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… the aims of education are to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.
— English educationalist Sir Ken Robinson
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At another two-teacher school out the same way, I was impressed at the team attitude shown in running things smoothly. The senior students—in fact, grades 3, 4, 5 and 6 all shared the same room—would make the teacher a cup of tea and answer the phone in the adjoining office when it rang (there was no-one else to do it), writing down a message which they passed on to the teacher without distracting the entire group. If the weather was nice and the students had been doing well, the other teacher and myself sometimes decided to delay ringing the bell (it was actually a physical bell, not an electronic one) for ten minutes or so and extend lunchtime. This was a true ‘country school’, with not a house in sight in any direction and students who, despite their obvious isolation, were mature, independent and capable of accepting responsibility as they did at home every day of their lives.
Emergency teaching days quickly turned into weeks and terms. It was during a term replacement at Oberon South that I informed shocked colleagues that in more than a decade of secondary-school teaching I had never spent an entire day (8.30-3.30) in the classroom, something they had done more times than they could count. At a private school in the outer western suburbs, a student of perhaps eleven years of age informed me that the Christmas song we were learning—John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War Is Over)—was not appropriate as it included the word ‘Xmas’ rather than ‘Christmas’. This was a deliberate move by Lennon (and for the same reason as I had chosen it) to create a song that crossed boundaries in an inclusive manner, but clearly you can’t please everyone.
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