Part 1 Chapter 2: Chris

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

It was the Friday morning of that first week of term in 1982, and I was over in the wet area talking to Penny and Anna about their model cottage.

‘What do you think, Steve?' said Anna, as she slopped a piece of papier-mâché onto the wire frame. 'Pretty wonderful, don't you think?'

It looked an awful mess, but fun.

'Wonderful,' I lied.

I looked over their shoulders at the activity in the rest of the room. It was the part of the day given over to the kids' own choices. Some were reading in a quiet corner and a couple were gardening outside with Barry. Andrew, bent over his cricket books, was writing out the bowling averages of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson. Jenny and Jenna were working together with bright textas on drawings which were exciting and vivid. Tyrell and Gunnel were making baskets, and chatting to each other about someone's dog. Dan, Michael and Ra were close by in the wet area, making a 'marble machine' — an elaborate maze of cardboard chutes and tunnels down which they occasionally sent marbles to test it. Jessie, Cass, Kate and Zoe were sitting at a table together, making drawings of imaginary cities. It seemed an interesting group of kids, happy to bring their interests and energy into the classroom. I was looking forward to the challenge of finding ways to weave these enthusiasms - for drawing, experimenting, reading, making and just being together - into the fabric of our curriculum.

But one kid concerned me.

Chris had arrived at the school at the end of the previous year. He'd been unhappy at his other school, and his parents were worried about his lethargic and sometimes hostile behaviour at home. 'He would rather do the rejecting than be rejected,' his mother had said to me on the first day of term, and I'd already noticed how many times he had dismissed something as 'boring' without giving it a chance.

He was sitting next to the marble machine makers, looking down on their activity with a half-smile on his round face. He had sandy hair, and narrow, dark eyes, which would almost shut when he laughed. His Dungeons and Dragons manual lay unread on the table. He was looking uncommitted, uncertain.

‘How's it going, Chris?’ I called.

He looked over at me, then at the ground, 'OK, I suppose.' I went and sat on the table next to him. I could feel a barrier between us, something more than just unfamiliarity, but didn't know where it was coming from.

‘What've you been reading?' I asked.

He pointed to the manual. 'A bit of that. But I'm not in the mood really. I couldn't be bothered.'

‘Well, what do you feel like doing?'

‘Nothing much. There's nothing interesting to do round here.'

Katherine, his teacher for the last part of the previous year, had told me that Chris liked maths, so I gave him some maths puzzles that Allen had prepared. 'Have a go at these,' I said, 'and tell me what you think? He shrugged his shoulders, and sat down.

I went back to Anna's model.

A couple of minutes later, Barry came in, asking for volunteers to help him inspect the school grounds to see what needed doing.

‘I'll come,' said Chris. He looked quite keen, and I hoped that he'd find himself getting involved, and feeling more a part of the school. But when I asked him later what they had done, he shrugged his shoulders again and said, ‘Not much.'

I was finding him difficult to reach, and, I had to admit, hard to like.

***

That afternoon we had our first maths session for the term.

I decided not to start with the maths folders straight away, but instead to do some work on number patterns with the whole group.

'Oh no, not that!' said Chris loudly, when he discovered what I'd planned.

It sounded to me as if he was saying this as a matter of course, not because he had really had his share of patterns during his school life. Still, I decided to give him something different to do, the problem of how many different ways you can sort ninety. six counters into equal sized piles.

‘God, that sounds even more boring,’ he said under his breath.

I started the rest of the group on their work, then went over to see Chris. He was sitting on the carpet with piles of counters in front of him, pausing every now and then to jot something down. He looked immersed and happy, so I left him alone.

'Steve, I've worked out that you can sort the counters into twos, threes, fours, but not fives,' he said to me at the end of the session. ‘I'll finish it off tomorrow. OK?'

His face was more open, his voice more relaxed.

***

I listened, one morning, while a group of kids which included Chris complained about the state of the school's cricket pitch, a worn and uneven patch in the middle of the oval. I asked them if they wanted to do something about it, and the idea of a concrete pitch emerged.

Some of them raised objections. ‘It would cost too much . . .It would be too hard.'

But Andrew and Caleb in particular were keen to look into it further, and the group joined me on the oval one morning to start the planning.

'Look at it, Steve,' said Chris, pointing to the bare patch. 'Hopeless, isn't it! You can't play cricket on something like that!'

There was something jarring about his tone, as if he were trying to establish himself as a member of this little group rather than pursue a genuine interest.

Andrew and Caleb took some rough measurements, and then we went to Bernie, the Principal. He did some calculations about cost, occasionally asking kids for help, Chris being quick and accurate with his responses.

At the end of the day, Chris wrote:

Today I went to the cricket pitch and I thort it was not very good so I went to Bernie, As sone as posoble it is going to be fixed up.

‘You haven't tried all that hard with this writing, Chris, have you,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘But I never try at things. If you try, then people expect you to do things well, and I’m too lazy for that!’

Was he being disarmingly honest, I wondered, or was I just seeing the same barrier from another direction?

