Part 1 Chapter 1: Anna

From my book 'School Portrait' (McPhee Gribble/Penguin, 1987)

I arrived early on the first day of the 1982 school year, and walked around the grounds with Allen, who was new to the AME and was to be my teaching partner. We stood on the oval, looking down at the herd of kangaroos grazing near one of the small dams. As we approached, the roos moved quietly towards the shade of the pine forest some fifty metres away to our left.

Behind us were the bottlegreen timber school buildings, a meandering line of separate rooms connected by a covered walkway and a single flat roof. The school sat in a small hollow in some six or seven hectares of undulating bushland, the greys and browns of the thirty or so tree trunks and the dappled olive greens of the foliage set against a sea of knee-deep yellow-brown summer grass. There'd be snakes in there, we knew, and we were glad that during the weekend parents had mown around the school. We could hear the distant hum of the morning traffic, but otherwise there was no hint that Canberra's suburbs were just over the rise beyond the dam.

We walked slowly back towards the buildings, and into our adjoining classrooms. This was to be my sixth year at the school, but as always on the first day of a year, I felt edgy. I was impatient for the kids to arrive, for the day to begin. I greeted a couple of kids who'd already been dropped off by parents. Then Allen and I sat on a table and talked for a while.

Our conversation was halting and somewhat strained as we waited. In the frequent pauses I could hear the birds feeding busily in the shrubs outside, and the slap, slap, slap of a sprinkler. Flies buzzed along the window panes. Our cupboards were empty, except for some paint brushes, which lay stiff and unused in a couple of glass jars. The walls were bare, and there was some of last year's paint on the carpet. The room itself was slightly airless and stale.

When our conversation completely dried up, Allen started mixing paste and laying out paints in his lino wet area, the part of the room used for messy activities. I chatted to the small group of children over by the windows. They were all kids I knew by sight - they'd been in Katherine's class next door to mine last year - but I didn't know any of them well.

The covered walkways outside were beginning to echo with the voices of children. The school buses had arrived, and the place was coming to life. The door opened and in burst three girls, laughing and shouting.

'Oh God, what an idiot! What a dumb stupid idiot! Who does he think he is anyway? I'm going to tell Mum about him, and I'll get her to complain to the boss of the bloody buses!' I was to find, as I got to know her better, that Anna often made this kind of dramatic entry. She was very tall for a girl of nine, at least a clear head taller than either of the other two. Her shoulder length auburn hair was partly hidden by a wide and elegant hat, but I could see her brown eyes darting quickly round the room to take in her audience, and her face was flushed. She waved her hands in the air as she talked, and was clearly enjoying herself.

‘What happened?' I asked, appreciating the performance.

'Oh, hullo Steve. Just a bus driver being an idiot,' said Anna.

'God, he wouldn't treat boys like that! He lets them make noise but he gets all angry and shouts if we say anything!'

Talking animatedly, often all at once, Anna, Kate and Penny rushed outside to sit on the grass. I knew, from speaking to teachers who'd had Anna in previous years, that she was popular, that she loved making things, that she was full of original ideas for paintings and plays. But I was also aware that she was worried about her reading and writing, and was apprehensive about Coming into my class. The work will be too hard,' she'd told Katherine at the end of the previous year. 'Steve will be too strict and I won't be good enough? I wondered about this apparent lack of confidence, and how it connected with the very lively, attractive and slightly zany person who'd just walked through the room.

I wished Allen luck as he shut the folding partition that separated our two classrooms. We'd decided to begin the year working with our own groups in separate rooms, and then work together more and more as the year progressed.

Later that morning, Anna and her good friend Penny started work on a model house made out of wire and papier-mâché.

‘What about this bit, Anna?' asked Penny, holding up a piece of wire mesh about the size of a doormat.

"Yeah, that'll do,' said Anna, and she took the wire from Penny and bent it into the vague shape of a small house. Then she began nailing it onto a wooden frame, while Penny stood holding the nails.

'OK, where's the papier-mâché, Steve?' asked Anna.

"You'll need to nail that down properly first, I said. 'But when you're ready, there's glue in the red bucket. You'll have to tear up some newspaper yourself, and mix it in with the glue. Have you ever used papier-mâché before?'

'Oh yeah, tons of times,' she said off-handedly. She left Penny to finish the hammering, and took whole sheets of newspaper and dunked them into the bucket of glue. 'Hey Penny, look!' she said, as she squeezed the sodden newspaper and grey paste oozed between her fingers. Some of it dropped on the floor.

'Come on Anna, be careful,' I said. Look, you really need to tear the paper into little bits to make it more manageable. You're going to make a dreadful mess like that.'

'Don't worry, Steve. We'll clean it up, won't we, Penny?' she said. She took a sloppy piece of soaked newspaper over to the model, and slapped it over the wire.

'Anna!' shouted Penny. 'You're dripping glue everywhere!' She got a cloth and started to clean up Anna's mess. Anna moved the bucket closer to the model, leaving slime on the floor.

They spread papier-mâché for about twenty minutes, and then Anna said, It could be a little cottage in a forest, with flowers and all that, you know, and trees and stuff.'

'Yeah, a house in a forest,' said Penny, dwelling on the sound of the words and the implied privacy and fantasy. 'We could use twigs for a thick forest. Who will we have living there, do you think?'

'Oh, I don't know,' said Anna. 'Maybe a woman and her boyfriend. We could have a bedroom, where they'd have sex together, and she'd always be having babies.'

Penny laughed, and shot a glance in my direction, then changed the subject. 'It needs more papier-mâché on this side. The walls look too thin.'

'Do you think? I don't think so,' said Anna. 'It's time to pack up now, anyway. We can paint it tomorrow. Come on.' Penny shrugged her shoulders, then helped Anna tidy up her mess.

