My first teaching contract was in the US, where I replaced a teacher who had been fired. I never asked why. Probably wise I didn’t. My second — and first real teaching job — was in Australia. Then back to the US for my third. My fourth was a short stint in Paraguay, and the longest stretch, my fifth position, was back in Australia again. My sixth was not classroom teaching in any traditional sense, but working as a volunteer with different Ministries in Kiribati, living in the community, and tutoring local kids.
By the time I had finished teaching across three continents and living as a local on a Pacific island, I had learned one inescapable truth: teaching is never just teaching. It is always also a way of seeing.
In Australia, students typically stand when a teacher enters the room. For the most part they are interested in learning, and the classrooms are composed of a marvelous mix of cultural backgrounds. Working with immigrants from all over the world is challenging at the best of times — being an immigrant teacher yourself probably just gives you a more empathetic perspective. A school system composed of, and built for, people who came from somewhere else. As was I.
Back in the US, I taught in a rural part of Oregon where, again, the population of the school was largely immigrant. Over thirty percent Latino when I was there; over seventy percent now, the last I heard. Another system designed by and for people who arrived from somewhere else. Most of the teachers and staff were not immigrants themselves, but they loved their students and their students knew it. It worked, and created a relatively harmonious atmosphere throughout the school.
My year in Texas showed me another side of American education entirely. The brand new charter school where I worked was made up of students who hadn’t coped well in the public system — for one reason or another, and sometimes for reasons that had nothing to do with school at all — or students who were looking for an alternative to a 2000 kid student body. Coming from the corridors of a couple of prestigious private girls’ schools in Adelaide to a classroom where some kids kept plastic bottles next to their desks to spit their chewing tobacco into … well, as you can imagine, some adjustments were required. What I found, once I stopped noticing the bottles, was that these students were paying closer attention than many I had taught. They just needed someone to show up consistently and notice them … they knew they wouldn’t get much of that in a bigger school.
The American School of Asunción was a different universe again — mostly children of foreign diplomats and wealthier locals, teachers largely from the US, but running on a Paraguayan schedule that took some getting used to. The afternoon siesta was a very welcome addition to the day. As for the students, the local kids were there because education meant something in their family — a cost, a sacrifice, a bet on the future … they were serious. The diplomat’s kids were there because that’s where their parents happened to be posted that year, and they had little choice. Same classroom, very different stakes.
Working in Kiribati, with kids, teachers, and the Ministry of Education, was something else entirely. Not only did I get to see how schools operate, I got to see the system behind the system. Living in a Kiribati village, participating in community life, was inseparable from the work itself.
Kiribati taught me improvisation … flexibility. Supplies didn’t always arrive. The power, if they had any at all, went out. Students came and went with the rhythms of family obligation and economic necessity. Teachers taught with whatever was in the room — including the room itself, or whatever they found in the bushes around the school yard. Nobody complained. There was a quiet resourcefulness to it that made most of what I’d considered “essential” back in Australia look faintly ridiculous.
And then Australia again — where I always felt at home from the beginning, and where the contradictions were their own education. The affluent sitting next to the struggling. Formality mixed with informality. And underneath it all, a quiet assumption that education is a service being delivered to a consumer. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the consumer doesn’t know yet what they’re buying, nor if it will be of any value once it arrives.
I taught students who fought for a seat in the classroom, and students who checked themselves out of hospital on a Monday so they wouldn’t miss a Biology practical. I also worked in facilities for students who hadn’t been to school in a year or more — students the system had half-given up on, who hadn’t quite given up on themselves.
Every school system reveals what a culture believes about the purpose of a human.
Four countries. Three continents. One language. What it taught me, ultimately, is that the subject was always people. It still is.
But that’s a post for another time.