The next day, the four boys organized a meeting to discuss the cricket pitch issue, and the meeting suggested having a cricket match on a nearby concrete pitch 'so that you can all see how good it would be'. But a couple of eleven-year-olds who hadn't been at the meeting got wind of what was going on, and went around the school collecting signatures opposing the concrete pitch.

'Hey, Steve,' called out Chris, as Allen and I walked back from the staffroom at lunchtime. His face was animated. 'Have you heard what's happening? Some kids are organizing a petition against the concrete pitch! It's war for sure!'

In fact, there was no war. We played our cricket match on a concrete pitch, and then we went off to Jervis Bay. The idea lay dormant for three years, until another teacher who handled the project more effectively than I'd done worked with some of these same kids, by then aged about twelve.

But I had seen something in Chris's face as he reported the worsening political situation to me. The tensions and conflicts beneath the surface were clearly much more interesting to him than cricket and the actual laying of a concrete pitch.

Later that day, the kids were writing, and I was walking around looking over shoulders. Chris was the only one using 'running' writing, or cursive script. 'I like your writing,' I said to him as I passed, and then I made a comment to the group about it and about how we were going to work on cursive writing this year.

Chris gave me his unfinished story at the end of the day.

'Does it matter, Steve, that a little bit of my story is printed?' I looked at his face for any sign of irony, but there was none.

He'd written (spelling and punctuation corrected):

Once upon a time there was an ogre. He lived in a big cave. Every night he came out of his cave to eat. He goes to a town, and he lifts up a house and grabbed all of the people inside the house and he ate all the people inside and went back to his cave and went to sleep. He kept on doing that until there were no more people in the town. He said, I will have to go to another town,' and when he had gone 100 metres in front of him there was a town, so he picked up a house and he saw an elf. He was very surprised to see an elf. The elf cast a spell on the ogre, and the ogre got smaller. He was as small as the elf. The elf said, 'You must go back to your cave. There is a hole in the wall. You must go in it. You must kill all the monsters in there.'

On the surface, it was just another adventure story, very much one of a genre. But there had been something about the way Chris had been so lost in its writing that made me suspect that it's source was in his unconscious mind. It seemed significant to me that the focus was on the ogre and not the elf, an ogre who lived in a cave (safe from the rest of the world), who made sudden devastating forays into the outside world and then 'went back to his cave and went to sleep'. Was the ogre's allegiance to the elf connected somehow with Chris's own wish to be more accepted by the group?

I found it an interesting line of speculation, but knew that, in the end, it wasn't important whether or not I understood the story's symbolism. What mattered was that Chris saw that I genuinely appreciated his story. He was obviously pleased when I read it out to the class.

***

The following day, Marion, the French teacher, came down to the class for half an hour after morning tea.

‘What's she doing here?' Chris whispered to me.

‘Marion's going to give us all a French lesson, to help you decide whether you want to take French this term.'

'Oh Steve, do I have to go? I hate French.'

‘Yes, we're all going. It won't hurt, and it's just for half an hour.'

I went to the back of the room, and Marion started the lesson.

Chris sat next to Dan, and the two of them giggled at each other's exaggerated pronunciation, and were generally restless, so I asked Dan to come and sit with me. Almost at once Chris began to look genuinely interested, and I could see him mouthing some of the words silently, watching Marion intently in order to catch the drift of what she was saying. By the end of the session he was as involved as anyone.

‘There,' I said to him after Marion had gone, ‘that was OK, wasn’t it?’

'Oh, I don't think I'll do French,' he said. 'It was a bit boring if you ask me.'

Again, as with comments he'd made before, I felt that his words didn't match what he was feeling inside.

The day ended with Chris and me having our first open clash.

We'd been doing maths during the afternoon, playing the game of Snakes and Ladders on the blackboard. I was on something of a high, after a particularly good week with the group, and I was fooling around, pretending that I couldn't understand the game as well as the kids. Ra in particular was enjoying it all, and was very quick at working out some sums based on the Hundred Square that we were using. But when I put up a whole lot of written sums on the board for the kids to do, Ra angrily gave up.

He was still angry after the session, and hid under a table.

'Come on, Ra, everyone else is tidying up. You come and join us.'

'I don't have to,' he said.

I let my euphoria and sense of being in control get in the way of my better judgement. Instead of ignoring him, I found myself taking him on.

‘If you don't help now, then I'll let everyone else go and you can do the tidying up by yourself.'

'I don't care,' he said.

I let the others go and turned to talk to Ra, but he'd slipped out a back door. I found him half way to the bus stop, and made him come back. He was very angry, shouting at me that he was going to miss the bus. As we got to the door of the classroom, Chris looked up to see what all the noise was about.

'Ra's going to miss his bus, Steve,' he said.

I was angry myself by now, and irrationally I turned on Chris.

‘If you're so concerned about Ra missing his bus, then you can come in and help him do the tidying up. Come on!' Chris looked at me, startled and hurt. But he could see I was serious, and very angry. He went into the classroom, and started banging chairs around and hurling scrap paper into the bins.

