Encore: Why I became a teacher at the school where I was bullied

Conversations

This episode features an interview with Australian high school teacher and author Brendan James Murray about his memoir, The School. He reflects on returning to

Key takeaways

• Brendan James Murray returned to teach at the high school where he was bullied as a child, finding it spiritually connected to his coastal community.
• He shares that approximately 50% of students in his area receive government financial support, highlighting widespread economic disadvantage.

Main topics

• Returning to teach at one's former school
• Student mental health and exam pressure

Notable quotes

"We don't teach subjects. We teach children."

Conclusion

Murray's reflections offer a poignant look into the emotional labor of teaching and underscore

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Speaker 1 (0:07) Each year, high school teachers get a list of names of their new students, the ones they'll teach that coming school year. Now, at first, it's just a list of names. But over the weeks and months, those names become people, each kid with their own story. Sometimes a student shines because of their talent and promise. Sometimes they're the class clown or the schoolyard bully. And sometimes a student stands out because of some terrible shadow in their background. And the teacher has to meet each and every one of those kids where they are if they're to have any hope of connecting with and educating them. As a profession, teaching is a strange mix of intimacy and bureaucracy, and it asks an enormous amount from the people who do it well. Brendan James Murray has been a high school teacher for more than 10 years. He's written a book about one year in the classroom called The School. Hi, Brendan. Welcome back to Conversations. Speaker 2 (1:14) Hi, thanks very much for having me on. Speaker 1 (1:16) Brendan, last time you were here, we were talking about Taipans. Are you still a little snake obsessed? Speaker 2 (1:22) I'm always going to be a little bit snake obsessed. It's just something that's... A big part of who Brendan is, I think. Do Speaker 1 (1:30) you have any in your living with you at the moment or is it merely a theoretical interest at this point? Speaker 2 (1:36) Purely theoretical. I think it would be a choice between the snake or my wife and my wife is always going to win that one. Speaker 1 (1:43) And I'm assuming it's not because venomous snakes are easier to get along with than the teenagers that you teach? Speaker 2 (1:50) Definitely not. Because Speaker 1 (1:51) teenagers get such a bad rap. What do you enjoy about teaching that age group? Speaker 2 (1:58) One thing that's very true of children is that they have this real honesty about them. And it's something people talk about a lot, but it's very true. With young people, you know exactly where you stand by and large. And when I suppose I'm an English teacher, when we're talking about real world issues, they have a way of... cutting through the adult nonsense and just seeing things as they are. And I think that can be really refreshing. And perhaps it's a sad reality of the human experience that to some degree, we grow out of that and in a way become less honest and more vague and more careful about what we say. So that's something that's very fulfilling about working with young people, especially as an English teacher. So Speaker 1 (2:44) the eye rolls and the groans, they're not things that put you off about teenagers? Speaker 2 (2:49) No, the key is to not take it personally, to see the humour in it. And I try to think as frequently as I can about what I was like when I was that age. And I think, like all kids, school wasn't necessarily my favourite place to be a lot of the time. Speaker 1 (3:09) So why then, of all the schools in the country, why did you decide to go back to teach at your old high school? Speaker 2 (3:18) I think it's a part of the world that I'm very deeply connected to, almost on a kind of spiritual level in a way. It's a really beautiful part of the world. We've got this beautiful coastline and I can't imagine myself ever being very far away from it. But there's quite a bit of disadvantage in that area as well. And I grew up myself at times under quite a bit of hardship. And it's quite fulfilling for me to be working in that community and trying to help the young people there and make a bit of a difference there. Speaker 1 (3:53) Was there a lot of deja vu, especially when you first started working in the school? Did it feel like you'd gone back in time? Speaker 2 (4:02) Definitely. I think anybody, if they reflect back on their time at school, whether it be primary school or secondary school, we spend so much... time there, it almost becomes part of the architecture of your mind, these different locations that you remember and what happened in this classroom or what happened in this part of the schoolyard. And certainly when I started, I'd walk past a particular spot and it's almost... like you suddenly get tugged into the past and you remember being there as a child or you remember a specific thing that happened there. So it is kind of a strange sense of having one foot in the present and one foot in your own past. Speaker 1 (4:44) Were there any teachers that you had as a student? Were any of them still there at the school when you joined the staff? Speaker 2 (4:52) There were a few, but by the time I came back, about 10 years had passed, something like that. So a number of them had retired, but there were a few. And at first it was a little strange, but that actually became a really nice thing to sit down and get to know them as people, as opposed to as just teachers with a capital T, which I think is how kids often see their teachers. Speaker 1 (5:17) You say it's a beautiful part of the world, but there is some disadvantage there in the community that the school is in. So what kind of stuff is going on in the families of the students that you teach? What range of stuff are those kids dealing with once they're outside of the school grounds? Speaker 2 (5:35) I think one of the things as a teacher is that you never really quite know. And that, I think, is the real challenge. You've got this room full of 24, 