Ben, an older boy in Allen's class, was also making a model. Where Anna had been impatient and impulsive, Ben made rough plans on scrap paper first of all, then carefully measured out the cardboard he was going to use. I found it easier to watch him, to share his pleasure. For Ben, it was the making of the model that mattered, and, like me when I'm deeply involved, he was shutting out the rest of the world as he worked. For Anna it was different. For her, the making was only a part of it. She was also enjoying being with Penny, playing round with a little fantasy, and, I guessed, unconsciously finding out something about me, how I reacted to the mess, the model and to her.

Over the next three or four days, Anna and Penny worked off and on with their model house. At times Anna would rush ahead of herself, and sometimes I found myself unable to watch calmly. I told them (with an edge to my voice, not because I was angry but because I couldn't stop myself from interfering) to spread the glue thoroughly, and explained that the walls should be thicker. When they ignored this and rushed to finish it, I suggested that they dismantle the weaker parts and do the job properly. I was feeling that I needed to give Anna a fair bit of my time, to stop her from doing things on the spur of the moment which would spoil the model and which would confirm some of the harsh things I'd heard her say about herself - that she was dumb, that things she did never turned out right. But, though I could see that the model would probably be better for my interference, I wondered if it would mean much to the two girls in the end, and I knew that Anna's enthusiasm was waning.

'Actually, Steve, I'm a bit bored of this model,' she said to me at the beginning of one session. 'I want to do something else?'

I've always felt awkward in this kind of situation. The model had lost its appeal for her, and I guessed that she'd regain her cheerfulness through starting something new. On the other hand, I didn't like seeing kids flit from activity to activity, never finishing anything. And in this first week, I wanted to make a point.

Not this time, Anna. I think you should finish what you've started.'

The following day, Anna and Penny got out their model, paints, fine brushes, cardboard and glue, and put on the finishing touches. They painted a door and windows, and attached tiny cardboard flower boxes. When the paint had dried, the two girls collected grass and twigs from outside for a garden and forest, and then we took the model outside to be photographed. Anna was very pleased with it, and I sensed that things like painting, play, and model-making were going to be important avenues for her growing more confident and articulate, as well as being a source of obvious pleasure.

I was also conscious that I'd been treading a very fine line between encouraging and dampening her enthusiasm. It seemed to have worked this time, but I'd gone close to snuffing out the flame. I wondered how, on the one hand, I was going to bolster Anna's self-confidence through helping her to succeed, and on the other how to let her have her head and express herself in her own messy and unpredictable ways. It was to be a while before I was able to see that these two were not necessarily incompatible.

During these first days of term, Anna had been very self-conscious about her spelling and her illegible handwriting, and had told me that she was a 'dumb reader'. And, even in her exuberant slapping on of the paste, I perceived the shadow of her own and society's expectations. Outside pressures were beginning to make Anna nervous about all this 'mucking around'. Friends had begun reading years earlier. Relatives, her mother had told me, were making comments about the school. Anna was getting the unspoken message that, while paint and play is fine for the five-year-old, she was now getting a bit old for such things.

During one short writing time in that first week of the year, she brought me this:

as you no I have a tow wall tat ter tow is sath a blow he gas my pas he hes my her he sath a blow I cat sat mor well 100 pas a day is to mach | no. I cat dow eneteing so bum my tow.

I tried unsuccessfully to decipher it as she waited for my reaction. I could manage to read about half a dozen words, but could get no sense from it.

T'm having some difficulty with this, Anna. Could you read it to me?'

No, it's stupid, anyway. She looked embarrassed, but was trying to sound as though she didn't care. 'It's just rubbish.'

'Give me some help,' I said. ‘I’d really like to read it.'

‘No, it's stupid, really stupid,' she said, eager to escape. ‘I just thought I'd try to write a poem about my toe, but it came out all silly?'

She turned quickly and went off. There were other kids waiting to show me what they had done, and Anna clearly didn't want anyone else to see hers.

I had another look at it over a cup of tea in the staff room. She'd said something about it being a poem about a toe. I showed it to Allen, and we deciphered it as best we could. Back in the classroom, I told Anna I'd worked out most of it.

‘You mean you could actually read it?' she said, obviously surprised and rather pleased.

'I think so,' and I read:

As you know, I have a toe,

Well, that there toe is such a blow,

He goes my pace, he hates my hair,

He's such a blow, I can't say more.

Well, a 100 paces a day is too much I know,

I can't do anything, so bum my toe.

'Hey, that's really good, Anna,' said Penny, who'd been listening.

Anna glanced uncertainly at Penny, but her friend seemed genuinely appreciative. ‘Well, I think it's pretty silly,' she said, trying to restrain a smile of pleasure.

I was glad that Penny had been there. I didn't particularly like that kind of rhyming poetry, though I was pleased that Anna had written something she'd wanted to share with me.

I was getting to know Anna better as I worked with her during these first weeks of term. She was very keen to do well but easily discouraged, and this was especially so when it came to maths. I felt at the time that I needed to use all my experience and every opportunity to help her make sense of what was, for Anna, the confusing and frightening world of numbers. It was only much later, after I'd seen what happened in the medieval village, that I began to feel that a good deal of this energy was misplaced, that her own developing interests in cooking, sewing, and in buying and selling were a more likely path to basic numeracy for her than the classroom maths I organized.

We did some maths all together one afternoon, and Anna didn't like it at all. It was the old puzzle concerning the warrior-king who was bored because there were no wars. A visiting pedlar introduced him to the game of chess, and the king was so delighted with the game that he offered the pedlar any prize that he cared to name. 'I'll take one grain of rice for the first square on the chess board, two grains for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, and so on,' said the pedlar. No problems,' said the king, and ordered his servants to calculate the number of grains and to organize delivery. How many grains did the pedlar get?