‘It's unfair,’ he said through tears of anger. ‘I've got to go swimming this afternoon, my mum will be waiting for me.’

He was right, it had been unfair. I let them go after a token couple of minutes, and went home for the weekend cursing myself for handling it so badly.

And yet Chris came in to school on Monday morning as though our tearful and tense confrontation hadn't happened. Not only that, but he said to some kids in a voice that I was meant to hear that I was ‘the best maths teacher in Canberra'. He was relaxed and thoughtful during the rest of the day, and asked me to read out some more of his unfinished story to the group.

Perhaps it was just that he'd had a good weekend. But I didn't feel entirely happy with this explanation. It was clearly important to Chris that he work out his relationship with me, to test it before revealing more of himself. For other kids this didn't seem to matter quite as much. Perhaps in some strange way my anger on Friday had broken a spell, somehow encouraged him to drop the barriers. That, at any rate, seemed to have been the effect.

I had another heated confrontation with Chris about a week later. I'd set aside a couple of sessions to listen to kids read individually. For those two sessions, I told the group, I wanted them to choose an activity for which they wouldn't need my help, to give me a chance for some uninterrupted time to listen to the reading.

During the first of the two sessions, Chris and Tobias finished making a model boat and took it off to the dam. But at the beginning of the second session, they were at a loose end, and so I took some time to sit with them. Chris was just plain impossible. Everything was 'boring'.

'Do you want to sail your boat again?'

"No, I've been doing that all morning. I've got sick of that'

‘How about going up to the library and reading?'

‘I don't like reading. Anyway, they haven't got any books that I like up there.'

‘You could write some more of your story?'

'No, I'm sick of that.'

I tried a couple of other ideas, but the response was the same, so finally I said, 'Well, come with me and we'll get some cardboard, and you can make a cover for your Jervis Bay diary.’

'Oh God, not that! That's the one thing I really don't want to do!'

At which point I hit the roof.

‘I don't care anymore whether you find it boring or not,' I shouted. ‘I've wasted enough time standing here trying to help. Just go off and do it, and I don't want to hear any more objections.'

Chris didn't storm off, as I'd half-expected. Instead he turned to Eli, and said calmly, as if not a cross word had been spoken, ‘I think I'll make another boat. Do you want to come and make a boat with me, Eli?' Eli, a very quiet boy, looked too surprised to say anything. He nodded, and the two of them went off.

Again, as with the cleaning-up episode, I'd been genuinely angry, though this time with more just cause. And again my anger seemed to have somehow cleared the air. I hoped that this wouldn't become the pattern.

Later that week, we began work on the play about the old school and William Chaffin, based on the list of school rules that I'd read out to the class. Chris was chosen to play the main part, that of William Chaffin himself, and he enjoyed the role very much. But even more important was the fact that he had been voted into the part by the rest of the class. He had been accepted by the group, and he talked about that play often during the months that followed.

I noticed that Chris was becoming more relaxed, more open, more willing to reach out. Perhaps, though the implications sat uneasily with me, he'd interpreted my angry outbursts as evidence that I cared about what he did, and that he shared my frustration that the self-imposed barrier was preventing him from taking a full role in the life of our class. Perhaps his successes in his maths, his writing and the play were what made the difference. Whatever it was, he now talked to me without bravado more often, about his interest in maths, his ogre story, about strict schools from the past, about his reluctance to read anything long, and his interest in controversy. I was finding that I enjoyed his company and conversation in a way that I hadn't at the beginning of the year.

You can tell there's a fish beneath the water by the bubbles that ripple the surface. I'd now seen a couple of Chris's bubbles, and once or twice I'd caught a glimpse of him peering tentatively from behind a rock. Maybe soon he’d be exploring the the pond a bit more confidently, and thinking about the bigger world beyond

***

The following Monday we took off for Jervis Bay. Chris was looking very excited as we got onto the bus, shouting to Michael, Dan and Tobias, feeling much more a part of things. He and Tobias played cards for the first hour of the journey, and then shot at enemy soldiers in the bush and at enemy planes in the sky with imaginary guns.

It rained on Tuesday morning, but fined up in time for us to go down to Murray's Beach in the afternoon at low tide, to explore the rock pools. Anna went collecting shells on her own, but most of the kids followed Barry over the rocks, showing each other what they had found and asking Barry questions.

‘Hey look,’ called out Ra, who was wading through shallow water with some friends, 'Barry, look! What's that in the water?'

Barry jumped into the water. 'It's an octopus!' he shouted with a grin, and the kids leapt onto the rocks.

Barry struggled to get hold of the creature, but it thrashed around wildly and escaped from his grasp. He tried again, almost submerging himself completely in the water, and this time came out holding a large and very beautiful cuttlefish, about seventy centimetres long and thirty wide. It had some of its ten tentacles around Barry's arm, and was trying to get its beak-like mouth near his hand. He eased it off his arm and into a large rockpool.

