FAIR DINKUM

NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

I had been warned that my year 11 class would be unruly, obnoxious, and down right rude at times. I was given the impression that they were incapable and somewhat miserable. That’s what every teacher wants to hear first thing in the morning on the very first day student teaching right? On day one my co teacher, we’ll call him Mr. X, and I co taught. He introduced me to my class, which I could immediately see consisted of about twenty-two 17 year old boys and perhaps five girls. This was going to be interesting.

“Class, this is Miss Barton, she’ll be interning here and taking over the class eventually this semester.” The class snickered a bit. I heard a discreet wolf call from the back of the room. “She’s travelled all the way from America.” The class fell silent.

“I’m alright with that!” One of the boys exclaimed.
“I’m SURE you are” Mr. X replied sarcastically. The student winked at me, which Mr. X did not witness, but I decided to pick my battles and not say anything about it. The first half of the class I observed each student two or three minutes to see exactly what I would be dealing with. A few students stood out. “Scott” sat in the back, a heavy set boy, tall, with sandy brownish hair and a bit of a crooked smile. His voice was loud and boisterous and his comments always seemed off topic and inappropriate. “Derek” was blonde, very blonde. His hair had clearly just been bleached, and his personality seemed to feed off of whatever “Scott” was doing or saying. “Lenny” sat in the front and he was very quiet. He looked polite, but it was almost this secretive, sarcastic polite which made you think he could be paying attention or he could be thinking about how much he hated your guts. “Adam” sat next to “Lenny” and he was clearly a bright young boy, with spiky hair and an inquisitive face. He always looked like he had a question to ask. “Onnie” and Lindsy” sat side by side, two of the overachieving girls in the class. The smiled at me, sat straight up, and seemed fascinated with my accent, and always did what they did what they were told.

During the next half of the class Mr. X and I split the class up to discuss the video we had just watched. Before the video the kids took a survey on the capabilities of the handicapped. Then the kids watched a video about the Paralympics and were to be split up into two groups to discuss if their opinions had changed before writing a response paper. Mr. X took “the bad boys” and I was given “the good girls” and “the smart boys.” (Mr. X did not put it this way, but it was clear that he had taken on the troubled students courteously to probably prevent me from pulling my hair out on the first day of school.) Everything ran smoothly and my group all seemed to agree on everything. I hated it. I wanted argument, disagreement, conflict, and questions. This would have to change, but for now I got through the lesson with no complications.

Back in the staff room I sat at a table with the other English student teachers and they shared stories about the disruptive and difficult students in their classes, and I was JEALOUS! These are the students that make you think, and make you push yourself, and make you frustrated because you know they are capable of so much more and it’s your job to show them that! I stormed out of the room to track down Mr. X. When I found him, he was in a rush doing a million things at once. He told me to follow him, to walk and talk. I began blubbering, my mind coming up with a million different ideas, and I stumbled over them as I spouted them out too quickly for my mouth and brain to coincide.

“Mr. X…I…well I have this idea…but…ok well I have a really great idea for a lesson…I think the boys would love it…but it would just be easier..ok well…”
“Carley, do you want to teach the whole class tomorrow?”
“I would love to!” I sighed in relief, and scurried back to the faculty lounge to plan my lesson. The lesson for the next day would be on the effectiveness speeches. Rugby is a large sport here, and I had come across a motivational speech given by a man named Glenn, we’ll keep his last name out of the story for now. Glenn was an AFL rugby player (equivalent to our professional Football sports leagues in the United States).

Class the next day started out the same as the day before, except for one minor change, Mr. X was out sick. In true Aussie fashion I adopted their saying “no worries” and carried on. A “casual teacher” subbed into the class just in case I needed the help. The boys were causing a ruckus while deviously eyeing me as I stood at the front of the class and waited for everyone to be quiet, assuming they would if they saw me standing there. They kept talking. I cleared my throat hoping they would pick up on the social queue. They did not. I began writing on the board and the class gradually quieted down as I wrote in big capital letters: FAIR DINKUM. Fair Dinkum is an Australian term for being true or genuine.

“Who looks in the mirror in the morning?” I asked. Nobody raised their hand. “Come on, who wakes up and looks in the mirror while they are in the bathroom in the morning?” I raised my hand and hands began popping up. “Who likes what they see?” A few hands went up, but not all. “Who in here has ever made a mistake?” I raised my hand. “Who can tell me what FAIR DINKUM means?” I asked.

