying to find some irrefutable reason why her advice is bullshit. Surely, surely it was more than a highly enjoyable waste of everybody’s time? Surely there’s a bucketload of theory to say that the lesson he has just given was spot on? But his mind is muddled. He can’t think straight.
‘Well, today I just chose mostly introductory topics, but you can use those activities to look at some complicated stuff... actually at uni we often use those sorts of activities and I find they really help me learn.’ Again this is feeling so weak, so insubstantial!
Susan smiles. To Allan, it seems an infuriatingly condescending smile.
‘You’ll find there are some things you learn at university,’ she says slowly, ‘that just don’t translate very well into a real classroom. I can see you might find it quite frustrating. Don’t worry, it might take a while but gradually you’ll work out what is helpful and what just doesn’t work. Most new teachers feel that way. It’s a bit of a roller coaster. Look, let’s talk some more later. You tidy up here a bit,’ Susan seems to make a point of looking around at the desks pushed out of their usual order, at the bits of paper on the floor, ‘and we’ll talk some more later.’
After she’s gone, Allan remembers again the face of Rebecca, the girl at the front. Allan had looked over to her several times, to see how she was coping with the noise and the movement, and each time he’d found her lovely brown eyes looking back at him. And she was smiling. He’d taken it to be encouraging, expressing some kind of gratitude that Allan had worked so hard to make a lesson active and engaging. But now, suddenly, he is not so sure. Was she looking for more guidance, or reassurance? What had her gaze really meant?
4.
As Susan drives home, she thinks about the deflated look on Allan’s face. She feels a flicker of remorse. Was she being too harsh?
She thinks again about her nightmare. And about the domestic world she is about to re-enter. No, she isn’t being too harsh. There are lessons here that Allan will have to learn, harsh lessons, and it will be better for him to learn them sooner rather than later. This isn’t a profession where ungrounded optimism survives for long.
But Allan isn’t a bad person. He is idealistic and perhaps a bit too sure of himself, but one day he will be a good teacher. He knows his stuff. He loves his subject. And, despite his laughable ineptitude with a student like Mel, he seems capable of working constructively with students.
Susan begins to compose a letter to Allan in her head. She’d like to write a friendly letter, but firm. She finds, as she drives, that the words come easily.
Dear Allan,
I could see that you were upset with my feedback, and perhaps I was being unfair in not emphasizing all that was good about the lesson today. You held the students’ interest from the beginning, and that’s no small thing. You had them interested in the play, had them wanting to hear more, you got them involved, and there are many preservice teachers, and not a few who’ve been in the profession for quite a while, who don’t do these things as well as you did them today.
But Allan, there’s more that you need to work on. And maybe there are some ideas about teaching, some assumptions you’re making, that you need to re-examine. If you don’t, I suspect you’re going to find yourself struggling when you’ve got your own classroom.
The first is to do with entertainment. Teaching isn’t the same as entertaining. Yes, you’ve got to engage the students, you’ve got to make them want to pay attention, do the work, make the effort.But it’s more than that. They’ve got to learn, they’ve got to come to the end of a unit being able to demonstrate that they’ve met the outcomes. It’s only part of the job to have them enjoying Romeo and Juliet; they’ve got to be able to write confidently about themes and draw on evidence from the play to justify their opinions. They’ve got to be able to say how Shakespeare’s language works to create meaning. These are the outcomes on your lesson plan, it’s against these that you’re going to be assessing the students, and you’ve got to address them explicitly, much more explicitly than you did in today’s lesson.
The students like to know, right from the beginning, what’s expected of them, how they’re going to be assessed, and what they need to do in order to succeed. Today they were entertained, but at a deeper level they were confused. They didn’t know where you were going with all of this, or what was required of them. You’ll find that, if you don’t make all this explicit, their interest will tail off, you’ll have Mel and the others losing focus, and you’ll end up feeling angry and frustrated.
All of this is connected to something else that they won’t teach you at university but which matters deeply. If you don’t get this, you won’t get teaching.
For many of these kids, and for their families, they don’t care in the end whether they leave school loving or hating Shakespeare; they just want the good grades. I suspect, Allan, (though I may be wrong, perhaps I’m judging by appearances and accent, and that’s dangerous, I know) that you’ve never had to battle for a place in the world. I suspect you come from a family that has valued literature, from parents who love to read. This is true for you, but it’s not the case with most of the students in this class. This wasn’t the case for me, either, to be perhaps riskily personal. I am the first member of my family to have a university education. It was a ticket for me, out of a social world that had limited opportunities, from which my parents and my siblings and many of my classmates never escaped. Working hard at school, getting the grades and getting into university, changed my life. It had nothing to do with loving learning; it was a hard slog, it took a lot of discipline, and if I feel any pleasure in it all, it’s more to do with pride at having survived and succeeded.