'Hey, come and see what Barry's got!' shouted Chris, and the other kids crowded around. The exquisite markings along the back of the cuttlefish changed from an angry orange to a glossy green-black as we watched it swim around, using tissue along its sides like a stingray's wings to glide it along. Every now and then, when someone got too close, the cuttlefish would expel water quickly and shoot away.

Some of the kids wandered off after a few minutes, but Chris, Dan and some others stayed to watch. They got into the water next to the cuttlefish, and lightly touched it as it swam past.

Clearly Chris had been excited by all this. As we walked up the beach to the bus, he started to sing happily:

Dan is my friend, and Anna is my enemy,

Dan is my friend, and Anna is my enemy …

Anna usually rose to bait like this, but she ignored it perhaps sensing that there was no venom. It was just Chris's way of celebrating his warm feelings for Dan without appearing soft. I heard him later on suggesting to a non-committal Andrew. 'Hey, next time we come to Jervis Bay, let's share a cabin together!' He was putting out feelers in lots of directions.

After breakfast the next morning, I asked Chris and Penny to organise the cleaning and cooking rosters for the rest of the camp.

‘Yeah, OK,’ said Chris. He took a piece of paper and began to write down jobs. Penny stood by and watched as Chris made all the decisions.

'Listen,' I said. 'That's not quite what I had in mind. Can you see what's happening?'

‘What do you mean?' asked Chris.

"You're doing it all,' said Penny. 'I'm meant to be in this, too!'

‘Whoops, sorry, Steve,' said Chris. ‘Well, let's start again. What do you think, Penny?' He looked up to make sure I'd taken in his facetious exaggeration.

Later that morning, Chris organised a game of chasey around the cabins.

'OK, everyone who wants to be in the game, come over here and I'll find out who's in,' he yelled, and about ten kids gathered round in a small circle. 'Put your hands out. Eeny-meeny-miney-mo,' he began, but instead of tapping each hand in turn, he slapped them. It wasn't hurting the kids, but there was an aggressive edge to the way Chris was doing it.

'Chris! Don't be an idiot!' shouted Barry. 'It's a game, mate, just go gently. All right?'

Chris looked surprised, then momentarily upset. He shrugged his shoulders, 'Yeah OK', and then (under his breath) 'It's only a bit of fun, gee.' Then he threw himself back into the game, the incident apparently forgotten.

We then packed our lunches and went on a longish walk to Black's Harbour, a very pretty and secluded beach along the coast, where the kids explored, swam, snorkled and played on the sand. Anna came out of the water and over to where I was sitting. She took off her mask and told me breathlessly, 'I can't breathe properly! My nose is all suctioned up!'

Then Jessie and Cass began to dig in the sand, making a small river down to the edge of the sea from a fresh water spring that they'd found. They worked alone for about fifteen minutes, while most of the others were swimming. Soon Penny, Kate and Zoe joined them, and the rivers started to get more ambitious, to branch off and spread out across the beach. The conversation was starting to get more animated, especially from Zoe and Kate, and they experimented with damming the water from the spring, and then letting it flood down in a rush.

Caleb, Tobias and Tyrrell then joined in, and soon the boys were building the dam at the spring while the rest made their rivers and walls and junctions. It was getting more and more exciting, especially when the flood waters were released. Eli and Ra made a rock castle near the sea where these rivers rushed in, and Eli began to tap the waters into a moat that ran around their castle. Zoe and Kate were by this time walking up and down the line of children, making suggestions and comments. 'Let's release the water from the dam now! We're holding it for too long ... Leave the middle part of that wall unwrecked, so we don't have to build it again!’ Others, and especially Tobias and Caleb, were much more involved in shaping the sand, making tunnels and walls, and banking water in the dam.

Then Chris, Michael and Dan got out of the water, and saw what was happening. They were soon building their own dam and river, a little distance away from the main group.

'Hey, Michael,' called Chris after they'd been going for ten minutes or so. 'See that wall down there. I'm going to let some water go from the dam. It's really going to obliterate that wall. I'm going to make it branch off. I'm going to see how it copes with it.'

'Don't, Chris,' said Michael. 'That's cheating. We should just let it all out at once, when we're ready!’

'I want to try. Just a bit,' said Chris. But before he let any water out he'd found something else. ‘Hey, I know where it's going to erode. Have a look, Dan. It's going to erode here.' Dan looked up briefly, but wasn't really interested. Chris scooted around, calling out suggestions. The other two calmly went about their preparations.

‘This bit looks too weak I reckon. I'm going to build this bit up!' He was really excited by now, and slapped on sand as though his life depended on it. ‘That's good now! That'll hold! Hey, you guys, quick, the dam is about to burst! It's getting too full!' Dan and Michael ran to the dam.

'It's just getting deeper, that's all,' said Michael.

No,' yelled Chris, 'it's going to gush off there. Just there!'

‘No it won't,' said Dan quietly. 'Let's build it up more.'

They built up the dam walls for a minute, and then Dan stood up.

'Let's have a little bit of test water!'

Michael made a small hole at the top of a dam wall, and water trickled down the river beds they had been shaping. The three followed the water down, commenting on what was happening and speculating excitedly on what the full force of the dam water would do when they released it.

