Overall Positions

17 Dec 2011 8 Comments

by Leeann Nolan in Uncategorized

The OPs are out and status updates are going crazy on Facebook. Most students seem thrilled with their results with only the occasional suicide threat casually thrown in. There are the inevitable jokes including, ‘OP24 fml’ from a student who didn’t even go for an OP, and another which stated ‘OP, yeah, well I got one’.

Last night I put up a status saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what OP you get you are all winners’. I received comments back ranging from: ‘Rubbish Nolan’, to the pragmatic and knowing advice given by past students that your OP doesn’t matter once you get into uni, or when you start work. Your Overall Position is a figure specific to a certain time and place in your life. George Negus said the other night on The Project that seventeen is a ridiculous age to expect young people to sit alone in a room and study, with all the hormones raging and pressures of trying to be an adult.

I know it’s clichéd but there are many highs and lows in life and your ‘position’ is ever changing. Perhaps thankfully, it will never be made so public again. The advice adults give ranges from, ‘don’t worry it’s not the be all and end all’, to ‘your whole life depends on it’, no wonder it’s all so confusing and stressful. I guess the truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes.

My status update may have seemed a bit lame, okay it was, especially after Charlie Sheen has made ‘winning’ seem a lot like losing. What I’d meant was you don’t need to get an OP1 to be a wonderful human being. It’s just a number, and there are lots of avenues you can take to get where you want to go. To me, everyone who actually completes Year 12 is a winner; it is more than I did when I was their age.

I still remember the day I left school, May 1981, the year I was in Year 11. I went to St. John Fisher, a Catholic private school, at Bracken Ridge, and loathed it. I hated the tediousness of school, the rules that seemed ludicrous, the monotony, and the mind numbing boredom. I left feeling bitter, not knowing what the future would bring, and not caring. At sixteen, the future was the next Friday night, getting together with friends and going out. As we drove along Bracken Ridge Road, heading home, my mother turned to me and said, ‘You’ll regret this for the rest of your life.’ To some extent, this is true, but at the time I didn’t listen. I wanted freedom, or what I thought was freedom. But the freedom I got was as vacuous as the catchcry of ‘freedom’ Young Liberals spruik from the comfort of their parent’s middle class homes.

I had thought of writing this blog, dedicated to my Year 12 2011 students, because the idea of writing sixty-five individual good-byes overwhelmed me. Yet as a write this I feel like I want to make mention of them all, because in some way they have all impacted upon me. This year I taught three Year 12 classes: Modern History, English and English Communication. Picking a favourite class is like choosing a favourite child, it’s an impossible task. They were all wildly different, and the students within each class were also unique. They have all taught me something.

This has been the most challenging year of my teaching career. A new syllabus has been implemented since the last time I taught Modern History seven years ago. I began with no resources, and a class of ardent learners and critical thinkers who kept me on my toes.

I have been fortunate, I think, to teach in the public school system, because it is here that diversity is valued, where students of different races, religions, and cultures can sit side by side and hear each other’s stories, thoughts and ideas. It is well and good to learn these things from textbooks and websites, yet it is quite another to sit alongside another person whose life is different to yours, to rub shoulders with them.

One of my English students, Jessey, a Jehovah Witness, came to my Modern History class and explained her beliefs and values, and everyone listened enthralled, including those who considered themselves Atheist. Another student is Jewish, another Baptist, while another is Agnostic. Their political views have also been widely varied, encompassing all parts of the spectrum from conservative to socialist, which often created intense debate. I’ve left the classroom invigorated, my mind drumming with their brilliant ideas. One student wrote in a card he gave me that this is true learning, not the use of whiteboards and PowerPoints, and I agree. I really don’t know what I’m going to do without Jai, who I constantly deferred to, in the class next year.

Some of my students have suffered sorrow in their lives these past five years, ranging from minor disappointments, to tragic, life altering loss. There have been the bouts of flu, glandular fever and pneumonia. Yet they have all worked hard and remained at school until the end, tenaciously going to a place every day that many of them hate.

Some of them know exactly what they want to be: doctors, lawyers, teachers, town planners, fridge mechanics, carpenters, journalists, writers. I envy them this knowledge at such a young age. Of course, their goals may change and they may find themselves on different paths, but they’ll reach their destinations in the end. Though I teach English and the humanities, some of my students are focussed on science and this will lead them into careers in medicine and engineering. Yet they also care fervently about people and the world around them, and I love them for that.

Some of them achieved huge success out of the classroom. Renae is a Tai Kwon Do Champion. Josh is a delegate for UN Youth Australia, and is soon to travel to Europe to participate in a UN modelled conference. Mitch competed in the Australian Rock Climbing Championships. Dan is a Queensland Representative hockey player, who taught me how to break down knowledge and explain things more clearly, if only in an attempt to stem his constant flow of probing questions. That’s the amazing thing about students, if you listen to them, really listen, they will tell you what you are doing wrong.

There are those who are quieter, who don’t shout their views loudly, and who sit back and watch, considering everything that goes on. I see and hear everything standing at the front of the class: the text messages; the hands loosely held; the notes surreptitiously passed. I see the tiffs between best friends, the hurt or dark looks of students when they enter the classroom, and I know immediately that something has happened at lunch, or in the previous class, or at home the night before. I see myself in many of the students. The anguish and pain of not fitting in. The barbed remark either cruelly and expertly placed, or randomly and carelessly said.

I remember a comment made by Tom, who said, ‘Miss, I was sitting at lunch feeling depressed, and then I remembered I had English and I felt happy.’ I think that is the most beautiful thing a student has ever said to me, and I will never forget it. Despite the weariness I sometimes feel, teaching is so rewarding; there is nothing I would rather be doing.

My English Communication class did not receive OPs, and one of them commented, tongue in cheek, on my status, saying, ‘I was in your Com class, don’t you care about me?’ The truth is I loved this class. They were the most gregarious bunch of students and I always looked forward to having them. There was Sean who couldn’t stop swearing in class, but was the first student to yell a greeting out across the playground. There were the boys whose Grand Final football game I saw when they were in Year 10; the euphoria on their faces when they won the game is one of my best memories. There was Jess, the only girl in a class amongst seventeen boys, and she dealt with it so well, though the level of testosterone in the room was overwhelming. There was even a student who wrote in his graduation speech that English Com was his favourite class (this was for assessment, and I was marking it, but still …).

Earlier this year, I visited my Year four and five teacher, who also happens to be the mother of a childhood friend of mine. Mrs Hunt was by far my favourite teacher, she made learning fun and it was obvious how much she cared for us. I can still remember the feeling of warmth in her classroom, and I hope my students remember me this way.

I don’t have advice. I’m not a counsellor or a youth worker, and heaven knows my own life is far from perfect. But I wish all my past students well. The quote ‘One Hundred Years from Now’, by Forest Witcraft may seem a bit presumptuous, but I hope that I’ve been a help to some of my students along the way.

One Hundred Years from now
It will not matter
what kind of car I drove,
What kind of house I lived in,
how much money was in my bank account
nor what my clothes looked like.
But the world may be a better place because
I was important in the life of a child.

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