Albury High: Day Four

This morning I got to sit in on a year 12 advanced double English session. I spent the first period with one teacher and the second with another. It is amazing me this week, how much the English syllabus has changed since I was in high school. The kids were studying a comparative literature unit, Jane Austen’s Emma and the film Clueless. The purpose of the unit is to show how stories remain the same through the ages even as contexts change dramatically. The class was talking about he way Frank Churchill’s character in Emma has been replaced by a gay character in the movie, but both characters fulfil the role of the unattainable male beau in the storyline, Frank Churchill through his engagement and the gay guy for obvious reasons. I never did comparative lit until university, however it would seem that the current high school curriculum has far more breadth. In third period I sat in on a year seven class where the kids were finishing up some group work assignments. They were studying Harry Potter and the teacher had divided them up into Slytherin, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor and Ravenclaw for the assignment.


After lunch I sat in on a year eleven essay marking meeting amongst the teachers. I got to examine the rubric they were using and read some of the essays. It was interesting listening to them discuss various marks and acknowledge that they wanted to give various kids higher or lower marks due to their expectations of the kids. However it all seemed really fair and certain essays were passed amongst all the teachers for corroboration. Initially there seemed to be more discussion over the higher marked essays and the teachers themselves disagreed over what the question was asking and the criteria a perfect scoring essay should meet. The teachers were also confused about having to translate marks out of twenty into fifteen for this task.

Again I found myself questioning my own learning style and whilst I could see myself having been a 12/13 student in year eleven twelve, I wondered if I would be capable of writing a top scoring essay myself, now. If the work some of these kids are handing in is better than mine own, how can I have aspirations to teach them? I can only take comfort in the fact that as my understanding of grammar and English usage has improved over the past few years as an ESL teacher, so will my competency as a story teller and decoder. Which follows up on what I was saying before on using this opportunity to improve my storytelling. “If you can’t do something, teach it.” The wisecrack that wrote this neglected to mention that after this process, one should also be able to do it.

Another year 12 modern history class cemented my view that I think I really want to teach English. It was somewhat confronting to realise that I was learning history in the class, more than learning teaching. I have this arrogant idea that I have a reasonably good grasp of Asian histry gleaned through my travels, but I was truly wrong. The class was finishing up a unit on the conflicts in South East Asia that centred on what we call the Vietnam War. They were discussing a massacre that I had never even heard of. The end of a Four Corners documentary was shown - the other part was shown yesterday - and I was very impressed by the way the teacher got the kids to examine really subtle instances of bias. The class spent quite a bit of time critiquing the "source" - I'd even forgotton about primary and secondary sources; I don't think I've heard those expressions used since high school - and again, I don't remember learning such sophisticated analysis skills in high school, although I did have an especially crap senior history teacher. Home work was set to cover a section from the text book on Cambodia and write an essay on how the Khmer Rouge altered life in Cambodia from 1975-1978. I laughed that the question itself was an understatement in irony, although I was embarrassed that I had to double check those were the actual dates from Year Zero.