'Turn off test water! Turn off test water!' called Dan, his voice sounding like one of television's space commanders.

They played like that for ten minutes or so, and, as they played, their moods blended better. As the moment for releasing the dam water approached, Michael and Dan joined in more with Chris's shouts and orders. They all cheered when at last the water burst from the dam and obliterated their walls and banks.

I would have felt proud had I managed to set up an activity back at school that involved so much cooperation and creativity. The kids were alive, animated. They were trying out new words, playing out fantasies, and (particularly Chris, I thought) testing out some new relationships.

***

Chris seemed keen to start on his project as soon as we got back to school. He got himself a sheet of cardboard, and a place to work. He had a book on sea birds from the library open next to him.

"What's the project on?' I asked.

'Sea eagles,' he told me.

As we’d stood watching the cuttlefish at Jervis Bay, he had said something to me about doing a project on squid and cuttlefish, and I knew he hadn't seen any sea eagles there.

'Are you sure?' I asked. 'Don't you want to do some work on something you actually saw?'

'Oh, I'm pretty interested in sea eagles,' he said. 'I see them when we go down to our house at the coast.'

When I returned to his table about half an hour later, he was meticulously copying a drawing of a sea eagle onto his piece of cardboard. I encouraged him to try sketching much more quickly and roughly, to get the overall shape and 'feel' of the bird, and he was delighted with the results. He was happy to let me show his sketches to the group that afternoon just before he went home.

But he began to lose steam the next day. Often when I looked his way he would be staring into space or chatting with a friend, his book pushed to one side. He'd finished his sketches, and had told me what it was he was planning to do with the rest of his project. ‘I want to find out about the sea eagle's food and how many eggs they have and who looks after the young and stuff like that.' But he wasn't looking at all motivated. I went over and sat down at his table. As soon as he saw me, he grabbed his book.

‘It's OK, Steve. I'm reading. I'm working,’ he said with a grin.

'Interesting?' I asked.

'Oh yes, he said, with an enthusiasm which didn't quite fit. ‘Did you know that the sea eagle can fly at two hundred miles an hour? It's the same as the American bald eagle.'

'Are you sure?' I asked. 'Is that what the book says?'

‘Not this book. I read it somewhere I think.'

‘What about the book you've got. Is that interesting?'

‘Not really,' he said. ‘I just can't seem to get into it.'

"Well, read to me for a bit.'

He read, accurately but without enthusiasm for a few minutes. I'd been skimming the pages as he read, and had noticed a more interesting part, which I pointed to. 'Read that,' I said. 'I think you'll find that better.' And I went to help someone else.

'Hey,' I heard him say a few minutes later. 'Hey, Michael, did you know that if the sea eagle sees an osprey carrying a fish it will chase it until the osprey drops the fish?'

Soon he was distracted again. I went over and helped him focus his attention back on his project, and he was responsive and attentive. But, as soon as I turned to help someone else, he would stop reading and wait passively for me, or he'd grab Tobias's electronic game and start playing with it. He was good-humoured throughout it all, and admitted cheerfully to me that he wanted to take some books back up to the library so that he could delay, yet again, the evil moment when he had to go back to his silent reading.

Over the next few days he found the answers to his research questions, and he wrote them down rather sketchily on his cardboard. But he was never really involved. When I looked around the room, I could see that what was true for Chris wasn't true for everyone. Many of the kids - even those who found reading difficult - had enjoyed going to the library, looking through books, dissecting the squid, painting sea pictures of whales and octopus and star fish. The room was looking good as we prepared for the parent evening. It was just that Chris didn't feel caught up in it.

Chris's mother came in that lunchtime and we sat outside in the sun.

‘Chris came back from the camp at Jervis Bay rather down in the dumps,' she told me. ‘He told us that he didn't have any friends, that Barry thought he was an idiot, and yesterday he said that he wanted to go back to his old school.'

I was stunned, and told her so. I told her about the William Chaffin play, and how it seemed to me that Chris had been much more in the thick of things at the camp: that he, Michael and Dan had played together a lot, that he'd organised games and rosters, and had been excited by the cuttlefish. I told her what had happened between Chris and Barry, and how Chris had turned away from Barry's wrath as if unaffected. 'Just like Chris,’ she said. ‘He's very good at hiding his true feelings when he thinks he's being watched.' I described Chris's mood since we got back to school, how he'd lost some of the drive of the past few weeks. ‘But I'm very surprised,’ I said, ‘that he wants to leave. Overall, things seemed to be working out so well for him.'

‘I suspect that there are other reasons for his mood at the moment,' said Chris's mother. ‘He was caught spending money on sweets the other day, something we've forbidden. He was also down in the dumps about a very bad gym session after school last week. I suspect that things are getting on top of him a bit. He's also upset because we've banned TV in our house. He obviously gets a lot of information from it, but he's been doing nothing else but watch, and no reading at home. In fact he needs a lot of encouragement to get started on anything.’