Although no-one had time for the final answer, most of the kids enjoyed seeing the numbers grow unexpectedly quickly. But not Anna. She was soon lost amidst it all, and became angry, first with herself, and then with me for setting the problem.

‘We'd better have a different sort of maths tomorrow,' she told me. 'That was just disgusting!'

And so we did. It was a number game based on Snakes and Ladders, with special dice representing tens instead of single units. I asked the kids to choose a partner, and, to my surprise, Anna didn't choose Penny, who was very good at maths, and who would have done most of the thinking. Instead she chose Zoe, who also found maths rather intimidating. And it turned out to be a very good choice indeed, because Anna was able to play the game slowly and in her own way, counting on by ones when she wanted to. Penny would have counted on in tens, and may have confused Anna by trying to show her how to do it. ‘Hey, that was fun,' she said, when she and Zoe had finished their game.

Then I asked the group if it would accept a challenge from Tobias and me to a game. 'Oh yes! You've had it! We'll kill you, easy!' they shouted. I'd drawn a board on the blackboard, and, as we played, I moved our counter vertically for tens, or got Tobias to do the same, hoping that kids like Anna might learn from our example. We complained loudly when we were beaten.‘ It was rigged, we were distracted, you all cheated,' we told them. Anna crowed as loudly as any of them at our defeat, and was delighted that a maths session had actually been fun.

The following morning, she brought me some little cakes that she'd baked at home, and a bigger cake that she and Gunnel had made. I wanted to share it with the class, but they insisted that I take it home and share it with my family.

A couple of weeks later, Anna went to the library to use a typewriter for a story she wanted to write. She came back after about an hour. The damn typewriter wasn't working properly,' she said, as she handed me a sheet of paper. 'Anyway, it's a stupid story. And you won't be able to read it. Mum never can.'

ay rose wes yoe yor her iv, got a hogd marn and I dot like peopol koeting eneway iv, gast ben to the her dresos and dot get tat sdeko mark out of my her you havot got ene her tho you peg a loing kamthe rabet now sdop tat sgwobling

My eyes scanned the page several times, in an unsuccessful attempt to recognize some key words which might help me guess the rest.

"You're right, Anna' I said. 'I can't work this one out. Would you read it to me?'

I thought she'd dismiss it, and say she couldn't be bothered. But instead she sat down and started reading:

'Ay, Rose, where's your hair?'

I've got a hogged mane, and I don't like people commenting. Anyway, I've just been to the hairdresser, and get that sticky musk-stick out of my hair!'

"You haven't got any hair, you pig!' And along came the rabbit, 'Now stop that squabbling!"

'That's beaut Anna,' I said. 'A very lively and interesting bit of writing. But what's a "hogged mane"?'

‘Well, you know how horses sometimes have their manes cut, really short you know, so it stands up all bristly right along the top to the saddle,' she explained slowly, trying hard to describe clearly the picture in her mind. It was such a contrast to her usual throw-away lines. 'That's what a hogged mane is.'

It was obvious to Anna that I had enjoyed the story. Her picture of the self-conscious and fractious horse reminded me of Anna's own reaction to the bus driver on the first day of term.

After we'd finished talking about the story, she jumped up and asked brightly, with an openness that was new.

"Well, Steve, what do you think I should do now?'

'Do you feel like making something?'

'Yeah, that's just what I feel like doing.' And off she went to the junk boxes, and soon was working with the private concentration I'd noticed in Ben earlier that term. In half an hour she'd made a small car out of a cardboard packet and coloured paper. A couple of kids looked up while Anna was showing it to me. 'Wow, that's really good, Anna,' said one. She finished the car, and then, for the next hour, she worked on a caravan to go with it, complete with bunk beds inside. During the afternoon, she added a trailer with a boat on it, again all made from scraps.

"You can show it to the group, if you like,' she said, as she handed it to me to put in a safe place. And, as we settled down to our group meeting later, she called out, 'Don't forget my car and trailer!'

'Hey, that's great, Anna,' said quite a few, including some of the boys not known for their magnanimity towards models made by girls.

Anna's face was flushed. The approval of the other kids was so obviously important to her self-esteem. Indeed it was rather like the spring sun to the seedling, encouraging her to explore more, to risk more, to grow. As she stood rather shyly and proudly in front of the group, there was a stillness about her that I hadn't seen before.

One Monday morning in late March, my class left for Jervis Bay, a drive of about four hours from Canberra. Our first stop was Tianjara Falls, and from there Barry, the school's outdoors teacher, led us to a magical pocket of rainforest - ferns, tall straight trees, leaf litter ankle deep, seeds floating down through the few patches of sunlight - all much cooler and very beautiful. Barry explained to us that this was the only rainforest for hundreds of kilometres, a remnant from a previous time when weather patterns had been different.

Most of the group went off to explore this little world, which was no bigger than our school oval, and which was cut off from the surrounding bush by a huge rock cliff, boulders and steep slopes. But Anna and some of her friends complained loudly to me of being thirsty and tired.

'Can't we go,' she whined. This is meant to be a trip to Jervis Bay, not a long bushwalk in the heat. Anyway, I've left my drink bottle in the bus.'

But I was feeling on top of the world in this beautiful place, and was unmoved. I told them that we wouldn't be going any sooner for their complaints, and that they had a choice - to sit and grumble, or to explore and enjoy this unique environment.

I fully expected to be ignored, and for Anna to sit in gloomy silence, but, to my surprise, their mood changed, and she and her friends went off to climb rocks, look at stones, and to find cubby-like ledges to sit on, from which they looked out over the forest and called down to me. Anna found some stones that were flecked with rusty streaks, and Barry told her there was iron in the rock.

Meanwhile the others were zipping around, climbing everything climbable, perching on boulders, throwing seeds into the air to see how they came down, and looking for lizards. Ra called down, 'Hey Steve, this boulder I'm sitting on seems to be moving, but it's only the wind moving the branches all around me.'