25, maybe sometimes even 26 kids, and that's going to be 25 different experiences. And you don't know what they've just walked out of before they walked into your classroom. But certainly economic disadvantage. I remember when... When I started as a teacher at the school, I was told that approximately 50 % of our students received some form of government financial support, the families. And that's not unique to just that school. That's all the schools in the area. So it's that part of the world where there is that economic hardship. Speaker 1 (6:25) And then for you as the teacher, there's teacher training and then there's the reality of stepping into your own classroom as a qualified teacher. What part of teaching was the steepest learning curve for you? Speaker 2 (6:39) Definitely behaviour management, I think, is the steepest learning curve for every new teacher. How do you get a room full of 25 young people to be interested or engaged or... or ready to take part in whatever it is that you want them to do. Speaker 1 (6:56) What kind of advice had you been given about managing behaviour when you were doing your teacher training? Speaker 2 (7:03) A kind of cliche in teaching is don't smile until Easter, which is the idea that if you are the kind of unyielding wall, the tough teacher for the first few months of the year, you set a standard that makes it easier to control the class for the remainder of the year. Speaker 1 (7:22) And did that work for you? Speaker 2 (7:24) I didn't even attempt it because it's not in my nature. I'm not kind of the tough guy at all. And I knew it was just a facade that I wouldn't be able to maintain. So I didn't try to teach in that way. So Speaker 1 (7:38) what works for you? If you've got a kid, say, acting out or being the class clown and disrupting that classroom, what approach do you take? Speaker 2 (7:46) So I think you need to have boundaries that... you enforce. So you need to say to kids, if you do this, this is going to happen. And then you need to make sure that that happens every time because the moment it doesn't happen, there's this wiggle room that causes problems. But I try really hard, and all teachers do this, I think, try really hard to understand the kid as a human being and be interested in them and care about them. I think that is the best way to get kids to do the right thing because 99.9 % of kids, if they know that you do care about them, they're either not going to act up or when they do, they'll at least feel quite guilty, which is a really good bit of leverage as a teacher that you can have. Speaker 1 (8:32) What story did your dad tell you about getting the strap from a teacher that he had in the 1960s, in the days when corporal punishment was a standard part of classroom teaching? Speaker 2 (8:44) Dad had a teacher who would give the students the strap but do it so, so, so gently that it became a joke amongst the students and they would deliberately do the wrong thing. So this guy would give them the strap essentially for their own amusement and that was a story that he told me a number of times growing up. What Speaker 1 (9:07) message did you take from that or how did you see that teacher in that story? Speaker 2 (9:11) When I was a kid, I used to just think it was a funny story. But as I grew older, and certainly when I became a teacher myself, I formed the view that this was probably a teacher who was protesting in a way. I think he'd probably been told by his principal and by the bureaucrats who oversaw education at that time that when students do the wrong thing, you're going to hit them. And if you're not prepared to do that, you won't be in a classroom. So his approach to that was, fine, you're going to make me hit the kids. I'll hit the kids, but I'll barely hit them at all. So I think that was actually a really courageous thing that that teacher did. I think he was taking a stand in his own way, even if the students didn't recognise that and didn't realise that it would have been far easier for that teacher to just be whacking them like everybody else. I really, really... admire that. And I think that's what modern teachers need to be doing and what I try to do, which is think about what's right and wrong about education and take stands against what's wrong so that schools can be the best places they can be for the young people in our care. Speaker 1 (10:24) Is there a particular year level, Brendan, that's the most challenging or assumed to be the most challenging to teach at high school? Speaker 2 (10:32) Year eight. So year sevens are still a little bit nervous and a little bit scared. Year nines are starting to get a little bit of the teenage apathy sneaking in. So rather than running wild, they're more likely to kind of roll their eyes at you and sit back. With year eights, you've got the immaturity of the year seven, but none of the apathy of the year nine, which can result in a... A fairly lively classroom. Yeah, exactly. Tell Speaker 1 (11:02) me about the bet that you made with two year nine girls, Tegan and Jada. Speaker 2 (11:07) Yeah, so there was these two girls that I taught some years ago and they always wore huge amounts of makeup, so much makeup that they were almost... when they had their makeup on versus when they had it off, they were almost unrecognisable as being the same people. And of course, that amount of makeup was against the school rules. So they were always butting heads with the coordinators and the principals, other people. So I gave them the bet that if they would come to school, come to English one day with no makeup on at all, I'd not make them do any work. They could just chill out and... and watch a movie. So that was my attempt to kind of bribe them. The underlying thinking being that what I hoped was that they would have that experience, feel good about themselves and feel happy and not have people giving them a hard time because they'd expressed to me that they didn't want to wear that makeup. It was something that they felt like they had to do. Speaker 1 (12:05) And did it work? Did they take you up on it? Speaker 2 (12:07) Eventually. It took ages. I was... reminding them about this offer again and again and again and again. And then one day they just showed up without their