July 2023
“My tummy hurts, I have a sore foot, leg, arm, eye, and hurt feelings.” Despite my aptitude for curing all of these ailments (sometimes with nothing more than a piece of wet paper towel) , I am not a nurse but a primary school teacher.
I teach small children. Not all the time, but a day or so a week. I was once a full-time teacher until I went part-time and realised there could be a life of less stress. Now I mostly write, sometimes I mark standardised writing tests, and will be supervising student teachers from next month.
While that sounds like a lot of different hats, it is no where near as crazy as a fulltime teaching load! I don’t think I realised how all-encompassing fulltime teaching was until I stopped.
On Thursdays, I don my teacher’s garb, gird my loins and head out into the world with a packed lunch and a water bottle. I spend the day teaching Year 5s in the morning and little Year 2s in the afternoon.
By lunchtime, I look forward to the end of the day and ask myself how I ever managed to teach full-time for 14 years. I read news reports of teachers leaving the profession because they are burnt out and have had enough of the added burdens placed on them by schools, the government and the general population, and I understand it’s a tough gig.
I maintain my teaching connection for the money and to keep up my teaching quals. Lets face it, it’s a good thing to have in times of economic uncertainty and I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it either. Anymore.
I make the most of my time at the lovely northern suburbs school where I work. The children are from essentially high socio-economic families. They have breakfast before they leave for school, they all have healthy lunches and are generally well-behaved and polite.
Some schools where I do relief do not have children like that. Sometimes I head out to the south-eastern suburbs where children don’t have breakfast and sometimes don’t have lunch. They are not always dressed warmly in winter, and they are not always polite. In fact, they can be downright rude and disrespectful.
But kids are kids – sometimes they bowl you over with their joi de vivre, and other times they slap you right in the face (not literally, hopefully) no matter where they come from or their circumstances. Mostly they want to learn and do the right thing.
I had to teach a sport session the other week, and my allocated sport was tunnel ball. Everyone has played tunnel ball, right? Apparently not. The kids had no idea what was going on. I had no whistle, so my not-very-loud voice was put into action. “Line up! Spread out, step your right foot out. The other right! Watch the ball, the ball! It’s under your legs…” It was a disaster. I don’t know who was more relieved when it came time to return to class, me or the kids!
Tunnel ball aside, I enjoy attending school for other reasons. For one, staff and other teachers provide me with the adult contact I sometimes lack as a WFH writer. Two, schools have the best staff morning teas! And finally I get to have fun with kids – what’s not to love about that?
My team teacher inspires me to be organised. In fact she is the most organised teacher I have ever met! I sit at her desk, and within half an hour I have reduced it to a mess of papers, have lost my pen, spilled pencil shavings and scattered her neatly stacked papers everywhere. If only I could emulate her organisational skills in my own piles of paper and pads at home on my writer’s desk!
So, I look at my occasional foray into schools as human development and a steady income stream to supplement my erratic freelance income.
I suppose I will always be a teacher to some degree. Just don’t make me use my teacher voice!
All in a Day Adventures 