Educating Anita

Updated

One teacher. Seven students. Welcome to one of Victoria's tiniest schools.

"Wait up while I go get my saw from the classroom," yells the kid before tearing off across the grassy field. Hair streaming, boots flailing.

Only in a place like French Island, perhaps, would such a sentence from the lips of a 10-year-old not cause a teacher to bat an eyelid.

Anita Harding is a long way from where she thought she was headed when she enrolled in a Bachelor of Tourism Management as a school leaver.

For the past year she has been the sole teacher in one of Victoria's smallest schools, Perseverance Primary, where the entire student body of seven kids fits into one classroom.

It's a job that takes the rigour of a drill sergeant and the steadiness of a mountain.

Harding could write you an essay on the importance of being flexible.

"They say plan B. I'm usually up to about plan Z."

Take this morning, for instance.

Harding and her teacher's aide Sharon Pemberton — her only support in the classroom — were hauling from the mainland a pizza oven and a defibrillator, new supplies for the school. After wrestling the boxes on and off the ferry, they get halfway along the six-kilometre dirt road between the jetty and the school when the car sounds funny. The women stop and discover they're driving on the rim of a completely flat tyre. Do you think they could find a jack or a lug wrench in the boot?

"So I'm calling parents to say, 'One, our tyre's flat, can anyone come save us? And two, if you get to school and we're not there, sorry, we'll be there as soon as we can'."

They eventually made it to school — thanks to a lift from one parent and the tyre-changing skills of another — only to encounter the day's next curve ball.

"We get here and our server's gone kaput, so we have no internet, which means our normal day is just a write-off. We're playing with the generator, playing with the servers. Can't print anything, can't access any files. All my program is on Google Classroom and Google Docs, couldn't access any of that. So we just, we make do. By then it was 10 o'clock in the morning and then the rest of the day happens."

It tells you something about Harding that this entire rigmarole is recounted with good humour.

'Nothing but trees'

Harding's first glimpse of Perseverance was a shock to someone who was herself schooled alongside 1,000 other kids in Sydney's western suburbs.

"We were driving up and Sharon pointed out, 'Oh the school's in behind all those trees'.

"I remember thinking, 'Oh my gosh. Where is the school? There's nothing but trees. What have I gotten myself into?'"

French Island is about 65 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, in Western Port Bay, buffered from the sea by the smaller but infinitely more developed and populous Phillip Island.

In the last census 119 people lived here. There is one general store.

The only access is by passenger ferry or the barge, which can carry just two cars per trip.

The school is a bush block surrounded on all sides by pasture, not another building in sight. Chooks strut the perimeter as though in some self-appointed playground duty.

In the distance a line of trees demarcates a slight ridge in an otherwise flat sweep of landscape.

Fly strips jostle and knock languidly on the doorframe of the school's one room. The lunch bell is literally a bell on a stick that you ring by hand.

"It's the complete opposite to what I had," says Harding. "After I finished school I even met people who'd gone to the same school, were in the same year, our classes were next to each other but we'd never met.

"These kids all grow up together here and they all know each other pretty much since birth."

The dynamic amongst the children — even with the five-year age difference between oldest and youngest — is more akin to siblings than classmates. The seven kids come from just four families, meaning every student but one has a brother or sister at school with them.

The entire student body plays together at lunch, slaying imaginary beasts in the cubby and the scrub, poking the 'dead' one with sticks, giving each other instructions sotto voce like directors whispering to actors from off-stage.

There's a closeness here that the other day allowed one of the boys to accidentally leave school wearing one of the girl's shoes.

"Made me laugh," says Harding. "Maddy went home in her socks and her mum called Oscar's mum when they realised Maddy's shoes were gone. They switched back no dramas."

Sometimes it's on Fridays, when the students attend Crib Point Primary on the mainland to access subjects like music and Indonesian, that the island qualities show themselves, as the kids interface with the mainstream.

One lunch duty at the bigger school, Harding was about to intervene in a situation where a little girl had brought out a soccer ball but had nobody to play with. A couple of boys had started using the ball, got bored and booted it across the playground as they were leaving. This upset the girl and Harding was about to ask her what happened when two of the Perseverance boys appeared out of nowhere. They said, "Why would anybody do that? Clearly she didn't like it," and promptly asked if they could play with her.

"One of those boys was Zack and he's a keen soccer player, a little Messi in training, and he just slowed the pace and showed her a few tips and played with her. They saw exactly what I saw and just acted. I didn't need to console the upset girl at all because her peers had just done it themselves and she was laughing in no time.