We looked at some fossils in the sandstone, and then walked back to Tianjara Creek. It was hot and muggy outside of the rainforest, and the kids knelt by the creek and drank, and waded through the water. Dan put his head under for a while. It was cool and refreshing.

We got to camp an hour or so later. The camp itself was perfect for our purposes - twelve huts, two to a hut, each with a bunk, cupboard and desk, and a large kitchen/dining room where we would eat and meet, and where the kids would be doing their daily diary writing. There was a grassed courtyard with barbeques, and Barry and a couple of the kids lit fires and cooked sausages while the rest of us settled in. After dinner, and despite pouring rain, Barry went off with eight children to set crab nets. The rest, including Anna, got into pyjamas and cleaned teeth, then sat around with pillows, blankets and soft toys in the dining room while I made up a story about them finding an old bottle by the beach, with a cryptic map inside. The map led to a treasure, with which they all did extravagant and eccentric things. The story line was fairly predictable, but the kids enjoyed hearing themselves in it, and they jeered and protested when they didn't like a particular twist in the plot or character description.

The next morning, while the children tidied away the breakfast dishes and packed their day packs, I sat in a corner of the dining room reading the diaries they'd just finished writing. By and large, they weren't very interesting. ‘First we did this. Then we did that. Then we went there. It was good.' No-one had dwelt on one particular part of the day, or had described observed details or settings or feelings much at all, and I made a mental note to say something about this to the group later on. Anna's was more interesting than most. This is what she had written (with spelling and punctuation corrected):

On the way to Jervis Bay we stopped off at Tianjara Falls and went for a long walk. We climbed up rocks, we had a look at fossils. We went to a rainforest and there were caves underground and tunnels and we went in them. In one tunnel you had to hold on with your hands and legs on the walls or you would fall in the hole, and there was one what you had to jump in and I grazed my leg. It really hurt. And then we went into one where you had to tumble into it. It was fun, but I was really tired because it was such a long and tiring walk and I didn't bring my drink bottle with me.

The following day, before the kids began writing, I read this out, and made the point that Anna, who wrote in more detail and with some imagination about a small part of the day, had written more interestingly than others who had tried to record everything that had happened. She was obviously pleased to have been singled out, and she wrote with a good deal of concentration for the next twenty minutes or so. This is what I later read:

Yesterday Barry caught a cuttlefish and I put my finger on it and it suctioned on my hand. It glid in the water. His tentacles swayed on behind him. He went an electric blue around the edges, and the body went all red and brown, and its body went babe?) sometimes. Barry turned it upside down and it had a little throat that it sucked up water with and then spurted out water at you, and near that he had a little hole and a little black beak in it, and sometimes it would poke the beak out and try and nip you.

This was an impressive piece of writing from someone who, a month earlier, dismissed everything she wrote as 'dumb'. She'd chosen her words effectively - ‘swayed', 'spurted', 'nip' were all just right. And when she couldn't think of an existing word that suited her purposes, she adapted in what I felt was a beautifully effective way. 'It suctioned on my hand. It glid in the water.' She was unconsciously experimenting with language, playing round with words to achieve a particular effect. I told her that it was undoubtedly the finest piece of writing she'd done that year.

The next day she wrote:

I saw a starfish yesterday and I picked it up. It was the biggest I have ever seen before. It was yellow with little black sblobs on its spikes. It was alive and moving its legs. It was very spikey. It camouflaged into the rock. It was interesting. It just stayed on the bottom like a bit of sand in a rockpool. It was very interesting.

'I'm not so pleased with this one,' she said. 'I just couldn't seem to write it how I wanted. It just sort of wouldn't come out right.'

What a contrast, I thought, to the self-disparaging comments she usually made. She was taking herself and her talents seriously. She was seeing herself as capable.

But, almost as soon as we got back to school, her mood changed. Allen's group had also spent a week at Jervis Bay, and we decided that this was an opportune time for us to begin our work as a teaching team. We decreed that each child had to follow up the Jervis Bay experience with some kind of project, though the kids were free to choose the topic and the form the project would take. Most chose to do research-based projects - Why do octopuses live in rock pools? How do whales reproduce? We also set up some practical activities; Barry brought in an octopus, squid and cuttlefish for sketching and dissection, Allen organized the wet area for painting and models, and I worked with a small group making a large model rockpool.

Anna had wanted to find out more about fantail fish while we were at Jervis Bay, and made that her project. But neither she nor the school librarians could find anything about them in the library.

'God, Steve,' she said, fixing me with her accusatory stare, 'there's nothing there! I can't do this dumb project! How do you expect me to do it when there's nothing in the bloody library?'

As Barry had said to me once, even when Anna complained about the weather it was as though you were personally responsible.

"Maybe you'll have to think of something else,' I said. But she wasn't in the mood. She helped Gunnel with her starfish work for a while, wandered around, complained some more, and finally grudgingly chose to do a project on the sea anenome.

She arrived at school the next day in the same foul mood. She was churlishly demanding of Anne, an adult who was helping her with her work, and told me several times that her project was stupid and she hated it. And then, during the afternoon, she and Jessie came to ask if they could have a break from their projects. 'It's getting really boring just working on them all day,' said Anna. 'Anyway, we've got something we want to do.'

"What is it?" I asked.

'Come and see,' they said.

They took me outside, where they'd set a table up on the grass.

There was a sign on the table, which said 'SUICIDE CENTRE'.

'You see,' said Anna, 'what you do is you come to our centre when you're feeling unhappy, and we fix everything for you by helping you to commit suicide. You get up on the table,' (she climbed up as she spoke) "and you throw yourself off, like this!'

She jumped melodramatically into the air, screamed as though she'd been stabbed, then fell to the ground. 'Do you want a go, Steve?' she asked, instantly regaining her composure. *We really think you should try a bit of suicide. It's highly recommended.'

