“That’s not going to be me,” I sniffed, as I read the statistics. Half of all new teachers leave within the first five years. But not me. I was different.
How smug I was. Five years? I barely made a term.
At 31, after a career in international development, managing projects in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, I took a break and spent a year studying Chinese in Nanjing. I would indulge my inner Rudd and brush up on my Mandarin while working out my next big move. Babies were on the horizon, my husband and I had decided. But could babies and flying to PNG for weeks at a time mix? I didn’t think so.
A niggling thought sat at the back of my mind, deliberately unexamined. I should be a teacher. I had repeatedly dismissed it. Teaching was something the women of my parents’ generation did after school because it was either that or nursing. And they usually hated it. Don’t be a teacher, was the advice I was given, whether directly or more subtly, through raised eyebrows and a nudge towards higher-status professions. You’re better than that. Women can do anything these days.
But what if teaching was my true calling, I thought, returning to Melbourne with my intermediate Chinese in tow. I was bright, compassionate, creative. I could inspire the next generation to be bilingual, and there weren’t too many non-Chinese Mandarin teachers around. You’d be perfect. This was it – my destiny, hidden from me all these years by a layer of inter-generational baggage. Plus, a secure job based in Australia, with no travel and maternity leave – teaching was the answer to all my quandaries.
I searched for courses and discovered Melbourne University’s new master of secondary teaching Internship program. If admitted, you would be placed in a school for three years, teaching four days a week, and concurrently complete your masters. I applied. I was accepted. I was thrilled.
There were 42 of us in the 2017 cohort, degree-qualified people in our mid-20s to early 30s. We completed our eight weeks of “intensive” over the 2016-17 summer holidays, learning about the Victorian Curriculum, Vygotsky’s theory of proximal development, behaviour management techniques, how to support EAL (English as an additional language) learners in the classroom. All we had to do was front up on day one of term and, well, teach. God help us. We had a picnic at Lincoln Square gardens on the last day of studies, all nervous but excited about what lay ahead. We wished each other luck and dispersed across Victoria, most at government schools, some at private.
When I think about that term at a state school in Melbourne’s south-east, I see a blur of faces, classrooms and late nights spent at my laptop creating worksheets, quizzes, lesson plans. When I was not at school, I was worrying about my students, dreaming about them. Why had Thomas cried when he lost his blue pen? How could I get through to Jason, who didn’t get the basic building blocks of Chinese? What could I do to stretch Hope and Oliver, while still catering for the Jasons of my classroom? I stopped seeing friends, attending my choir, going to gym class. My husband cooked for me every night while I desperately marked student work and scrabbled together a plan for the next day, trying my best to cater for these oh-so-different young people. He hugged me on the nights I came home crying, overwhelmed by the behaviour of the year 9 boys. Teaching, it seemed to me, was the hardest job in the world. What had I signed up for?
“I think your decision to go into teaching is more about having children than the teaching itself,” said the psychologist. Towards the end of term one, after spending my day off crying under the doona, I took advantage of DET’s confidential psychological service. As ashamed as I was to admit it, she was right. I had tried to Lean In, like Sheryl Sandberg has been telling us women to do, and instead I had fallen down a rabbit hole of stress and anxiety. I loved those kids, well, most of them, but I couldn’t do it anymore. The three years it would take to get the degree, not to mention the years of teaching after that, suddenly towered before me like an impossible Mount Everest. Don’t be a quitter said my inner voice. Don’t be another idealistic teacher who can’t hack it. But another, saner voice said: Get out. Get out now. In the term one holidays, I emailed the principal, and the uni, with my resignation.
So far, after one term, four interns from my cohort have left the program, myself included. The support from the uni was, while not perfect, adequate, but it was not enough to convince us to persist. Perhaps completing a different, more conventional teacher training program would have had a different outcome, but I expect not. While my reasons for leaving, and for becoming a teacher in the first place, were more complex than I had realised, others left because of the low salary, the work load, the mounting uni debt, and because “they simply didn’t want to turn up”. It’s not only kids who find it hard to drag themselves to school every morning.
Our country needs good teachers. Unfortunately, I am not going to be one of them.
This piece was first published in The Age / Sydney Morning Herald on 7 July 2017