As Alice fell down the rabbit hole she began to ‘wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people who walk with their heads downwards… I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please Ma’am, is this New Zealand? Or Australia?’.
Twenty years ago I moved (with my husband and daughters) to Australia - although we travelled by plane, not down a rabbit hole! Whilst it is not all that remarkable (there are lots of us Brits here), it is a place that never fails to create a feeling of curiosity. For the past two weeks, I and my fellow teachers have been on ‘school holidays’, and we are about to enter Term 4 - our final term for the year - both the calendar year and the school year. Alice’s comment about being upside down is felt strongly when viewing things from a Northern Hemisphere perspective. Of course, for all natural-born Aussies, everything is perfectly as it should be. October is springtime, not the fall. Christmas is summertime, not winter, and Aussies swim in the ocean whilst our US and UK friends hope to play in the snow.
Schools ‘up top’ are at the beginning of their school year and we down under are ending ours. Whilst it took some getting used to, I like the idea that the school year and the actual year end at the same time. Aussie kids finish their school year about a week before Christmas and have until the beginning of February to enjoy their time with family, their toys, and the glorious weather. Of course (to quote Shakespeare) “nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so” and so it is that what we do here is different and it makes sense to us - it’s just that my friends and family still struggle to get their heads around the fact that we do things differently here. It’s all rather curious to them.
Term 4 offers the chance for reflection. As teachers, we are sending our eldest students out into the world, and hoping they will take with them what they have learnt and maybe some of that wisdom we have imparted. I bumped into an ex-student on the weekend - he was clearing tables at the pub where I and my husband were eating lunch. We chatted about when he was in my Literature class, he told me about what he was studying at University, and I told him that it was a strange coincidence that I had just bought ink cartridges to go into the fountain pen he and his classmates bought me as a thank you gift. Incidentally, they had the pen engraved with a quote from The Handmaid’s Tale - “Nolite te bastardes carborundorem” (Don’t let the bastards grind you down). It was their way of saying to ‘keep doing what you are doing’ and don’t allow the system to get the upper hand!
Teachers often have to deal with negativity, lack of appreciation, and a general sense of disregard, but what a wonderful thing it is to have young people remember you with warm feelings, to reminisce about the time you shared in the classroom. Teaching is a curious profession - many don’t understand why we do it, yet others criticise, and then there are those who look back at their schooldays and their teachers with fondness. As teachers, we never know just how much we have influenced those young people who we shared our lives with for a short amount of time. Teaching is about reaching into hearts and minds, and hoping that we have made that little bit of a difference to someone.
In the final paragraph of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll writes of Alice imagining herself as a grown woman who gathers her children and ‘makes their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale’ and as a teacher, a mother and grandmother I want to be like Alice and share the stories of my own adventures into wonderland!
Great voice- I actually ‘hear’ yours!