And another thing. I’m sure that some of what you do at university is useful, but there are many things you don’t find out about teaching until you get into your own classroom. Here are some of them. They teach you at university about responding to individual differences, but there are so many of them, and they’re so complex, and we have so many kids who have specific learning difficulties, that you’ll go crazy if you try to respond to each of them. They teach you at university about models of classroom management, but you’ll soon learn that the students will only respond if you refuse to compromise, if you’re tough, and if you never make an idle threat.They teach you at university that the learning has to be relevant, but try making a syllabus made up by city folk for city folk mean anything to one of our ambitious indigenous kids, the best of whom just want to know how to succeed in a white fellas world. They teach you at university that there are a zillion different kinds of literacy and that literacy is everyone’s business, but the reality is that our kids need to learn to read and write and that if they don’t have those basic skills, then they’re lost. And finally, they teach you at university that nothing matters so much as making the lessons stimulating, but what they don’t tell you is that there are only 24 hours in a day, it takes time to prepare a stimulating lesson, and you’ve got four or five of them to get through every day.
You’ll learn, once you’re in a school, how to manage. And I can help you with some of this.
Susan smiles to herself. She’s enjoyed composing the letter. It helps to get some of it off her chest.And perhaps, no, she won’t write quite so personally as that. But she will write to him, or write a careful and constructive report for him which says some of these things. It is important. With a little careful mentoring, he’ll be a good teacher.
She turns into the drive and wonders what the evening will bring. It is time, again, to summon up the energy, to call up her resolve and reserves. She begins to plan how she can structure the evening so that things run, if not smoothly, at least without major incident.
5.
Four friends. Allan and Paul and Louise and Beth. At the river. Early summer evening. Daylight saving. Feeling of release and relief for Allan after the conversation with Susan. Paul is in charge and he’s lifted everyone’s spirits. It’s almost always fun to be around Paul, even when he’s being deep and melancholy. This evening he’s the opposite: all fizzy energy and mock bossiness. It’s great.
“Go!” Paul chirrups and hits the timer balanced between half-finished beers and potato wedges. Allan is scribbling on a soggy page torn from a notebook, writing “spontaneously”, as he’s asked Susan’s students (his students?) to do every lesson this week – don’t pause, don’t correct mistakes, don’t think, don’t stop, JUST WRITE.
Paul’s brow is furrowed and focused – Allan knows he shouldn’t look up but he can’t help it. He loves Paul’s enthusiasm, his energy, his passion for life. Allan loves his face, too, the smooth skin beneath the soft Che Guevara beard, the intelligent brown eyes.What would the students say if they knew I loved a man? What would Susan, the straight-laced, uptight Susan say! Allan looks again at his lover, this crazy born-again beat poet, who now reads a book a day and organizes his friends to gather together on Thursday evenings to play writing games and drink beers they never finish.
Don’t stop, just write.
Allan knows that this is time he could be spending asleep–or, more realistically, in front of his computer trying to write a lesson plan that Severe Susan won’t tear to shreds in milliseconds. At least she hasn’t said no to spontaneous writing–it’s a good “settling activity”, she says–so he’s kept it as part of the daily routine.
Just write, Paul hisses, when he sees Allan looking at him.The impulse to craft his words carefully is pretty strong, but he thinks of Paul saying, “Don’t correct mistakes – there are no mistakes!” and he ploughs on, writing whatever pops into his head.
I’m glad to be here tonight. Beth is looking gorgeous in her trademark white jacket and rainbow toggle beanie, and Louise doesn’t even break a sweat on something like this, writing so serenely as if she were doing nothing more taxing than patting a kitten, but I know whatever she writes will blow me away, because her mind is dynamite.
And as the timer counts down and Allan’s brain stops straining to control his handwriting, he scribbles about sugar and waitresses and frogs wearing bells as hats, and suddenly he finds himself writing about Paulo Friere and setting his students free.
