Ironically, the day before I was due to start my new teaching position the Principal at Camperdown Public School rang me and said she had a position for me. When I explained that I already had a year's position she was both pleased for me and disappointed. I was torn between wanting the easy and familiar job which I knew I could do and taking up the challenge of a new school and a whole new set of children with disabilities.
After my success at Glebe I really thought I could do the job. I also felt a sense of responsibility to the new school and did not want to leave them in the lurch without a teacher. How I would wish I had been selfish and taken the easy path.
Belmore North Public School was about 30 minutes drive away and located in a largely Muslim area of Sydney. My teaching friend lived close by and she offered to pick me up each morning and drive me to school with her. In the afternoons however she didn't leave until 5pm as her son did music classes and she would stay behind at school before leaving to collect him.
From the start it was clear that I had made a bad decision. This was for a number of reasons. Firstly the children were hostile towards me. I can understand this now as they had had the same teacher for the whole school lives and suddenly she had left them. They felt let down and I'm sure in their own, retarded minds, that by rejecting the 'new teacher' that 'Miss' would come back.
Never having taught children with mental or physical disorders I was at a total loss as to how to control them. No matter what strategies I tried they failed. The children refused to obey instructions, constantly fought with each other, seemed to take great delight in seeing my frustration and even laughed when I tried to discipline them. This was usually in the form of threatening to take away privileges (like using the computer or playing games).
The children were all labelled as being moderately retarded. However they were all mostly very clever and conniving and in some cases dangerous. I had a class of 13 children, Year 5 & 6 and due to their mental conditions most of them were already starting puberty. I had one girl in the class who I was constantly having to watch as some of the boys took great delight in trying to fondle her or flash their private parts at her. Another boy was on medication which he had to take 3 times a day or he would start having uncontrollable temper fits. I was not authorised to administer the medication so every session, I would have to send him across to the Secretary's office where he would be dosed.
On top of feeling totally abandoned by the other teaching staff, exhausted by the difficulties of teaching this class I was also feeling that I was being deliberately unfairly treated. This was because I was immediately told that I would have to cover 10 playground duties during the week. 3 mid morning duties and 5 half hour lunch duties (one ever day). There were 30 playground duties during the week and I was covering one third of them yet there were over 20 teachers.
When I complained to the Principal that I didn't think this allotment was fair he told me that most of the other teachers had 'committee duties' so I had to cover for them. I soon realised that this was not true but determined not to let them get to me I accepted. So even getting the opportunity to get out of the school and smoke a few cigarettes was limited.
Obviously I wasn't emotionally equipped to deal with everything that was happening. School was crap, home was crap - it felt like my whole life was crap. Matty revelled in my failure. He was happy to see me arrive home every afternoon physically and mentally drained and then tell me he knew I 'wasn't cut out to be a teacher'. When I tried a few times to ring in sick and take a day off he threatened to ring the school and not only tell them that I was lying but that also about my criminal record. I was trapped.
Towards the end of the first term Matty started to get really sick. His lump had swollen to about the size of a baseball and the medication was making him constantly nauseous. Often I would return home to find he had vomited uncontrollably through the house as he tried to make his way to the bathroom. It was left to me to clean up and then deal with his tantrums or depression.
Everything came to a head two weeks before the end of the first school term. In the middle of an unusually productive teaching session I suddenly realised that the reason the kids were being so quiet and pretending to work was because one of the boys was crouched down behind the girl student and poking a pencil into her vagina. I stupidly lost it and yelled at the boy. He was twice my size and weight and as i advanced towards him he came at me with a pair of scissors and pinned me against the wall.
I handled it myself all right. In the middle of the classroom I lit a cigarette and calmly walked out of the room, across the playground, past the Principals window and out of the school. I waited for over 30 minutes for a bus, but being close to lunchtime, no-one at the school even noticed I was gone. At the train station I seriously contemplated jumping under a train and ending it all. I didn't. I made it home, walked through the front door and straight into my bedroom. I locked the door, smoked myself into a stupor while listening to the constant ringing of the phone (obviously the school) and Matty calling me which I ignored.
When I eventually came out of my room, Matty grabbed me and started yelling at me as to why I had ignored him and why I hadn't answered the phone. It was too much. I fought back, grabbing him by the shoulders and violently pushing him against the wall telling him if he touched me I would kill him. He was too shocked to respond. I took my dog and went for a long, long walk before returning home and cooking dinner for a still shocked and quiet Matty. I ate my own dinner in my room after getting stoned again and didn't come out until the morning.
That morning I returned to school as normal. My class was taken by another teacher while I attended a meeting with my supervisor and Principal. I didn't hold back. I told them that I would finish the term and leave. Even when they offered me a 'regular' teaching position I laughed in their faces and told them they could go f*ck themselves. I really didn't care about the consequences but I think they were scared that I would go to the Teacher's Federation and make a complaint or possibly sue them - which I had every right to do. I just wanted out of there.
Amazingly the last two weeks of the term turned out to be annoyingly calm. The kids were well behaved and even begged me to stay on and keep teaching them. I hated them even more for that.
There were no sad goodbyes on my last day. I left the school with hardly a word to anyone. Two days later Matty's lump burst and life would take another change.....
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