'And it seems to us,' she continued, ‘that he is happy here. Last year he was slamming doors and throwing tantrums after school, and they've disappeared. He's generally much happier and more relaxed at home.'

I suggested that perhaps the lack of regular maths while we prepared for the parent evening was a problem for Chris. Not that he needed to be doing lots of maths - he was very good at it, and picked things up quickly. It was more that maths was something he really enjoyed doing. Messing around with numbers and problems gave him a sense of achievement and satisfaction. (What a contrast, I thought, to Anna!)

So we decided to get in touch again in a week or two, to see how things were panning out. And I talked to Barry, who said he'd make a point of working with Chris soon.

I wondered whether or not to talk to Chris directly about all of this, and in the end decided against it. Our relationship by now was a good one (he had told his mother that 'Steve thinks I'm pretty intelligent) but, when we talked about his feelings, he often told me what he thought I wanted to hear, or else said something which fitted his image of what a cynical young person would say.

***

Once the parent evening was over, we returned to our more regular routine, and Chris settled back into the group. He started work on a giant die one day, with one of the girls in Allen's group. They got chicken wire, shaped it into a metre-high cube, and then stuck on papier-mâché and painted it. It was never finished, but he’d had a lot of fun with it. I remember, too, one afternoon when we played a game of softball with Chris as one of the captains. 'Have I won?' he asked, as we left the oval. He was enjoying the work on handwriting and spelling that we were doing, and was deeply involved in the maths.

I loved working with him on his maths. He revelled in a challenge, though he still insisted that he never tried at anything. He'd work for a while on a problem, then, when he saw that I wasn't busy, he'd come over to talk about the work he was doing. He listened intelligently if I had a suggestion or a correction to make, and then would walk off thoughtfully, mulling over what had gone wrong or where his train of thought might lead.

And he continued work on the ogre story. It was obviously much influenced by his favourite game, Dungeons and Dragons, and was full of episodes like the following:

He sees a passage leading to a door. He goes to the door in a bad mood, but he goes on. He opens the door and sees a hundred skeletons and a whole lot of gold and lots of other very valuable things.

As he walked into the room, he remembered the elf said skeletons were alive. So he went up to the skeletons and with his sword he knocked off all their heads and got the valuables. He was tired, so he iron-spiked the door and went to sleep. There was no other doors in this room.

***

'Yeah, that's right, Caleb, hammer that peg in first.' Caleb looked up at Chris with a knowing smile on his face.

Caleb had put his tent up hundreds of times before, and he suspected that Chris was pretty new to the game. But Chris was bustling about, looking busy and making all the right sorts of comments.

Caleb reached over to pick up a pole.

'Let's do the pole next, what do you think, Caleb?'

'Of course it's the pole next,’ said Caleb. He was amused rather than annoyed.

The kids were getting ready for a camp, and we were behind the chook pens at school. I was enjoying watching Chris fumble around. It made me feel somehow competent, when in fact my impracticality in the great outdoors was the source of much amusement for Barry.

'OK everyone,' called out Barry. 'Take down the tents now, and swap roles. The helper last time makes the decisions this time. The helper this time just does what he or she is told. Off you go.'

I expected Chris to make a real hash of it. He'd been putting so much energy into appearing to know what to do. But he had picked up quite a bit from watching Caleb, and it wasn't too long, with only a couple of temporary hitches, before he had Caleb's tent up.

'Good on you, Chris, said Barry, making up for any lingering ill-feeling after Jervis Bay. 'That looks pretty good.'

‘Naturally,’ he said, beaming.

Soon after the camp, I had a letter from Chris's mother, telling me that there had been a noticeable positive change in Chris over the second half of the term, and that ‘he was up before light the other morning to finish some writing - quite of his own accord.’

***

'Order! The House will come to order! The Right Honourable the Leader of the Opposition has a question.'

It could have been the Federal Parliament, except that the parliamentarians in front of me were better behaved than those at Parliament House. We had set up our own classroom Parliament about half way through the year, partly as a bit of fun, partly because kids love copying aspects of the adult world they see around them, and partly as an attempt to introduce more accountability and democracy into our classroom. We had a Prime Minister, and Ministers with portfolios ranging from Games through to Room Tidiness. There was an Opposition, too, and Chris was its leader. I was Speaker, and it was my voice calling for order.

Chris stood up.

‘I would like to address my question to the Prime Minister. When are you going to do something about your Ministers? They're hopeless. They keep saying they'll do something, and then they forget all about it. Like your Minister for Games. He said he'd organise a game of long ball sometime last week, but it still hasn't happened. And your Minister for Room Tidiness admitted that the present cleaning system was a balls up, and she promised to start a new system, but she hasn't. It's really hopeless.'

The Prime Minister looked embarrassed. ‘I'll talk to them afterwards,' she said, and sat down. Allen and I exchanged a glance. We'd been talking earlier that day about how confidently Chris was doing his job. In fact we'd begun to feel a bit uneasy that a few of the more confident kids - Chris and Paul in particular - were introducing a very effective brand of antagonism which was certainly true to life, but perhaps not all that good for the atmosphere of our classroom.