I smiled and shook my head, and they continued their game outside. I wondered later what had led to it. Had something happened at home to put Anna into this mood? Was she feeling uncertain about her friendship with Penny, who was spending this time in the library, engrossed in her work on the kookaburra? Or was it just that she'd felt overwhelmed by all the reading required by her project, and this was her way of breaking out, of releasing the tensions and self-criticisms that had been building up inside? I didn't know, and this wasn't a good time to talk with her about it. I hoped that the game would be a healthy release for whatever it was that was responsible for her foul mood.

But half an hour later I found Anna and Jessie shouting at Zoe, with Zoe distraught and in tears. It seemed that Jessie and Anna wanted Zoe's cubby in a nearby tree for a new Suicide Centre, but that Zoe had said no.

'But you haven't used it since last year!' shouted Anna. 'You're just saying that you want it now to stop us from using it.'

‘It’s mine,’ wailed Zoe. ‘I made it and you can't just take it.’

‘ Why don't you try to find a cubby that no-one wants?' I asked Anna and Jessie.

'Because we want this one, and I don't see why she says we can't use it when she doesn't ever use it. She's just being a pig.'

Zoe was shaking with rage, and could hardly speak. I knew from past experience that, if I took sides, then the underlying difficulties would not be resolved, but would work their way to the surface over some other issue. On the other hand, it was obvious that none of the three was in a fit state to look at the issues dispassionately. So I decided to impose a temporary solution.

‘No-one can use it till you've all quietened down and can talk about it calmly.'

'Oh come on, Jessie,' said Anna. 'Let's see if we can find a different cubby.'

They found one soon afterwards, and straight away began to nail up new walls and do other alterations to make it properly their own. And, as she hammered and hung old cloth curtains, I sensed some of her depression lifting.

Meanwhile most of the other kids were working quite happily on their projects. As I watched Penny studying a map of Australia to find out where kookaburras lived, or helped Kate organize the information she'd collected on seals, I felt that most of the children were taking a tentative but significant step in the development of their research skills. They were moving from activity and thinking centred around an immediate interest, like cubby-building or writing about the day's events, to something more objective, more sustained: the embryo of research in all its different forms.

But not so Anna. She worked quite hard on her small display about the sea anenome, and made neat copies of the writing she'd done at the camp. But it wasn't until later in the year, when we did some Australian history together, that I saw her take this step. She finished her sea-anenome project quickly and, as she was pinning it onto one of our display boards, I asked her what she thought of it. 'Disgusting!' she said.

It was only when she worked outside on her cubby with Jessie that the gloom of those few weeks lifted. One afternoon I watched them through a classroom window. They'd fixed up the walls and floor, and Anna was nailing on a new roof, singing as she worked. Jessie was sweeping out the cubby, and was arranging some wild flowers in glass jars along a windowsill. At one stage, tremors from Anna's exuberant hammering threatened to upset the jars, and Jessie shouted, 'Go easy up there, will you!' Anna laughed good-naturedly, the first time I'd seen her do so since the trip.

Big black clouds were building up overhead, and I assumed the girls would come inside before the weather broke. Zoe asked me to look at her shark painting, and I forgot about Anna and Jessie until about a quarter of an hour later, by which time the rain was bucketing down. Suddenly the classroom door burst open, and there was Anna, soaking wet, with an enormous grin behind hair that clung to her face.

'Hey, look at me everyone! This is ace! This is great!'

And out she went again, to stand in the rain.

Then, one Wednesday night, the parents and friends of the kids in our combined class came to look at our Jervis Bay display. It was a lovely autumn evening, still and cool, and our room had been transformed. As it got darker outside, the fluorescent lighting brought out the rich greens and blues and yellows of the paintings that covered most walls. On each of our classroom tables there was a display of photos, pencil and charcoal sketches of squid and octopuses, and neat copies of the kids' sea stories and diaries. On a bigger table in the centre of the room were the models - a papier-mâché starfish painted a vivid red and black, a grey cuttlefish made from an old sheet and stuffed with polystyrene, seaweed made from string, and a cardboard lighthouse with battery-operated light. We'd strung fishnets across one part of the ceiling, from which cardboard sea-creatures hung, and, in a darkened corner of the room, stood the model rockpool. It was about two metres square, built on a wooden base with chicken wire and papier-mâché. We'd painted it with browns and greys, fixed submerged lights under its various ledges, and filled it with individually designed and painted fish, weeds and crabs. Blue cellophane water' was stretched across the model, and, with its lights on, the rockpool had a depth and colour we hadn't seen during the day.

Barry had helped the kids make a seafood casserole, which was served after the family groups had wandered amongst the exhibits. Small groups of adults sat on the carpet or on the grass outside, while the kids played in the dark or in the school's covered walkways. I ate with Anna's mother, who was puzzled by my account of Anna's apparent unhappiness.

'Nothing's happened at home to explain it,' she told me. 'To the contrary, I've been noticing how much more Anna's been reading recently, and I'd assumed that she was working on it at school. She's reading school bulletins, labels, advertisements, simple stories, none of which she's shown much interest in before.'

We concluded that these research-based projects had probaby come at the wrong time for Anna. It was rather like putting someone who'd just learnt how to play basketball in with the school's senior team. Of course Anna had felt overwhelmed and depressed.