And even though he’s done spontaneous writing before, suddenly this feels like the first time he’s ever written like this–with friends, for fun, the purpose in the doing, not in the product. He feels, suddenly, like he’s in the middle of an e e cummings poem and he thinks joyfully about the lines:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
He could be doing anything right now–sleeping, working, getting drunk with other people his age–but, Allan thinks to himself,this is our joy today, this is our bliss. Writing and sharing freely, four people with no agenda and no judgment.
Thirty eight seconds left and Allan uses it to write two sentences. Both are unexpected. Both feel important.
What sickly spirit grips her soul and makes her mean? What joy to write with those I love; we make the world anew.
That night, Allan sits alone in his room. It’s after midnight. The afternoon exhilaration has drained out of him. He’s thinking about Susan and the lesson. His spirits now feel like lead.
No lessons tomorrow. It’s an excursion and then the weekend. He can write.
Writing helps. He feels put back together when he writes.
He’s already tried reading. Reading sometimes helps, especially if it’s reading that makes him work, or which reveals something he didn’t know, or expresses something he didn’t realize he felt. Reading that takes his mind off what sometimes feels like an inbuilt tendency of his mind to dwell on the ultimate meaningless of things, of the terrible void.
But the reading tonight isn’t gripping enough. He needs to do something more active.
So Allan sits at his desk, gets out blank paper, then sharpens his pencil with five precise twists. He draws a neat line down the centre of the page, and starts writing phrases in the left hand column. In the right, he jots down words he might use as rhymes.
Make the world anew … grew, blue
Sickly spirit ... makes her mean … scream, unclean, scene
He fills the page like this. He knows he’ll use few of the lines and the rhymes, maybe none at all, but it’s a ritual that gets his head in the right space. Or gets it out of the wrong one.
When he’s ready, he copy-pastes from the Net the opening sonnet from Romeo and Juliet. Then Allan begins to play with the words.
An hour and a half later, his poem is finished. It sits there, on the screen, his dark thoughts dispelled by the mental exercise, contained and restrained by the discipline of writing rhyming iambic pentameter.
Two classrooms, both alike in sincerity
In fair Nullinga, where we lay our scene,
From underworlds comes animosity;
Neath civil words is stirr’d an urge to scream.
As old meets new, as Past subverts the new-born,
A deep divide, a chasm, opens large;
As Cens’rous Susan, remnant of a time-gone
Subverts the lively longings of her charge.
A lesson full of fun and palpitation,
A lesson, theory-driv’n,forward bent,
Is shackled by the sad hallucinations
Of deluded Susan’s fury-fuelled lament.
What mean and sickly spirit in her grew?
O come the day we’ll make the world anew.
Allan smiles. It isn’t perfect. It probably isn’t fair. But it’s been fun to write and he feels better now, ready for sleep. Paul and the others made a point of telling him how much they had enjoyed reading his haiku about Mel, so, before leaving his desk, Allan posts his sonnet on his blog. Then he turns off the desk light and gets ready for bed.
6.
The next morning Allan feels a kind of energetic bounce in his gait as he walks down the corridor to the English staffroom. He feels like whistling, though of course he won’t. There is something about yesterday, he realizes, that felt significant, as though he’s discovered some new resource in himself. Yesterday he dealt with someone else’s criticism. He has spent time in the sunshine with his friends, he’s been carried along by Paul’s zing, and he’s forced himself to write when it would have been easier to give in to the hovering gloom. Shutting the world out at his desk last night, playing with words, mucking around light-heartedly with the opening sonnet of Romeo and Juliet, has reminded him (once again) that his love of words gives him access to worlds populated by the great and the insightful.
He wants to whistle. He wants to ring Paul. He wants to be a writer and a teacher.
‘Mr Hanley,’ he hears a voice call out to him from behind. ‘Allan.’
Allan turns and sees Alison from the frontdesk approaching.
‘Allan, Trevor wants a word.’
Trevor is the Principal.
Susan sits in a chair facing Trevor’s messy desk, her back to the door. She hears Allan come in, but doesn’t turn around to respond to his nervous greeting. She’s seething inside,in danger of making a spectacle of herself, and she’s not going to say much at all if she can help it. She’s aware of the tension in her jaw. She wonders whether the throbbing vein in her forehead is noticeable.
‘Allan,’ Trevor says. ‘Have a seat, please. I need to talk to you about a matter has been brought to my attention, a most serious matter.’
Susan can’t see his face – he’s still standing behind her – but she notices the sudden stillness in the room. He’s shocked, she’s sure of it, and she’s pleased.
‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ she hears him say.
‘Sit down Allan,’ says Trevor. Allan sits.
‘What’s this about?’ he asks.
‘It’s been brought to my attention that you wrote something last night on the internet, something that reflects badly on this school and that describes a member of my staff in a thoroughly unprofessional, possibly libelous, way. Did you write this?’ Trevor pushes a copy of Allan’s poem across the desk.
Susan turns her head deliberately slowly towards Allan. She hopes he can feel the cold fury in her eyes. She watches as he looks quickly at the print-out and nods.
‘Where did you find this?’ Allan asks.
‘You wrote this,’ says Trevor. ‘You wrote this and posted it on the Internet.’
‘I wrote something light-hearted, but it was private. How did you get this?’
‘It was on the Internet,’ says Susan slowly. ‘The internet! You’ve written this vile stuff about me, you’ve written this libelous rubbish, and you’ve published it for everyone to see.’
Susan had seen the poem for the first time just twenty minutes earlier, soon after she’d arrived, flustered and later than usual. She’d driven in struggling to regain some equanimity after, early this morning, finding her mother missing from her room. It didn’t take long to locate her; she was sitting on the curb a few doors down, muttering to herself and looking vaguely put out when Susan took her by the elbow and led her back to the house. Rosie has arrived soon after, and had taken over in her calm and reassuring way, but it has been unsettling. It was the first indication that another stage has been reached, and Susan found herself worrying, as she drove in to work, about what the implications mightbe.
Then she was shown the poem.
At first, she was just angry. Then she realized how invaded she felt, how humiliated and undone. She felt opened up and exposed by Allan’s poem. And by someone she was working hard to see objectively, someone she was preparing herself to help if she could.
‘I didn’t identify you. How could anyone possibly know it was you,’ says Allan. ‘This was private.’
‘No Allan, it wasn’t private,’ says Susan. ‘It was on the Internet. That’s why I’ve got a copy of it. That’s why colleagues of mine, parents of students I teach, the students themselves, can read it. You’re naïve Allan, naïve and dangerously unprofessional.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he says weakly. ‘I don’t get it. This was private. This was on my private blog. How did you get it?’
‘You mentioned the school Allan,’ says Trevor. ‘Well, you mentioned the suburb, Nullinga, and because we’ve got an automatic internet search on for anything that mentions Nullinga High, your blogpost showed up this morning.’
‘This is unforgivable,’ says Susan. ‘To write like that about a colleague ... in public.’
‘I’m sorry ... I’m sorry. It wasn’t serious. It was just a private thing, for my friends. I didn’t realize that there was any possibility that anyone else would ever find it. It was just private.’
Trevor puts his hand on a bunch of papers on his desk.
‘This,’ he says, picking up the document at the top of the pile, ‘is your Professional Experience Report. As you can see, it’s not filled out yet, but if we went ahead with this placement, you would be given a fail. Instead, we’ll be contacting the university this morning and advising them that we’re terminating your prac placement.’
‘On what grounds?’ Allan asks.
‘You’ll remember, Allan, that there’s a whole section of the report about professional conduct. Standard 7. To pass you have to show that you understand and apply, I’m quoting here, the key principles described in codes of ethics and conduct for the teaching profession.I have a copy of our current State codes of teacher ethics here. Have you read them?’
Allan is silent.
‘Read them,’ says Trevor. ‘You’ve breached them, and you’ll never be a teacher if you don’t conduct yourself professionally.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Allan. ‘I’m sorry Susan. I’m sorry that I wrote this. It was a mistake.’
Susan says nothing.
Less than an hour later, Allan sits at the bus stop, his books and papers in his backpack. None of the other staff would look him in the eye as he packed up to go, and Susan was elsewhere. It’s been a long and lonely hour. He’s sent a text to Paul, who says he’ll come and pick him up asap, but still there is no sign. Allan has decided to get the bus; waiting outside the school is just too painful.
Someone touches his shoulder lightly. ‘Hello sir,’ says a bright voice behind him. Allan turns. It is Rebecca, the girl from the front of his class. ‘What are you doing out here sir? Aren’t you coming to class?’
‘I’ve been transferred,’ he lies. ‘I have to go and teach somewhere else.’
Rebecca looks shocked.
‘Oh no, that’s awful,’ she says. Allan realizes it is the first time he’s heard her say anything except answer the roll. ‘I liked you. You were a good teacher. You were cool. That sucks.’