Question Time in our Parliament drew to a close, and then we discussed possibilities for a class excursion. Ice-skating was a popular choice, and the Minister for Excursions went to telephone the rink while the rest of the kids went off to different parts of the room to pursue their own activities. The kids were all working on a contract basis by now - they had agreements made with either Allen or me about what they would have done by the end of the week. And so there were some over in the wet area painting and model making, others reading, writing and working on maths, spelling or handwriting, and a small group off in the Quiet Room playing Dungeons and Dragons. Chris usually joined the D & D group, but on this occasion he came up and sat next to me on the stairs that joined our two rooms.

"Can I talk to you about something please, Steve?' I glanced at his face to see if he was coming to tease me yet again about the length of my nose. He and some friends had recently started making drawings of inventions designed either to measure its length (these were usually equipped with pulleys, cranes and giant tape measures) or to reduce its size (explosives were a favourite method). But he looked serious this time.

‘It's about the Parliament,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if there was any chance of me having a go at being the Speaker?'

We'd had the Parliament at other schools I'd taught at, and we'd often had kids trying out as the Speaker who controls proceedings. All of the kids who'd tried it had found it a difficult job, but had enjoyed the prestige.

‘I know it's not an easy job, and I might make a big mess of it. But l'd like to try, if you'll give me advice and help me with comments when you think I'm not going so great.'

I could see that he was keen, and knew he was confident in large groups. He had a strong interest in classroom politics - who made decisions and whether they were fair or not - as I had discovered during the first weeks of the term. So I talked to Allen about it, and we told Chris that, as long as the Parliament agreed, it would be OK with us. "That's good,' he said. 'I was thinking of moving a no-confidence motion in you if you'd said no.'

***

For about two months, Chris acted as Speaker at our weekly Parliament sessions. As we'd thought, he had some pretty difficult times, especially when an issue got complicated with red herrings. I helped when I could, and left him when I thought he could manage.

I remember one particular debate about the tidy-up system. It had started with a suggestion that ten kids be rostered to tidy up each afternoon, but after about ten minutes there were at least half a dozen other suggestions all being promoted at once. It was more like a brainstorming session than a debate on a motion, and Chris was struggling. And, on the occasions when he struggled, he tended to be a rather dictatorial Speaker.

'OK,’ he said, picking up the suggestion of the last speaker that the tidy up should be at the beginning of the day instead of at the end, ‘who thinks that this is a good idea?'

'Hey, wait a minute, Chris,’ called Elizabeth. ‘We haven't voted on my suggestion yet!'

‘Well, just wait your turn, will you,' snapped Chris.

‘But I made my suggestion first! And anyway, were not meant to be talking about when to have the clean-up, but how we should do it.’

"Oh, all right. So who here thinks Elizabeth's idea is a good one?’

'What was it? I can't remember,' called several voices.

‘The one about having a wheel which we spin to find out what job you've got for that day?’

‘I don't get it. How would it work?'

"We've been through all that,' said Chris impatiently. 'You should pay attention more and then you'd know what we were talking about.'

'But I was listening, and I didn't understand it then!’

By this time, several of the kids on the fringes of the room had lost interest, and were chatting with each other. Allen and I were trying to encourage them to take part, and at the same time trying to think of constructive ways of getting the debate back onto the rails.

'Are we going to vote or not?' asked Elizabeth abruptly.

I'll chuck you out of here if you keep interrupting. I'm in charge here,' said Chris, and then opened his mouth to direct proceedings, but no words came out. He had forgotten where we had all got to. So had we all. We adjourned the debate, and I suggested to Chris that he get the different ideas written on a big board for next time.

***

The class Parliament was one of a number of activities which signalled Chris's transition from a boy on the fringes of our group to someone at its centre. He continued to shed his protective shell throughout the rest of 1982 and during 1983, and threw himself into our big drama productions and the Australian history course. Our relationship settled into a comfortable and trusting one, partly through our shared interest in maths, which Chris developed into something of a good-natured rivalry, forever on the look-out for opportunities to prove me wrong. By the beginning of 1984, we had spent a fair bit of time working together, and we enjoyed each other's company.

Allen and I had decided to begin 1984 with our two groups together. And so, on the first day of the school year, all forty-eight kids sat around on the steps and carpet on Allen's side of the room divider, chatting about the holidays and waiting for one of us to begin.

Allen and I had worked together for two years now, and our working relationship was happy and comfortable. Strangely, we found the business of sitting down and planning together quite awkward, and consequently we did most of our real work together on the run, over coffee in the staffroom at morning tea, or in the classroom itself with the kids around us. He was sitting opposite me now, in baggy khaki shorts and long-sleeved shirt, stroking his sandy Ho Chi Minh beard gently, and looking rather like a young and kindly wizard as he talked to some of the kids.

We welcomed the new kids, and then Chris asked if he could say something. He was now nearly eleven; the youngest kids in the group were just nine.