But I was confident that no lasting harm had been done, and that night I thought more about Anna's sudden reading progress. She'd been reading regularly at school. I'd been encouraging her to go to the library, and I'd put some books in her way. But these things didn't explain the changes her mother had noticed. She'd done the same things last year, without the same obvious result. Some of it, I believed, was to do with growing up, getting to the stage where she was ready to make that leap. The accumulated experience that she'd had over the past nine years with print - looking at books, seeing and recognizing her name, pretending as a toddler to write, playing 'shops' or 'libraries', making shapes that looked like letters, drawing, learning how to write her name, discovering that letters have sounds, guessing at words from their initial sound or the context, dictating stories to adults and then looking over them and half-reading and half-remembering them, writing her own stories with her own spelling, reading captions to photos in family albums or on the wall at school, writing signs for her 'Suicide Centre' and invitations to the official opening of her cubby - all of these things had at last come together for her, and she was ready to take off. And these were her own accumulated and unstructured experiences, the result of her natural play, her innate curiosity, and her desire to learn to read. They were not the result of a structured, sequenced, adult-conceived reading programme.

For some kids, this spurt in their reading comes when they are four, and for others it doesn't come till their early teens. As a teacher I could help by encouraging (without anxiety) the child's natural curiosity with print, not forcing it when it was not there. And I could attempt the much more difficult task of protecting late readers from the labels which our society and the children themselves try to stick onto these kids - that they are 'below-average', or somehow inadequate. Anna was sharply aware of what was going on around her. She knew that others could read better than her, and that some people felt it was because she was ‘slow’. But given support for her developing interest in reading, and encouraged to refine and value the talents she had in playmaking, crafts and writing, I was confident that she would realize her potential just as surely as the child who had come to reading at an earlier age.

Nowhere is children's natural urge to understand and communicate more obvious than in their playmaking, as they struggle to express their view of themselves and the world, as they try out different persona like someone trying out new coats in a shop, as they delight each other with their ideas, or learn to listen and compromise in order to get a scene started. Apparently, before Michelangelo made a mark on a piece of marble, he would spend time running his hand over it, studying its texture, colour and contours, seeing the way the light fell on it, looking at it from different angles and distances. This is what children do when they are playmaking. Unconsciously, they're having a good look at the world, imagining themselves as adults in it, playing around with basic emotions like fear, courage, disappointment, love, and hate. As John Holt observed: 'Children use fantasy not to get out of, but to get into, the real world.'

This kind of playmaking was going on all the time at our school, in the playground, in the cubbies, and in the classrooms. And sometimes a discussion or an incident in class would lead to a play.

One day I told the kids about the punishments used by a teacher, William Chaffin, in a small American school in 1848. ‘The children would get four lashes if boys and girls played together, ten for playing cards at school, one for every foot above three of a tree they climbed, four for nicknaming each other, ten for any boy misbehaving to a girl, eight for drinking spirituous liquors at school, seven for making swings and swinging on them, two for wearing long fingernails, three for boys playing in the girls' area and two for girls playing in the boys', two for blotting your copy book, two for wetting each other at washing time, two for not bowing to an adult, six for going and playing at the mill creek and seven for going to the barn or doing any mischief about the place.'

As I finished reading, the questions and comments flowed thick and fast. "What's so bad about playing cards? .. How come the boys get more than the girls for the same thing? ... Hell, fancy getting hit for climbing trees... What's blotting your copy book mean, Steve? ... Did you really have to bow to adults in those days?'

We discussed these things for twenty minutes or so, and then one of the kids suggested that we make a play about William Chaffin's school.

'All together,' I asked, 'or in small groups?'

Most of the kids wanted to make a play with the whole group.

'OK,' I said. 'How will we start?'

With some kids getting lashed!.. With kids wetting each other at their washing time!.. With some kids getting drunk at school!'

Anna suggested that William was bullied when he was young. ‘Maybe he didn't know any other way of coping, except by being violent. So let's start the play with William Chaffin at school and we can show how he became cruel.'

'OK?' I asked the group, and there were murmurs of assent.

'Right, who wants to be the young William Chaffin?' I asked. Lots of hands went up. Chris was chosen by secret ballot (eyes closed and voting with hands up). Anna was chosen to be William's teacher.

We worked on it each afternoon for a week, and Anna loved it. As the particularly bad-tempered and strict school marm, she was very much the centre of all attention.

Our first scene was set in a classroom, with the teacher busy outside. Kids were throwing things round, shouting and fighting. The door opened, and in came Anna. There was panic, and the kids rushed for their seats. But Chris (William Chaffin) hadn’t noticed the teacher, and threw a book which landed on the floor at Anna's feet.

William Chaffin!' shouted Anna. ‘What to goodness do you think you are doing? Come out the front this instant! As for the rest of you, you dumb, idiotic kids, I'll deal with you later! William, what do you mean by it, eh?'

Chris opened his mouth to speak, but Anna was in full flight.

‘What do you mean by it, I say? I'll make you sorry, you insolent little kid! Bend over!'

But I ...

'Bend over!'

She reached for her imaginary lash, and hit him repeatedly and enthusiastically. She stopped only when the audience complained that she was overdoing it.

This first scene belonged to Anna, and each time we rehearsed it she would introduce something new. Sometimes her tongue-lashing would be menacingly restrained, and she would narrow her eyes and glare at the children in front of her. Sometimes she would push Chris repeatedly as she shouted at him, and it took all Chris's self-control not to push back. Once, she picked up the book that Chris had thrown, and hurled it temperamentally back at the class, which so startled everyone that we had to start the scene again. Other kids had more of the spotlight in later scenes, but none acted with such frenzied animation.

This William Chaffin play could have developed into a major focus for our group, but it was taken over by preparations for a second camp, this time under canvas. It was by now close to the end of the term and, although she and Penny were still friends, other relationships had also been important to Anna. A new girl, Catriona, had started with the group, and Anna had chosen to be with her and Gunnel for the camp. I took them down to the local supermarket one morning, so they could prepare their budget and buy some basic supplies. Anna suddenly stopped us as we wheeled our trolley up an aisle.

Look, marshmallows, said Anna. Let's get a couple of packets!'

'No, Anna,' said Catriona. 'We can't live off marshmallows. We've got to plan our main meals first?

