I had to prepare myself to read Teacher by Gabbie Stroud. I was conscious that there had been a lot of interest in the book before I came across it; this was made even more difficult because Gabbie had, when she had been a teacher, been a member of the IEU, which is the union I am currently working for. I had also heard a lot of people talking about Teacher. The vast majority of these were overwhelmingly positive reviews. The thrust was that Gabbie had successfully captured the experience of being a teacher in an Australian context, complete with the soul-crushing challenges of workload and datafication. This is central to much of my work – and certainly not something that I wold dispute – but it’s also a key part of the frustration inherent in my job. I know workload is a significant issue for teachers. I experienced it when I was a teacher, and I hear about it everyday from teachers who are still practicising today. But what can we – as individuals, as a profession, as a union do aobut it? I want to get past the talking and discussing and cataloguing and get onto the taking action part of it, so I was hesitatnt to approach the book. Nevertheless, I decided to pick it up and read it. It helped that we’d decided to do it for our IEUReading Book Club, too.
What I wasn’t expecting – and something that I hadn’t really heard much about – was how beautifully written Teacher was. It makes a lot of sense, of course. Gabbie writes about her own schooling days, and something that is apparent from the start is the passion, enthusiasm and talent that she had for writing. It’s there in the pages of Teacher, too; there were times when I could very clearly imagine that I was in the same classroom as Gabbie. Her description of the ‘shoe’ incident early in the book really struck home; while never having had a similar experience, I could understand exactly how Gabbie felt and why she reacted the way she did – a testament to the shared experience of teachign, but mostly down to her detailed, thoughful and emotive description. I recognised in her writing the bone-weary tiredness that came from teaching in the early years of the career, and the frustration and annoyance at all the non-teaching activities that seemed to creep in and crowd out the simple joys of being in the classroom and teaching young minds.
The sections where Gabbie describes her decision to leave teaching – and in a beautfully succint phrase, she points out that teaching actually left her, and not the other way around – are heartbreaking. As a teacher, I never went through anything like that – but I think that I got pretty close, by the end. There is somethign wrong when we take dedicated, passionate, talented people, and turn them into burnt out husks. And this idea is part of the answer that Gabbie suggests at the end of Teacher. She is quick to point out that she doesn’t have all the answers – and that education is incredibly complex – but she does note that the politicisation of education is a significant part of the problem. I’m not sure how you escape that, but I think part of the solution must be to, as Gabbie herself writes, put teachers back in charge of teaching.