Teaching in rural areas
Oct 26th 2005, 8:49 am
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Teaching in rural areas
A good article for anyone interested. I used to teach in Bendigo ('when I wore a younger man's clothes'), not too far from Monagle's Kyneton and had similar experiences.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/educat...775959305.html
Rural rhythms
By Bernie Monagle
October 24, 2005
Author Bernie Monagle shares his country life.
Students everywhere seem to go through similar personal and intellectual awakenings. Young people reflect the chaotic changes transforming their world, but kids do appear to be kids.
Whether standing in the bluestone halls of Melbourne Grammar in the heart of Melbourne, or staring at the harvester's trail of dust from the windows of Wycheproof P-12, kids all laugh at similar jokes, despair over zits and greet the marvels of our cosmos with a similar combination of awe and apathy.
So if kids are kids, why do I love teaching in and visiting rural schools? Perhaps it's memories of ignoring a lad's absences during harvest and later finding a bag of spuds leaning against my car. Perhaps it's remembering muddy north-west Tassie, where there was a collection of multi-coloured fluffy slippers lined up by the staffroom door. If you were having a bad day you chose the black or purple pair; on less troubled days you wore pastel moccies.
Perhaps I love working in rural schools because the memories of crabbing with the kids after school in the Leschenault Inlet, in south-west WA, are golden. Country children still tell the best stories. Boys and their dogs have room to have adventures and misadventures with motorbikes and electric fences. Girls have pet names for the livestock and can tell yarns about being found as a toddler, fast asleep at the feet of Fluffy, a fearsome 500-plus-kilo bull.
Rural students still love The OC but the land seems to be a powerful antidote both culturally and personally.
One advantage of teaching in the country is that you drive to work through mist-embroidered paddocks and the sunset drive home is a salve that banishes the worries of the classroom. My first classroom had an uninterrupted vista of Bass Strait, where ships and storms sailed past. Long division didn't seem too long.
My current classroom looks down to the Campaspe River and the black cattle that dot the fields beyond. We watch the river during the school year transformed from parched puddles to raging torrent. We have muttered darkly as the earthmovers have moved in to gouge a residential subdivision from the paddocks. It seems the city is coming; we may have to move further out.
You learn not to make comments about the rain spoiling your day when the town's existence is threatened by recurrent drought. You share their dread when the fire alarm rends the hot silence of high summer because you have glimpsed the past communal grief.
You can take an interest in most of the boys and many of the girls by simply turning up at the football of a Sunday. You can meet most of their parents in the less formal atmosphere of the pie van. It's less "us and them" when you both have tomato sauce dripping down your shirtfront. If you actually play footy, you can be a minor celebrity. If you happen to be tall and refuse to play footy, as I did, the town may never forgive you.
The down side, particularly for young teachers, is that there is very little privacy. Your students inevitably man every cash register, from the supermarket to the pharmacy. If it worries you that your students know who you dated and what brand of toilet paper you use, perhaps rural schools are not for you.
Many of the big city schools I visit seem to be communities within themselves, so big that it must feel to some students as if no one knows their name. It is hard to see how they reflect or connect with their suburbs or families. Rural schools, however, seem to be a direct extension of the town community. You don't so much teach in a school as teach in a town.
I loved my time deep in the western suburbs of Melbourne. Houses surrounded the school and the classrooms all looked inwards onto a meagre square of bitumen. I loved having 27 different nationalities in my class and the richness of their motley skins and languages. But I am drawn back to schools that have both uniformly Anglo-Celtic class lists and views.
I understand that isolation can unfortunately also mean an insular mentality, a lack of diverse role models, poor access to activities and health resources. The trade-off is that when you start teaching the children of former-students you will probably know everybody in their entire social circle. Relationships are pivotal in education. Rural teachers can walk down the street and have the immense privilege of being able to greet every person of school age and be acknowledged in return by the entire community.
There is a school float in the Daffodil Parade and there is a direct relationship between a win by the under-16 football team and the mood in your year 9 classroom. The elders, mentors, coaches, employers, bus drivers, shopkeepers, even the police, can take an interest in supporting a young person and in making them accountable, so that the school does not operate in isolation. You can really know a young person and know their world.
"It takes a whole village to raise a child" - and I hear houses are cheap in Murtoa.
Bernie Monagle teaches part-time at Sacred Heart College, Kyneton, and is the author of young-adult fiction such as Blue Girl, Yella Fella, Hot Hits and Hot Hits - The Remix.