Anna reached over to the shelves, grabbed three or four packets and threw them into the trolley. ‘I love these. They're great toasted by the fire!'

'Anna!' squealed Cationa. 'We didn't agree. You can't decide things all by yourself!'

'Don't you like marshmallows?'

"That's not the point,' said Catriona, her voice getting increasingly tense. "We've got to work out our main foods first.'

‘Well, I want marshmallows,' said Anna, beginning to sound flustered. "You want marshmallows don't you, Gunnel?'

'I suppose so.'

'So two of us want marshmallows, and only one doesn't.'

'God, Anna, don't you ever listen! I never said I didn't like marshmallows. It's just that I think we should plan our main food first.'

They walked on in silence. The marshmallows stayed in the trolley. Neither of them had asked for my support in the argument, perhaps because Barry and I had emphasized that we wanted them as much as possible to plan and work out difficulties for themselves.

'Bread,' said Catriona. 'We need two loaves. These ones are 85¢ each. Will we get these? Can we afford it?'

Gunnel and Cationa worked out that two 85¢ make $1.70, and Anna was happy to trust them. With an unfortunate lack of judgment, I saw this as an opportunity for some practical maths with Anna, and I asked her after the other two had moved on whether she thought they were right.

'I haven't a clue,' she said.

'Well, try to work it out. I'll help you if you like.' Her face was saying that she didn't like, but I ploughed on, unconsciously putting pressure on her, exacerbating her fear of numbers. I held out my hands. 'Let's work out two lots of 80 first. Imagine that I've got four 20¢ coins in each hand. How much would that come to?'

She began by mentally transferring one of the 20¢ coins from one hand to the other, so that there was $1 in one of the hands. But just doing that involved so much concentration (given that with most of her mind she was working out her chances of giving me the slip) that, by the time she'd done it, she'd forgotten why, and was confused. She tried again, adding 10¢ by 10¢ until she got to 80, but after that her counting in tens went 80, 90, 100, 101, 102, 103 ... Again we'd done this at school, and she'd got it right. But she wasn't in the mood here. I realized at that stage that it was time to leave it. But she carried the gloom back to school with her.

In the classroom, the three sat down to make their final food and equipment list for the camp, with Anna flustered and upset. I sat with them for about fifteen minutes, and Anna's agitation made any discussion between the three of them impossible. She would come out with three or four complaints or difficulties or confusions, all at once. I would try to help her focus on one of these, but she'd be talking about another one before anyone had time to home in on the first. She wasn't in a state because she was confused, but confused because she was in a state, and so my attempts to help were missing the point.

Later, as they practised putting up their tent, I exhorted them to keep calm, to talk things through, to do things slowly, to listen to each other. At one stage, a tent peg that Anna was hammering in was angled in such a way that the rope kept slipping off.

'Damn bloody thing,' she cursed, her face red and scowling. She tried to put the rope back on, but of course it slipped again. She grabbed it to try once more.

Is it going to work this time?' I asked, trying through my question to get her to slow down, to think more calmly.

"Yes, if I hammer this bloody peg in more.'

There were other kids and tent groups asking for help, but I felt that leaving her alone was going to lead to another explosion that might start the arguments in her little group once more. Quickly I tried to explain to Anna why her solution wouldn't work, but she didn't want to listen. I kept asking questions and, in that sense, forced her to take notice. In the end, she got the rope on. I felt frazzled and ineffective. But soon afterwards, as we walked back to the classroom, Anna held my hand and leaned against me. I wasn't sure whether she was just tired, or unconsciously thanking me for trying to help.

And that's where my 1982 diary finished. Over the time I'd known her, Anna had become more confident in her reading and writing, and shed got to the stage where she was reading for pleasure at home. Books needed to be carefully chosen, but her mother told me that Anna was not embarrassed to ask in a bookshop for 'easy books with big print'. For much of the time at school she was affectionate and happy, bouyed up by her successes with the models, her writing and her acting, and basking in the attention she received from her peers. But she was also desperately keen to do well, and sometimes the difficulties she experienced depressed her. She found the classroom stimulating and oppressive by turns, and was beset with sudden anxieties about coping, which as often as not would lead to some kind of dramatic release, as with the Suicide Centre and her argument with Zoe.

Over the next eighteen months, she continued in the same pattern, with periods of settled involvement interspersed with bouts when she complained loudly about herself or others. She wanted to go on the stage, she happily told her mother after one of our combined group's big improvised plays in 1983. On another occasion, after a family argument, she was sent to her room and appeared some ten minutes later in tears. "You'll have to send me to a school for handicapped people,' she told her mother, 'because I just can't control my brain.'

During this time, Anna began to develop an interest in history. Lesley, one of the other teachers, and I ran an intensive weeklong unit for which each child took on the persona of a First Fleet convict, soldier or officer, or of a First Nations person. Anna's choice was the convict William Bryant, and she had a wealth of primary sources to work with. The reading was demanding, but the rewards were great. First she found his name amongst those who had arrived in the convict ship Charlotte, and she told me excitedly about the ship's provisions. 'Listen to this, Steve. They brought 598 women's petticoats, 121 women's caps and 321 pairs of women's stockings. And they brought puppies, kittens, two mares, two stallions and five rabbits. Is that how rabbits first got to Australia?' She saw William Bryant's name mentioned in a marriage report, and again in an old newspaper article describing his dramatic escape with his wife and child in an open boat, in which they sailed all the way to Batavia. Each new discovery reinforced a growing realization in Anna that history was about real people, and whenever, in the months following, there was talk of us doing some more, Anna would tell the uninitiated that 'history is cool fun'.

