Marty In Remedial Land

A few years back, I did some teaching at Our Ladies for Perpetual Properness. The school was desperate to find someone to fill in for a month or so and the Head of mathematics, recognising that I was a warm body and thus very qualified, asked me if I could do it. That was unusual. I knew the Head quite well but even heads who know me are loathe to trust me with their classes. Which is fine. I think I am more trustworthy than that but I accept that there are counterarguments.

Anyway, I trundled off to OLPP. As the Head had informed me, I was to take over the four classes of one teacher, who was to be on leave. This teacher had carved out a niche for himself: he was the remedial guy. So, I was to teach Year 12 Further (now General), Year 11 Further-whatever, Year 10 veggie maths and a regular Year 9 class. Not exactly my top preferences, but I knew what it would be when I agreed.

I met the teacher before he took off, and he went through his lesson planning in friendly and very careful detail. He was astonishingly meticulous. Each lesson had its own A4 envelope with pages of carefully typed dot-point notes, each lesson had its own PowerPoint, everything was scripted down to the last i and t. He had been doing this stuff for years, if not decades, and at that stage he knew exactly how he wanted things, exactly what he wanted to say, with not a single thought for variation or improv.

Not quite the Marty style. Which the Head knew, of course, and he was clearly nervous. But I can be surprisingly well behaved when it is warranted. Really. I was a guest at the school and I knew my only job was to be a caretaker, to keep the teacher’s classes running as he would wish them to be run. I did my best, PowerPoints and all. In the main it went smoothly. Except for a couple of hiccups, which are the substance of this post and another to come soon.

As it happened, I was at the school for about three months and it was very enjoyable. I knew OLPP pretty well and very much respected the school at the time (if no longer). The girls were well mannered and respectful and, in the main, hard working. I enjoyed my classes, PowerPoints and all. The Further class quietly ticked along, the girls industriously getting on with doing as well as they could with VCE. The Year 11 class, clearly treating this as a more casual class before the hard work of Year 12 to come, were less inclined to knuckle down. But they worked, they were polite and funny and friendly, and we got along well enough. The Year 10 veggie maths was as pointless as these subjects always seem to be, but we got along very well; I liked the girls a lot, I pretended to teach them and they pretended to learn. The Year 9 class I adored, and I will write a bit about them in the next post.

PowerPoint was a struggle, of course. Whatever its benefits (none), it is not a medium with which I am very familiar. I found it difficult to both use the teacher’s slides and to teach in a natural manner. But I did my best and, even though undoubtedly I used the blackboards more than the teacher would have, I tried very hard to stick to the plan. One day, I consciously veered a little. This turned out to be a mistake.

One of the Year 11 topics I had to cover was arithmetic and geometric sequences, which in the teacher’s slides (and in the textbook) was presented in the simplest and driest manner. I decided to take a little time to describe what geometric (i.e. exponential) growth means in practice; nothing remotely original, just the standard simple and striking stuff of the Earth’s population doubling, why it is natural to assume doubling at a constant rate and what would happen if it did. Five minutes, tops. Some student subsequently complained.

I don’t know the precise manner of the student’s complaint nor how strong it was, but it was strong enough for the student’s mother to call the school. The first I heard of it was a day or so later, when the Head came to me and passed on the complaint, that I was not teaching the stuff I was supposed to or something to that effect. The Head was sheepish; he knew that the complaint was bullshit and he knew what he was in for.

Teachers, of course, get this bullshit all too often and have to learn to live with it. But I do not and I do not. I was furious, as of course the Head knew I would be and had a right to be. He was “just doing his job”. Some Deputy twat took the call, didn’t push back with the mother at all, instructed the Head to talk to me, and the Head did so. The gears in motion.

After yelling the obvious yells, I asked the Head which Deputy twat was behind this bullshit but, wisely, he wouldn’t tell me. I told the Head he had an obligation to tell the Deputy twat not to be such a twat, but of course he didn’t do anything of the sort. We both dropped it, and it was done.

Except it pissed me off for days, and it certainly affected the vibes of the class. I had been quite enjoying the class but it was difficult to continue being casual and jokey, my natural shtick, while being aware that there was a clueless snitch amongst them. Still, it smoothed over soon enough. I made a few innuendo remarks that mathematics, and all education, was about the meaning and the purpose of things, not the bare bones, and things returned to normal.

So, what did we learn?

The student might have learned to “deal with it”, the “it” in this case being a small and positive thing. But she didn’t learn that because her mother was too privileged and stupid to provide the daughter with a proper and obvious lesson. Instead, the student learned that, rather than dealing with it, rather than talking to the teacher like a mature human being, it was better to whine to her mother.

The mother learned that she could act like a spoiled brat at a fancy resort, make a groundless and absurd complaint to the management, and the resort would grovel in the desired manner.

The Deputy twat learned what she already knew, that she needn’t deal honestly and appropriately with a parent, and could simply pass the crap on to the Head.

The Head learned what he already knew, that the Deputy twat was a twat, and that a person with proper self-respect will not silently accept such bullshit.

I learned what I already knew, that parents are too often irresponsible whiners, Deputy twats are too often twats, Heads are “just doing their job”, and that students who have been trained to expect hyper-programmatic teaching can become utterly closed off to genuine and genuinely human teaching.

Here endeth the lesson.