Vacations.
I go to places where students don't go...like expensive resorts, Youth
Hostels, and Backpacker Lodges. I have been known to stay at a resort..Bali..where my holiday was nearly marred by a planeful
of Catholic kids from Carnarvon...and believe me..they were beautifully behaved and better than a planeful of drunken adults
I once travelled with...Hawthorn Football Club.
I enjoy well behaved kids and gravitate towards them automatically like
a moth to a flame and babysit whilst their parents party, so mostly now I steer clear of places where kids find me fun.
I travel cruises and deserts, gem search and climb tracks, and come back
totally refreshed and beaming with a sense of adventure, and good spirits...after trekking with oldies over mountains or
boating with hostellers in diving craft and creeping in subterranean caves.
Pay and Wages.
This is generally better than other jobs and one survives the 10 weeks
because of the good wages and the vacation every ten weeks.
I smile when I see the union canvassing for more pay rises...teachers
get well paid. Its the conditions they work under that needs cleaning up and improving...like student attitudes and expectations
of Administration.
Enthusiatic Students...a Happy Students.
This is what keeps teachers putting up with the difficulties and what
brings and keeps teachers working at teaching....the students who want to learn.
I feel so sorry for these students, each time they get renegated
a backward role ,because some disturbing student has the continuous limelight. I don't know why schools do not have sessions
of behaviour management for the students having problems. Its useless sending teachers to these sessions..they come back
loaded with ideas on what to do but the students don't want to follow the ideas and eventually the teacher swings back to
what they were putting up with in the first place.
My best moments have been reading the projects of students who have done
a task because they wanted to....of seeing how they have researched and written about their findings, of seeing how they have
reached into areas of their own finding and presented their views to me to share.
I love being in a class which has that contented working
hum that infiltrates throughout a room of totally absorbed students..l had this today with Year 8 and also with
Years 9, and it made all my weariness float away and I felt reborn....Students wrapt in their work make such beautiful
music.
When teaching Art this was a regular and constant state of affairs as
most students who choose Art Studies do choose Art and love it. Teaching SOSE and Work Studies, is not always the same
and a working harmony has to be worked at so very carefully as SOSE is compulsory and many students are not doing it because
they want to, and the Work Studies students have selected this unit as an easy way out.
I became accustomed to art students and craft people in
the making, who are absorbed in their tasks ,and this current inattention is disconcerting. To gain it back I tried different
methods and provided different media and resources, but it is difficult to get continued and combined enthusiasm, as the disturbances
do destroy an uniformity and do not permit this working atmosphere to happen very often.
Students who are interested in what they are doing are the dream world
of teachers...and they do happen...like miracles.
