About me

Teaching has been my bread and butter for the last twenty-five years. I love teaching, and I love trying to get the best out of my students. Most of my students (surprise surprise) don’t share my love of books. Motivating students to see the benefits of English and to appreciate how they can become critical thinkers is a philosophy that I take into the classroom.

Like a Maths teacher who recognises in the solving of a complex problem, something fundamentally beautiful, I love resolving the complexities of an essay question. The succinctness of a form that demands resolution in the space of 1000 words appeals to me. Just as appealing, is the idea phase – the labyrinth of possibilities that unfold as you sit and contemplate the ‘to what extent?’ or ‘do you agree?’ or ‘discuss’. The limitlessness of the ideas phase, and the excitement that comes with shaping and organising information into the contained parameters of a word limit, has me totally absorbed as I sweep the kitchen floor, sweat it out on the exercise bike, or do the shopping. Yes, I am the multitasker, doing my best work not when I’m pouring over a computer, but when I am on the go.

I can write essays anywhere (a bit of a boast I know). If the football is a non-event, you will find me, hiding on the far side of the boundary-line, engrossed in the world of a text. Unfortunately, this can have some repercussions, particularly when you don’t see your son go headfirst into the pack like a rabid dog, searching for the ball only to be knocked out cold two metres away. No. Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ had my attention on that occasion. Distractions have their advantages. I certainly didn’t dissolve into tears and do the crazy mother, jump the boundary fence thing.

So, over the years I have stockpiled (or rather our IT guy at school has preserved), realms and realms and realms of content that I am rediscovering. My plan is to keep adding this content to this reservoir of files. What goes around comes around, as we who have been in the education game fully appreciate. I am rediscovering stuff that I wrote when ‘The Imaginative Landscape’ was a thing, and when the enigmatic questions posed by the Context ‘Whose Reality?’ really sent my head spinning.

Then there was the ‘Life of Pi’ era; yet more head-spinning days of philosophical reflection. Moving into graphic novel territory, I embraced the notion that texts could represent ideas and information visually. I had to learn about gutters and speech bubbles and layers of meaning that did not come naturally to me, as a reader of words. And I loved Art Spiegelman’s ‘The Complete Maus’. I loved teaching this text and discovering, along with my students, what it meant to be the son of Holocaust survivors.

My best essays are always derived from the conversations I have with my colleagues and students. The kernel of an idea will form, and from there it takes hold, sometimes dormant, for a while, sometimes there below the surface, germinating, until inspiration takes hold. All the time, I am revisiting those conversations, mulling them over in my head, working out the way forward, the questions posed, the language I will use – because that also, is important.

Enough of me talking about writing essays. In this meta-era of self-examination I will resist the temptation to dwell any further on the process, and instead, refocus my attention back to the writing of an essay. I can hear the delightfully ironic voice of Vicki Laveau-Harvie, reading ‘The Erratics’ on my audiobook. An idea is forming. What fun it will be to respond to this VCE text.