PART 1: INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION
 

 

With little fanfare and with even less opportunity for thoughtful revisionism, I officially left teaching on 26 January 2015. My employer, the Department of Education and Training, referred to it as a ‘separation’ and, in important ways, I guess it was.
 

Teaching and Paul Anthony Regan had cohabitated for thirty six years and, like any long marriage, both partners had infected one another with positive and negative ‘stuff’. There was no acrimony between the parties at the close of business or none that I was aware of at that time. Rather, this separation was initiated by your humble author achieving sixty years of age. It was time to move on for both of us and those journeys should take quite different directions.
 

I had always bored colleagues in my latter years on the job by regularly asserting that ‘separating’ teachers should not be permitted to enjoy the largesse of their retirement benefits and superannuation unless they agreed to generate some sort of ‘response’ or ‘wash-up’ to their careers and what you’re now reading is, in part, a product of this half-baked notion.
 

It’s impossible to be awoken by an alarm clock for almost four decades and not develop ideas and opinions about what to do, how to interact with others and, ultimately, how to make this world a wilder and wackier place.
 

But what follows cannot simply be a recount or a narrative and there are critical reasons for laying down some range fencing. For instance, I have never kept a worthwhile diary of things that have happened during my career and an accurate recall of many events is ambitious to say the least. I’ll certainly attempt a qualitative comment here and there but I’ll consign a chronological account of stuff to the bin for starters.
 

A straight narrative presents similar problems. There have been many complications during my teaching journey but I can’t guarantee any type of resolution to what follows and the eventual attainment of educational, professional or personal Nirvana is definitely not the purpose of this exercise. Indeed, it is the people-centred nature of the teaching job that makes it difficult to wrangle into an organised and coherent text of any specific genre. The idea of breaking those thirty six years into rough concept or theme headings is how I’ll begin. Where possible, I’ll include personal ‘events’ and attempt to offer some context to what I’m describing, analysing or pushing.
 

However, one thing needs to be stressed up front. Ladang is excluded as a principal or hidden aim of this treatise. I’m sure that some bridges may be burned but, again, that’s due to the subject matter being dealt with. Teaching has been, for me, an engrossing occupation and I hope that generalisation is reflected many times in the ensuing text.
 

The worst antagonists to the profession of teaching have always been teachers themselves and colleagues of my vintage are over-represented in this sub-group. I’m sure the reasons for this stance are varied, considered, legitimate and ‘work-shopped’ but my co-ordinates can’t be found in the ‘pissed off’ zone as yet. That may change with separation and time but warning whipper-snappers off the path towards teaching central is, likewise, omitted from my immediate brief.
 

The current educational ‘scene’, as I write, is most pertinent. The movement towards autonomy within schools, the credentialing of teachers and the continuing roll-out of the national curriculum all form post-it notes that I’ll grab and use in subsequent discussions. Over the last couple of years, it seems like an entire industry has been set up based around the ‘whole new world, baby!’ propaganda that both governments and education departments have been generating. Whether this scene is depicted as a frontier land or whether it harks back to old battlegrounds from previous decades will, most certainly, be examined.
 

Coupled with these developments is Australia’s weakening performance in international educational attainments of school-age students. This decline, albeit gradual, has been occurring over the last decade. The outstanding feature of this trend tags a student’s postcode as the pre-eminent factor that will account for his or her level of success in the classroom and, even more importantly, place of residence is gaining a higher co-efficient value with each passing year.
  

Unfortunately, all of this presupposes that the reader possesses some knowledge of schools, support agencies and basic educational infrastructure. But my intent is not to produce a tome simply for teachers. If my recollections, thoughts and leanings do appear ponderous, then let them be ponderous to all-comers.