PART 2: THE BRIGHTEST AND THE BEST

 

THE BRIGHTEST AND THE BEST

 

 

 

 

 

There was never an actual time that I can nominate when the decision to become a teacher was made. Certainly, no revelation pointed me in the direction of the school gate and I have no recall of anyone advising me that teaching was the career of champions. But teaching did provide an avenue for attending university and I desperately hankered for sandstone enlightenment.

 

After a fabulously mediocre Higher School Certificate performance in 1973 (my second attempt!), I matriculated and gained a place as a first year Bachelor of Arts student at Sydney University. Luckily, I also secured a teacher’s scholarship and nominated myself as a potential social science teacher destined for high school hysteria.

 

During the last year of my arts degree, it was suggested by the Department of Education wigs that I reconsider my original decision to work in the social sciences and concentrate on primary teaching. The reasoning for this centred on the fact that there was a glut of social science teachers in high schools and the department would guarantee me a position if I realigned my professional focus towards younger students. Because my degree would still be completed and because I was keen on a job, agreement was immediately forthcoming.

 

My professional teacher training occurred in 1978 through a Diploma of Education (Primary) course at Sydney Teachers’ College. The course consisted of specific teaching skills’ training at the campus and two distinct practicum sessions which, in total, accounted for six weeks of ‘in-school’ experiences. As you’ve probably now realised, with a hefty half a dozen weeks practising my highly developed skills with actual ‘students’, I was like a coiled spring waiting to be released onto the youth of the great state of New South Wales.

 

The reason for including this enthralling background information regarding my initial training to be a teacher is to highlight one thing, that is, how bloody average it was. I don’t use ‘average’ in the negative or derogatory sense but in the ‘normal course of events’ sense. You could probably multiply this description by one hundred and you’d have an authentic description of many prospective teachers’ entrances into the profession from that time.

 

Sure, many teachers from the seventies bypassed university to attain a Diploma of Teaching from teachers’ colleges and, yes, in their first few years of teaching they were most definitely superior in the classroom setting compared to university-trained colleagues but ‘divide and rule’ is not my point here. College-trained teachers displayed the very same academic ‘pedigree’ as their university counterparts and that pedigree could be characterised as ‘regular’………….. nothing more and nothing less.

 

A lot of talk has occurred over the last decade about the perceived low status of teaching and a frequently cited strategy is to lift the profession’s standing by only choosing the ‘brightest’ of graduates to induct into the classroom. In fact, both major federal parties view this as an essential plank in the renovated house of the holy known as Australian education.

 

However, there are a number of pretty basic problems with such a strategy. The first lies in the assumption that the ‘brightest’ students automatically morph into the ‘best’ teachers. No-one is arguing that teachers shouldn’t have high levels of literacy and numeracy along with more than adequate entry teaching skills. But teaching is like any other job in that ‘real’ experience leads to refinement and development of the craft………. and both of those are realised over a career rather than a few short months and, most certainly, not when a teacher first walks through a classroom door.

 

Secondly, teaching is a supply and demand type of profession and, on any measure, labour intensive. When I graduated from university in 1978, there were approximately four hundred like souls from Sydney University and Sydney Teachers’ College alone. At last count, there are around twenty thousand teachers in New South Wales’ government primary and high schools. Now, should one assume that only the brightest of graduates will choose to pursue a teaching career and do so in numbers that are needed to replenish the organisation? Such an expectation is both unrealistic and unattainable.

 

Lastly, is the teaching profession compelling to prospective ‘bright’ graduates? I would certainly say ‘yes’ but I’m biased. As a career, education does have some immediate PR problems. Issues such as salary levels, working conditions, documentation, probity hurdles, accreditation and welfare are, I believe, features of the job that most punters have a fair knowledge about and they don’t always jump out at the graduate strikingly in the most positive of ways. If altruism was the determining factor, then there might be some chance but I’m sure that other professions would challenge that assertion strongly.

 

Teacher training institutions have, likewise, received recent bad press. Much of this angst has come from federal and state politicians who temporarily have their hands on the wheel of the education bus. ATAR entry requirements, teaching methodologies and even the changing curriculum have all been used as indicators that these tertiary institutions are not doing their job properly.

 

The problem with a political imperative is that the politician has to blame someone, or something, and training institutions have copped more than their fair share of this rubbish.

 

From personal experience when supervising trainee teachers from various universities and with even the cranky old teacher’s perspective, I’ve routinely found them to be motivated, skilled and eager for advice and opportunities to practise the teaching craft. If tertiary institutions are not doing their job, I have yet to see it.

 

The irony of all this political focus on the mouth of the river is that such blood-letting as well as howls for improvement and ‘lifting the game’ are coming at a time when federal funding for teacher training institutions is, in fact, being wound back.

 

Teaching is a complex occupation and an analysis of its domains will follow later but any entry-level teacher must have both the capacity and ability to accommodate and manoeuvre around the often conflicting demands that will immediately confront them. The two most crucial ones are system demands and those demands which the teacher places on himself or herself. The ‘best’ teachers are the ones that genuflect at the latter altar most frequently.