‘I just wanted to warn the kids who are new to this group about a couple of things. First of all, you have to be careful what you say about the length of Steve's nose. He gets rather tooshie (a word the kids used to mean "explosive" or "temperamental", as in "chucking a tooshie"), because he's very sensitive about it. Also you've got to watch Steve when it's time to tidy up at the end of the day. He somehow seems to find that there's something he has to do somewhere else, and he's always disappearing.’

He was enjoying his role as an elder, initiating the younger kids into the rites of the tribe.

We set aside a part of each day for the first fortnight to take the kids swimming with Barry. I sat with Chris one afternoon at the pool, and we talked about the new year.

‘How are you finding it?' I asked. 'You're seeming very confident to me. You've grown up a lot over the past twelve months or so.'

'Have I?' he said. 'I hadn't noticed.'

I smiled. He was very poised.

‘No seriously, Steve,’ Chris said. ‘I've been in this group for two years now, and I don't have any real fears of the AME!’

I recalled a part of a letter from Chris's mother. Chris had told her that when he first came to the AME, home and school seemed like two totally different places. 'He said that gradually this split or separateness had gone,’ she wrote to me. ‘He doesn't feel split anymore.'

Chris, a keen swimmer, had just been beaten in a race by his younger sister, and I asked him how he felt about this.

"Steve,' he said. When I race I really race to beat my best time, not to win. It doesn't matter who wins.'

***

I had an opportunity soon afterwards to see whether this was the real Chris speaking, or whether he still found himself saying what he thought I wanted to hear. He was the captain of our school chess team, and we were visiting another school for the first match in the Canberra primary school chess competition. The four boys with me were very nervous.

‘What happens if we get beaten 4-0?' asked Peter quietly, as we got out of my car.

'God, I hope we don't make fools of ourselves,' said Chris.

'It's OK,' I said. 'Just try to relax. You'll play better if you're feeling calm. Look at Ra.'

Ra had said very little in the car. He looked as though he was deliberately composing himself, concentrating his mind so that he would play well.

‘I just can't help being nervous,’ said Kleete. ‘Where are the toilets?'

We all laughed, and some of the tension was released.

The opposition's captain met us at the door and took us through the school corridors to the library. Everything was so neat and tidy after the AME. 'Didn't these kids ever make a mess?' I thought to myself. There were rows of almost identical paintings and drawings along the walls.

The chess sets were already out and our opponents were waiting at their tables. The kids shook hands, then began their games.

For about twenty minutes, there was dead silence. Chris was deeply involved in his game, unconsciously rubbing the back of his head as he thought. I watched him as he moved a piece quickly, and said, 'Checkmate.'

His opponent stared despairingly at the board, then stood up, tried to smile, and shook Chris's hand. Chris was thrilled, and he smiled over at me. While his opponent wandered off to watch the other games, Chris stayed at his table, looking down on the scene of his triumph.

Suddenly he noticed that he hadn't won after all, that there was a way for his opponent to escape. According to the strict rules of chess, his opponent had conceded defeat. Even now, it would have been easy for Chris to have packed up the pieces, and no-one would have been the wiser.

But Chris called his opponent back, showed him the saving move, and then invited him to continue the game. I hadn't said a word - it had all been Chris's initiative.

Their game continued for another ten minutes, and eventually Chris lost. He was obviously disappointed, but he congratulated his opponent and shrugged his shoulders.

Chris’s sense of himself and of his place in the world were now much better developed, and he was working and playing as a confident and relaxed member of the group, settled in his developing friendship with Dan and in his working relationship with me. It would have been possible, I thought at the time, for someone like Chris to pass quietly through a conventional education system, taking in all that his various classes and courses offered, for everyone to feel that he had been reasonably successful, but for him to have remained essentially unmoved, unaffected, unchanged by any of it except in a very narrow academic (not intellectual) sense. Instead, he was opening up more of himself to the educative process. He had stepped out from behind the mask, and was now using more of his mind and expressing more of his feelings. He was growing and changing.

And what had been my role in all of this? Our relationship was important, certainly. And Allen and I had initiated a number of activities - like the maths - which had stimulated Chris. But as I looked back over the past couple of years, the important changes for Chris were not the result of any lessons that Allen or I may have taught, or of a programme of work that we had prepared. They were, instead, the consequence of Chris being a part of the complex world that was our class. Allen and I were the most experienced and influential people in this world, but it included much more than what was under our direct control. It included the cuttlefish and the playing on the beach at Black's Harbour, the class Parliament and the chess. It included the collective richness of the children's past experiences and their present fantasies, as we made up our improvised plays and as the kids wrote their stories. And it included the myriad of subtle interconnections between the children themselves, as they worked and played, planned and argued, both in the classroom and outside.

It was this compelling and complicated world that had drawn Chris out from behind the barrier. Allen's and my role was to help it be as rich a world as possible, by bringing (in John Holt's words) as much of the outside world as we could into the classroom, and then getting out of the way.

To take the image used earlier a step further, the fish was now out and swimming. Soon, in our medieval village, he would be exploring the wider world beyond this particular pool.