This year I have spent time some days acting as a teacher’s aide in a public primary school. This is a typical school but in a relatively lower socioeconomic part of the state that I live in. It’s also a beautiful part of the country but there are mostly labour jobs or support jobs like in healthcare and education. Nearly a third of the citizens in this state are on some kind of public assistance, with a large population of older Australians. There are cycles of poverty here where kids grow up in families that have never seen someone working a job. Almost half of Tasmanians are functionally illiterate as well. So clearly there is a lot at play here. When we moved here we moved due to the tremendous quality of life. The cost of living is great, and we were able to buy a large two-storey house with ocean views where we listen to the waves from our lounge room, all for the price of an apartment in Sydney. Private schools cost less money and our kids are enrolled there as it’s also next to our house. It seems like we may have been living in a bit of a bubble though.
The public school that I’ve spent time at is one that locals consider a “better” public school, and it has brand new facilities, essentially they built an entirely new school next to the old school and it services students from prep to grade 12. I spent time in a primary classroom with kids that are my eldest son’s age. The teacher who hosted me has been teaching in private schools the majority of her almost two decades of teaching, but in the past couple of years she moved over to public schools. She is the kindest and most emotionally generous teacher I have ever seen in action. She has patience of a saint and shows up with so much love for her students. She has a teacher’s aide to help out with one of the students who has been diagnosed with autism I believe, but one where he can become violent. She recently got another student brought into her class who is very similar yet more volatile and she fought for another teacher’s aide. Out of the 24ish students almost half of them have some kind of special need, they are either on the spectrum, have ADHD, come from highly traumatic backgrounds of some sort. Somehow she manages to get the lot of them to focus as best as possible and do the work they need to do, but it’s an effort. About another third of the class is made up of students that are just a bit behind. They either don’t read well, or have trouble with their maths, they need extra help but are mostly quiet about it because they don’t want to draw attention to themselves. This could be that during the earlier years they missed key learning blocks around reading or basic maths, so by time they are into the middle-end of primary they are simply behind.
The rest of the class, about a third of are right in the middle. They get what the teacher is teaching, they are quick with their answers, they do what they are supposed to do when they are supposed to do it, they are helpful, and some of them could be more challenged.
How on earth is one teacher supposed to cater to all of these different students, with different needs, different levels of education even though they are in the same class, different abilities to cope with information, hold the emotional space so they feel safe, and also teach them the content?
Further I’m not sure why the educational model is the same now as it was when I was growing up in the 80s. Schools were originally created to help with the industrial revolution to help create good workers to help the country progress. Technological changes have advanced, the rise in diagnosed children with some kind of learning disability or disorder has increased – why has the teaching model stayed the same?
I did notice that some students were called out in small groups to work on something for 45 minutes or an hour, then reintroduced to class, but that’s simply not enough.
I don’t know the answers but it seems like having classes based more on ability might be a better option than trying to have a mixed bag of needs in one room. What if all of the students who need the extra help are then with trained teachers who can support their needs? What if the students who are behind are grouped together and the basics are repeated so they catch up? What if the students in the middle are all together and they then become more challenged and excel further? What if the students had individual learning on apps for each of their subjects so they were able to focus on what they in particular needed to work on without feeling shame? What if they competed with themselves and not one another on how well they were doing? What if they had the option of choosing extracurriculars like language or coding if they were ahead? How else could the classroom function? More teachers with much smaller class sizes so they could actually focus and modify lessons to fit the needs of their students in real time/
It was so apparent that the kids in the “middle” and the kids who were a bit behind were so aware of the emotions and the volatility of the other kids in the classroom, that it was distracting to their learning, disruptive to the classroom environment. One child yelled out a bunch of curse words loudly and threw something across the room while I was there. I feel for that child and the home life they might have that where those kinds of words would flow out so effortlessly from a small person. I also felt horrible for the rest of the class who have normalised that this is just a behaviour that someone has. Apparently the entire class has had to evacuate and leave the classroom when one of the students has gotten into an outrage, obviously fully disrupting the flow of learning.
I am all for diversity. I know that having different perspectives in discussions can bring so much depth and awareness. I’m also a proponent to being inclusive and having people in who want to be in the group. The concern to me is that there has to be a better way than trying to just put all of these different needs into the same classroom setting I had growing up in the 80s when when it’s 2024.
Bigger picture, the students miss out on getting a quality education, which impacts their ability to be a contributing member of society, which impacts the local community, which impacts, the state, and the country. This is huge. I am a parent and I know these early years matter so much for the rest of their lives, and it’s so bizarre to that the same system, status quo is being offered.
It’s a huge problem, but education, the system of education drastically needs a shakeup.
Imagine a future where the teachers are supported, the students are supported and everyone thrives. Imagine a near future where the next generation become problem solvers, inventors, and citizens equipped with the knowledge of how to move forward to make society a more equitable, kind, supportive place. I want to live in this world where poverty cycles are broken, where education is celebrated, and we care about one another. How do we get there?