Proclamations on our education system, especially its perceived failures, honk all around us just now. Well, we’re all experts on the topic; we’ve all been to school.
Among all the utterances, it’s hard to see the actual students. They’ve been turned into statistics; smothered by buzzwords: “disengaged … knowledge-based … a great curriculum and the right pedagogy” (that last pair of thumpers from new Education Minister Erica Stanford).
In the midst of the noise, the kids keep going. What strikes me most from the decades I’ve been in schools as a teacher, tutor and visiting writer is the resilience of so many students, their adaptability, their ability to plug on while politics and philosophies froth around them.
What follows is anecdotal. And historical. But I believe it’s still relevant. Let me tell you about Chaz and the 17 …
Chaz hailed me in the street last week. He’s in his mid-50s now, lays concrete, drives a beat-up Honda. He’s missing a few teeth, missing his razor, too. He’s done all right. I mean that last sentence. When I taught him four decades ago, you couldn’t imagine Chaz holding down a job of any sort. Yet here he was, married with a couple of granddaughters (“you wanna see the photos?”)
Chaz was in a special Form 5 (Year 11) English class our small high school formed one year. We knew a bunch of pupils with major learning problems were about to start their School Certificate course (now replaced by Level 1 NCEA); knew also they’d sink in a mainstream group.
I heard myself say, “I’ll have them.” I lay awake that night, wondering what I’d taken on.
It had to be a small class; they’d need focused attention. There were 17 of them, 15 boys and two girls. The ratio is revealing, and still depressingly relevant.
A number of the 17 were “behaviour problems”. Of course they were: our 1970s education system was as loud as today’s in trumpeting failures. “We’re losers,” was how Mitch put it. They were poor at communication; didn’t have the language to explain themselves. If there was a misunderstanding or confrontation, they got confused, then frustrated, then angry.
It was no use teaching them the official School Cert English syllabus. Even at the slowest pace, they’d be lost. But I still wanted them to learn … well, something. How?
Common-sense stratagems offered themselves. I found early on that they liked being read to. They became silent, attentive, almost gentle. So I worked through Barry Hines’ Kes, with its slum boy, hopeless at school (yes, an obvious choice), who finds and trains a young hawk; finds also skills he’d never imagined.
We read SE Hinton’s The Outsiders, crackling with teenage gang culture. I’d get them to try a couple of pages themselves, knowing some could scarcely handle a paragraph. We’d discuss story, characters, issues.
Those discussions were a revelation. Words were still a problem, but an atmosphere like a factory cafe developed, and we debated gangs, animal rights, corporal punishment. I drip-fed them the odd term: “peer pressure … deterrent … petition”; hoped a few might stick.
A lucky break came when I heard that quiet, powerful Jake planned to sit his driver’s licence. I got multiple forms from a startled Ministry of Transport and we all went over them in class. That led me to firearms licences, job applications. They learned a few more phrases.
Who wants a mintie?
They learnt poetry, too. I read them some of Siegfried Sassoon’s more jolting war verse, and they liked that well enough. Then one afternoon, I tossed each of them a poetry anthology, said, “Right, we’re going outside. Ten minutes to learn as many lines as you can. Winner gets a Mintie.”
Later, I got a better idea. “Another 10 minutes. Anyone can recite five lines when we get back, whole class gets a Mintie.”
That sometimes turned one of them into a hero, especially when Vince managed his quota from The Charge of the Light Brigade, punctuated by “Aw, shit,” when he faltered.
A lot of things didn’t work. We couldn’t read plays, aloud or silent. They couldn’t handle anything requiring written analysis or evaluation. At least once a week, I knew within five minutes they couldn’t comprehend the apparently simple task I’d set them.
Just as often, one or more of them would arrive bristling and belligerent, because they’d felt humiliated or inept in another class. Chaz, in particular, was always liable to erupt for no discernible reason. On those days, I’d abandon my lesson plan, lie (“Oh, I forgot – been meaning to read this to you,”) and hope to hold them relatively subdued until the blessed bell rang.
We became a team of sorts. I grew fond of them, even at those bad times. They were stoic, glamour-lite but with skills beyond any school syllabus. In our rural town, some were already de facto farmhands, hunters, child-tenders. As I say, they knew how to adapt, to plug on.
You could see many of them going on to be what politicians like to call “typical Kiwi battlers” or possibly, in the words of our current PM, “bottom-feeders”.
I didn’t see them as “typical’'. I saw them as individuals – and I know how smug that sounds. Almost any of them could become seismic at any moment, so I needed 17 separate packages of control and motivation to keep them reasonably attentive. Nothing unique about that: you still find such classes in nearly every high school, and all hail to the teachers who try to help them.
When the year finished, they didn’t give me a present or make a speech. They weren’t that sort. None of them passed School Cert English: Pam scored a surprising 41%; I think the next highest was 34%.
They all left school at the end of that year. They’ll be in their mid-50s now. Some were beautiful as teenagers. Tye was a young Leonardo DiCaprio. Kayla was all dark ringlets and ivory skin. Jerome was small, delicate-faced. I’d feared the other boys might torment him, but they seemed to treat him with clumsy tenderness.
I hope they’ve had good lives. I know some have / did, in spite of the education system’s predictions.
Mitch became a council worker. Jake of the driving licence took trucks the length of both islands. Others were fencers or owned lawn-mowing franchises. A woman with an exquisite little girl in a supermarket was Kayla, now a caterer. Vince the poetry-learner married the school dux, started a drainage business, died of cancer in his 40s.
And there was Chaz. “Someone told me your son’s a really bright cookie,” I said, on the day he hailed me.
Chaz’s missing teeth showed in a grin. “He’s got these two fucking university degrees. Can’t understand a fucking thing he does, but it’s fucking brilliant, eh?”
Yes. Amidst all the tumult and strife of official doctrines or declarations, Chaz – and, I reckon, a lot of today’s kids like him – is doing all right.
Names have been changed for privacy.
David Hill is a Taranaki author well known for his young-adult fiction.