“A good Aussie!” One of the boys shouted. I wrote the words true to yourself under FAIR DINKUM.
“Who in here thinks they are a FAIR DINKUM Aussie?” I asked. All of the boys and a few of the girls raised their hands. That was my gateway, I introduced the video to the boys, after some minor technological problems which surprisingly the boys handled alright. We had to switch classrooms a few times because the video was not playing on the computer which was hooked up to the projector. Technology always fails when you need it the most. Finally I was able to get the video to play. The boys sat and watched the tall, dashing, dark haired, badass man on the screen talk about how much he loved drinking and fighting. The boys laughed at all the appropriate times in the speech and I could see the thought process going on inside the boys heads “drinking and fighting, this is bloody awesome!”

You see Glenn, the sports star in the video, goes on to explain in his motivational speech to a group of high school boys, that he eventually became heavily involved with alcohol and fighting. During one fight in particular he shattered his elbow through a glass window and tore his elbow basically in half. At the hospital, intoxicated, passed out, covered in blood, he woke up to the doctor who nonchalantly explained to him all of the physical therapy he would have to go through to even turn a door knob again. However, before leaving the room he looked and Glenn and said “I think you’re a joke. You’re not your own person. You need to recover who you are.” Glenn woke up every morning from then on, and as he lifted his arm to put gel in his hair, he had to stand face to face with the scar that ran all the way down his elbow and arm. He was forced to face his scar, and himself. He looked in the mirror, and asked himself one question: “Am I fair dinkum?”

As the video ended the class didn’t budge. Every set of eyes remained on the screen, and nobody spoke. I turned the video off and the class remained silently still. Finally one boy spoke.
“Is it over?”
“Yes it is”
“But, I want to hear more” The rest of the video was just question and answer with the audience and was irrelevant to the class, so I shut the video off. We moved to the computer lab where I asked the class to write a letter to Glenn about how the motivational speech affected them, what it meant to them, and how they could relate to it. I also told the kids that I researched Glenn a little and came across his website where I found his email address.

“Oi! He’s NOT going to want to hear from a bunch of kids!” A student exclaimed.

I walked around the class observing the boys as they wrote and helping when I was asked. The layout of the letters for some of the boys was all wrong, but the emotions and ideas that the boys were putting on paper were exactly right. I was thrilled. These are boys, who I was told on a GOOD day would perhaps write a sentence IF they felt like it, were each writing excellent ideas about how inspirational the speech was and how it made them think twice about fighting. These letters might not have seemed like that much, but it was a start. I didn’t want the students to write pages of perfect, professional, letter writing. I just wanted them to think and react according to their own feelings and experiences. “Derek” amazed me the most. I stood behind him while I helped “Scott” his counterpart, but out of the corner of my eye I watched “Derek” focusing on putting his thoughts into words. I started to walk away…

“Miss wait!” Derek shouted after me. I whipped around.
“Whats up?”
“Is this okay so far?” His response was both thoughtful and honest, but what shocked me the most was that he actually cared whether or not I approved.

Later that day I wrote to Glenn introducing myself as an American student teacher, telling him a little about my class, and letting him know that the students really enjoyed his speech and that they really looked up to him. Glenn lived in Melbourne and had probably never heard of Newcastle High School. I told him he was probably a busy man and if he didn’t respond I understood, but I just wanted him to know how that the kids in my class really connected. The next day in the faculty lounge I received a phone call from the main office. They had put somebody through for me. I answered the phone, and it was Glenn. Half in shock I may have initially sounded like an idiot. He looked up the high school and found the main office number. He told me it was good to hear my voice, and that he just wanted to tell me it was great what I had done with the kids, thanking me, and that he really enjoyed the letters.

This was my first experience teaching at Newcastle High School. I wasn’t going into it expecting to hear back from a major athlete, I just wanted to do something that would make the kids think outside the box and realize how capable they are and how much they can accomplish if they put their minds to it. The kids wrote the letters, I did not, and the kids are the reason Glenn called me. I am so excited to share the news with the class tomorrow that I received a personal phone call from Glenn himself. It’s very important to me that my students trust that when I say I’m going to do something, I follow through. It’s made me realize that I always need to be dependable and follow through. If I am asking my students to be dependable with assignments, I also have to be dependable. As I said, I was not writing to Glenn for attention, or to hear back from a big sports star, I simply wrote to him because I told my students that I would send their letters.

~Carley B


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