She started the 1984 year in a mildly provocative way, answering questions about a story I was reading so facetiously that I stopped asking them. And then, later on the first day, she teamed up with Caitlin (with whom she'd developed a friendship over the course of 1983), and together they disrupted the small drama group they were working with. They performed their part as Greek gods and heroes in broad American accents, and when the group that I was a part of finished showing its scene, Anna leant over to me and said loudly that we'd 'gone on and on for much too long'. She was probably right, but it wasn't said to be helpful. Were these hints of an approaching adolescence, I wondered, or just signs that I was feeling extra sensitive that day?

Probably the latter, because she soon settled down to tackle her work with her customary determination. In response to some comments that I'd made to her about her work, her new friendship with Caitilin, and her swimming, she wrote me the following note, with spelling and punctuation as in the original:

i can not ick splan wott you sede but how you sede me and caitilin wor not shor of watt i was dowing in some parts i was and in some i wasent shor. wen i made the clay thing i made the spit and she made the box i helped a bit on the box but she was foling a bit. so tats why it was dume. In swemming I cant get throw the bareya, as soon as i get ther i start to file as if I have no more are and i stat cofing and some times you mite see me poking my head out of the wata and tats why I stop. I do not enjoy the maths vory much but i pot up with it.

After I had read this, I looked back at some of her 1982 spelling. I was struck by the improvement (though, when I said as much to Anna, she told me firmly and dismissively that her spelling was terrible). I could see that a number of very complex skills were coming together for her. She was now able to hear the sound of a word in her head, break it up into syllables, and find letters that conveyed the sounds pretty well (e.g. 'ick splan' for'explain", and "bareya' for barrier). She had also assimilated a lot of the common patterns in words, so that she was spelling words like was', 'some', 'made', and so on. Some of these skills may have come from the spelling lists (often made up from the kids' own work) that we gave out from time to time. But most had come, I thought, from her greater exposure to print, and from her growing sense that she could do it. We had also spent quiet times sitting together looking at the words she needed in her stories, her history work, her writing about horses, and I guessed she was doing the same at home with her mother. I knew that no logically sequenced spelling programme would have helped to the same extent. It wouldn't have touched the real Anna. Instead it would have briefly became a part of that shallow well of received learning that is forgotten almost as quickly as it is taken in.

Her handwriting had also improved. In 1982 it had been close to illegible, and over the two years she'd been in my class we had spent many sessions together when I would show her how to do a particular letter or combination, and she would go away and practise that for about twenty minutes. Her mother told me that she still wrote lots of letters unintelligible to the uninitiated, but that Anna was now able to laugh at this.

We had organized the maths in our group in such a way that each kid was able to work individually, with challenging topics for those who were confident with numbers and mathematical ideas, and more basic problems for those like Anna who found maths a struggle. Just as I felt that it was best for her to be reading books that were both interesting and easy, so I thought there was little point in getting her to struggle with maths concepts which only confused her no matter how much she tried.

But in fact just about all the maths that I gave Anna during her three years with me was unsuitable, no matter how much I varied the content or my approach. She would try to be interested, she would promise to herself that she would work hard, but it was all so divorced from what really interested and motivated her, and its logic was so foreign to her more intuitive and spontaneous way of looking at things, that maths times for her were almost always painful. Both Anna and I persisted because, at the time, we were both swayed by society's view that a child cannot be considered properly educated unless they're receiving regular doses of maths instruction. Later 1 concluded (unfortunately too late for Anna, who by then had left my class) that society's requirement that Anna be a numerate adult had been ill-served through the accumulation of unhappy experiences to which I subjected her.

Typical was a session we had at the beginning of 1984. She was working on a problem from her maths folder: How many people could a boat carry in a week if it made twenty-four trips carrying its maximum load of seventy-two passengers?

‘What does this mean, Steve? How do you do it? I don't get it,' she said to me almost before she'd finished reading the problem.

‘What do you think it means?' I asked. "What do you think it's all about?'

'I don't know. Boats ... Twenty-four boats? ... No, a boat that makes lots of trips.'

'How many trips?'

'Twenty-four?'

'That's right. And how many passengers can it carry each time?'

‘Um, seventy-two?'

‘Right, so what is it, do you think that you have to work out?'

‘How many passengers the boat takes in a week. I know that, but I can't do it. How do you do it? It's too hard?’

I sent her off to have a try. 'Use any way you want to work it out. Draw pictures, use counters, anything.'

She came back a little while later with a drawing of the river and a boat, but stuck as to what to do next.

I sat next to her on the stairs. All around us kids were working on their own problems, and there was a busy hum in the room. Some were measuring and counting with blocks and counters, some working with elaborate drawings, some talking and arguing with friends or with Allen about some aspects of their maths, and others were working just with numbers, paper and pencil.

Anna and I worked together for about fifteen minutes, but nothing seemed to help. We drew pictures, I showed her (not for the first time) how to multiply by ten and how to add large numbers but, though she was trying to concentrate and was desperate to understand, she had the same blank look on her face at the end of our time together as she'd had when we started.

Sessions such as these only made Anna feel less intelligent, less able, less skilled than she actually was. A couple of years after Anna had left my class, her mother told me that she'd noticed how confidently Anna handled numbers when she was cooking, buying clothes or looking after her horse (on which she lavished much loving care), and that through these interests she had become basically numerate, though she still saw herself as hopeless at school maths. Real life and school. So often they are seen as different worlds. So often what children learn in one is seen by them and by teachers as being totally irrelevant to the other.

What Anna needed to be doing in my class, in order to become better prepared to enter the work force as a numerate adult, was, I now think, an almost entirely practical course; playing games, cooking, making toys and models.

Or building a village and being put in charge of the accumulated riches of a medieval monastery.

There hadn't been a lot during those early weeks of 1984 that had stirred Anna. She hankered after something a bit more exciting, something on a grander scale where she could indulge her love of make-believe and drama. She knew that we were planning some kind of a village project. She knew, too, that the project would involve more history research and role play.

"When are we going to start, Steve?' she asked me crossly one day. 'All this other stuff we're doing is really boring!'