OzTennis
http://www.theage.com.au/news/educat...775959305.html
Rural rhythms
By Bernie Monagle
October 24, 2005
Author Bernie Monagle shares his country life.
Students everywhere seem to go through similar personal and intellectual awakenings. Young people reflect the chaotic changes transforming their world, but kids do appear to be kids.
Whether standing in the bluestone halls of Melbourne Grammar in the heart of Melbourne, or staring at the harvester's trail of dust from the windows of Wycheproof P-12, kids all laugh at similar jokes, despair over zits and greet the marvels of our cosmos with a similar combination of awe and apathy.
So if kids are kids, why do I love teaching in and visiting rural schools? Perhaps it's memories of ignoring a lad's absences during harvest and later finding a bag of spuds leaning against my car. Perhaps it's remembering muddy north-west Tassie, where there was a collection of multi-coloured fluffy slippers lined up by the staffroom door. If you were having a bad day you chose the black or purple pair; on less troubled days you wore pastel moccies.
Perhaps I love working in rural schools because the memories of crabbing with the kids after school in the Leschenault Inlet, in south-west WA, are golden. Country children still tell the best stories. Boys and their dogs have room to have adventures and misadventures with motorbikes and electric fences. Girls have pet names for the livestock and can tell yarns about being found as a toddler, fast asleep at the feet of Fluffy, a fearsome 500-plus-kilo bull.
Rural students still love The OC but the land seems to be a powerful antidote both culturally and personally.
One advantage of teaching in the country is that you drive to work through mist-embroidered paddocks and the sunset drive home is a salve that banishes the worries of the classroom. My first classroom had an uninterrupted vista of Bass Strait, where ships and storms sailed past. Long division didn't seem too long.
My current classroom looks down to the Campaspe River and the black cattle that dot the fields beyond. We watch the river during the school year transformed from parched puddles to raging torrent. We have muttered darkly as the earthmovers have moved in to gouge a residential subdivision from the paddocks. It seems the city is coming; we may have to move further out.
You learn not to make comments about the rain spoiling your day when the town's existence is threatened by recurrent drought. You share their dread when the fire alarm rends the hot silence of high summer because you have glimpsed the past communal grief.
You can take an interest in most of the boys and many of the girls by simply turning up at the football of a Sunday. You can meet most of their parents in the less formal atmosphere of the pie van. It's less "us and them" when you both have tomato sauce dripping down your shirtfront. If you actually play footy, you can be a minor celebrity. If you happen to be tall and refuse to play footy, as I did, the town may never forgive you.
The down side, particularly for young teachers, is that there is very little privacy. Your students inevitably man every cash register, from the supermarket to the pharmacy. If it worries you that your students know who you dated and what brand of toilet paper you use, perhaps rural schools are not for you.
Many of the big city schools I visit seem to be communities within themselves, so big that it must feel to some students as if no one knows their name. It is hard to see how they reflect or connect with their suburbs or families. Rural schools, however, seem to be a direct extension of the town community. You don't so much teach in a school as teach in a town.
I loved my time deep in the western suburbs of Melbourne. Houses surrounded the school and the classrooms all looked inwards onto a meagre square of bitumen. I loved having 27 different nationalities in my class and the richness of their motley skins and languages. But I am drawn back to schools that have both uniformly Anglo-Celtic class lists and views.
I understand that isolation can unfortunately also mean an insular mentality, a lack of diverse role models, poor access to activities and health resources. The trade-off is that when you start teaching the children of former-students you will probably know everybody in their entire social circle. Relationships are pivotal in education. Rural teachers can walk down the street and have the immense privilege of being able to greet every person of school age and be acknowledged in return by the entire community.
There is a school float in the Daffodil Parade and there is a direct relationship between a win by the under-16 football team and the mood in your year 9 classroom. The elders, mentors, coaches, employers, bus drivers, shopkeepers, even the police, can take an interest in supporting a young person and in making them accountable, so that the school does not operate in isolation. You can really know a young person and know their world.
"It takes a whole village to raise a child" - and I hear houses are cheap in Murtoa.
Bernie Monagle teaches part-time at Sacred Heart College, Kyneton, and is the author of young-adult fiction such as Blue Girl, Yella Fella, Hot Hits and Hot Hits - The Remix.
OzTennis
