School Spirit

Although I posted this topic a week or so ago, I didn’t realise that the nine points I posted then were just the first nine of a list of twenty one reasons that you know you are a teacher. This Monday, the rest of the list found its way into my pigeon hole via the back of the weekly staff bulletin and timetable. So now, here is the complete set.

Once again, I don’t know where this list originally came from, but there are so many accurate sentences here it’s almost scary.

How do you know you are a teacher? Here you go!

1. You can hear 25 voices behind you and know exactly which one belongs to the child out of line.

2. You get a secret thrill out of laminating something.

3. You walk into a shop and hear the words ‘It’s Ms/Mr ______’ and know you’ve been spotted.

4. You have 25 people that accidentally call you Mum/Dad at one time or another.

5. You can eat a multi-course meal in under twenty-five minutes.

6. You’ve trained yourself to go to the toilet at two distinct times of the day: recess and lunch.

7. You start saving other people’s rubbish because most likely, you can use that toilet paper tube or plastic butter tub for something in the classroom.

8. You believe the teachers’ staffroom should be equipped with a margarita machine.

9. You want to slap the next person who says it ‘must be nice to work 9 to 3:30 and have summers off’.

10. You believe chocolate is a food group.

11. You can tell if it’s a full moon without ever looking outside.

12. You believe that unspeakable evils will befall you if anyone says “Boy, the kids sure are settled today”.

13. You feel the urge to talk to strange children and correct their behaviour when you are out in public.

14. You believe in aerial spraying of Ritalin.

15. You think caffeine should be available in intravenous form.

16. You spend more money on school stuff than you do on your own children.

17. You can’t pass the school supply aisle without getting at least five items!

18. You ask your friends if the left hand turn he just made was a “good choice or a bad choice”.

19. You find true beauty in a can full of perfectly sharpened pencils.

20. You are secretly addicted to hand sanitiser, and finally,

21. You understand instantaneously why a child behaves a certain way after meeting his or her parents.

All so very, very true…

Personal favourites… numbers 11, 12 and 21. You may have others…

Cheers.

I read an article today in the current edition of the Herald Sun talking about the number of women now in principal positions in Victorian government schools. Seems that, for the first time, more than half of the principals in Victorian government schools are now female. Well, to be totally precise, 50.9% of them are female. So, yes, there are more female principals than male principals, but it’s pretty close, eh?

I suppose the article jumped out at me today for two reasons. Firstly, we’ve had a change of principal ourselves for this year, and yes, she’s a woman and she’s replaced the man who held the job for 13 years before her after his retirement. That’s all well and good, but to be honest, I’d never really thought about the gender change in the role until this article popped up in the paper. Which probably leads on to the second reason this article popped out at me anyway.

It never even occurred to me that people would keep track of the balance of men and women in principal roles! Yet another apparently important statistic about the profession I was blissfully unaware of! Why hadn’t I thought about it before, I was thinking to myself. Because, I replied with a shrug (I shrug a lot at stuff like this), there’s a bucketful of other things I need to concentrate on first, eh?

It’s good news that there’s real balance in the roles now, don’t get me wrong. From my own point of view, if there’s a woman or a man in the principal and leadership roles at this stage, it makes no matter provided it isn’t me! I was asked the other week by our principal if I was interested in leadership opportunities and various related options in the near future and I pretty well laughed and implies ‘you’ve gotta be kidding me!’ Knowing how I organise my room, my kids and myself, I know I’m better suited in the classroom with 25 kids rather than organising 350!

I can’t see the top of my desk already after four weeks! I’d lose my office if I was a principal!

The other little statistic that slightly surprised me was the balance of female and male teachers in the state. I know it’s imbalanced, but I was surprised the percentage was still as high as it apparently is. One in five teachers are male. I thought it would have been lower. Again, this is from my own experiences, which involve two schools in one country town, not 1500 government schools across the entire state! We’ve got four males on staff (all classroom teachers) out of a collection of 16 grades and three specialists.

Hey… that’s four out of 19… which is pretty well one out of five. Hmm… guess I shouldn’t have been surprised after all!

The kids weren’t required at school today. We had another professional development day. In fact, we had the first of a four part series of professional development sessions, the last three of which will take place over the next three Wednesday afternoons after school. It was about recognising language learning difficulties and the current ‘best practice’ way to teach around them. Bits and pieces of it were worthwhile, but that’s not really the purpose of this post. Instead, I’m focusing on the teacher’s voice.

The voice the teacher uses when actually teaching and interacting with the kids.

One of the presenters today spoke to us all the way through with her teacher voice. It was vibrant, it was active, it varied in pitch, it over dramatised expression to promote interest.

In short, it got annoying really fast.

Honestly, it was like being back at home in the early 80s watching Romper Room on telly. I really felt as though I was being condescended to by this (granted, very well-meaning) teacher presenting parts of this session by the way she was speaking to us all through the day. It put me in mind of the way my mum used to read books to me when I was two or three, lots of exaggerated expression and over-the-top voices. Which was fine when I was two or three listening to mum read ‘The Pokey Little Puppy’ Golden Book.

It started me thinking about the way I talk to the kids in my grade each day. I’ve got the same level as this presenter, except that she’d come from teaching prep kids the years before. I know it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t stand or sit there in front of them all and rabbit on in this forced teacher voice all day and expect the kids to take me seriously! I know it wouldn’t work because there are times when, for a bit of a laugh, I’ve put on this particular style of teacher voice for certain lessons just to see the effect.

The kids generally just nod their heads lower, look up at me from beneath crooked eyebrows with wry little smiles and say things along the lines of ‘you’ve gotta be kidding us, Mr V’.

Yup. Kids don’t like being condescended to.

Which has left me wondering about it, because apparently all the kids at her own school adore her BECAUSE OF THE WAY SHE SPEAKS TO THEM!

I suppose there’s just different ways of doing things, eh? I guess the kids I work with (who’ve known me for several years already just coming up through the school) expect just the face I’ve always shown and not anything I’m not. This particular person presents to the kids in this way, with this voice and approach, and the kids recognise it as her way of teaching. I rock up and talk to the kids like I’d talk to just about anybody (which usually means pulling their leg several times during the day, granted), and they appreciate me for sticking with who I am.

While such a voice seems to work for others, I just can’t see myself changing my style of delivery. I reckon tomorrow I’ll just keep doing as I have, give them a high-five as they walk inside in the morning and a ‘g’day, Ugly’ by way of greeting and get on with it.

Kids aren’t dumb. They recognise quickly when you’re not shooting straight.