"It was pure compassion that I saw from those boys and I just melted. Made me proud."

Tiger snakes, black outs and sleeping beside your desk

When I ask how the school came to be called Perseverance, the kids answer like it's a silly question. "Um, because we persevere..."

"You've got to be tough to live on French Island," one of the boys tells me, scratching an enormous bug bite.

It's the kind of place that educates a teacher as much as the kids.

A NSW transplant due to her husband's military service, Harding is four years out of university. She taught for a year and a half in her home state, then eight months as a casual relief teacher up and down the Mornington Peninsula before she came to Perseverance.

She got the call on a Sunday. To start on the Monday. The teacher they had lined up dropped out upon realising it's possible to get stuck on the island when the ferry is cancelled in bad weather.

Harding has been 'learning the island' ever since.

What it means to run a school that is totally off the grid, on an island that has no mains electricity or water.

"We lost power once because I didn't order any petrol for the generator. I didn't even know generators needed fuel."

Now she knows that precisely 440 litres of diesel arrives by truck each month — if you place the order.

Snakes. The different species, how to identify them and what to do if someone gets bitten. Bushfires. Once the schoolyard was so thick with smoke from a planned burn that it turned into a surreal movie set, perfect backdrop to the kids' make-believe. And the isolation: if there's a medical emergency it will mean an airlift off the island, ambulance cover indispensable.

Once the school went into lockdown because a student went outside to use the bathroom and came face-to-face with a tiger snake right outside the door.

"Unfortunately it was the hottest day and pre air conditioner, so we ate lunch early, closed all the doors and windows and put the blinds down, pushed all the furniture out of the way, sprawled out on the floor and watched movies for the rest of the day. Sharon and I had to ferry the kids out to the toilet as they needed it one at a time, checking the surroundings as we went. We had to dismiss the kids from the middle of the road outside the school at 3:15 just because we couldn't actually locate the snake we knew went under the building."

Then there was the time the kids were playing cricket and play was interrupted by a koala lumbering across the corner of the field. So abundant is wildlife on French Island that the kids resumed play as if nothing had happened. Only their teacher was still standing there with her jaw dropped in wonder.

It's nothing to find an echidna waddling across the chip bark beneath the monkey bars. Black cockatoos screech and swirl in the sky. At lunch a student emerges from the scrub behind the school with two giant wedge-tailed eagle eggs in hand.

Not only are the kids different on French Island, but the parents too.

"They still value all the same sort of things: respect and education," says Harding.

"I'd say the parents are just a bit more relaxed with their kids. They're happy for them to climb trees and play with sticks.

"They don't tend to wrap their kids in cotton wool like some parents I've worked with in larger schools."

As for getting stranded on the island?

"It doesn't happen too often but it seems to come and go in waves," says Harding.

"There was a string of ferry cancellations at beginning of last term where every Tuesday we couldn't get home for about four or five weeks.

"We have inflatable mattresses to sleep on so we're not on the floor at least. We have frozen food and long life packaged stuff that we can cook for dinner or we go to the shop to get hot food.

"It's not too bad, I guess, and you can't beat the commute, sleeping on the floor next to your desk."

Nine to five. Not

TEACHERS ARE PEOPLE YOU CAN COUNT ON says the sign on the wall by Harding's desk.

"We teach them to count. Get it? The kids know I love a good pun."

What the kids probably don't know is how much work goes on at night and weekends.

The notion that teaching is a cushy job, with short hours and lots of holidays, has always irked Harding.

"It's not quite like that," she laughs.

"People who have a teacher in their family won't be saying those sorts of things because they know. But there's still that stereotype.

"I think for every hour of teaching time there is about three hours of preparation that goes in behind the scenes.

"The better prepared I am, the smoother the day goes, the more engaged the kids are, the better they learn. You could be lazy and slack off and leave school at school, but you'd have a hard time getting through each day."

Especially in a one teacher school, where a grade two-er sits next to a grade fiver who knocks knees with a grade four-er. Juggling multiple year levels simultaneously creates a mammoth workload. This year the seven students span three different grades.

"You've got to do three times the work because they each need different things.

"Whereas for, say, a grade five class you'd have to get some grade four stuff or even lower, mostly grade five and a little bit of grade six, I'm doing prep, grade one to grade seven, and that's across the lessons. So if one child's at this level for maths, they might be on this lesson, but then they're on a higher one for English because of their strengths and weaknesses."

Harding's longest day is the first Monday of each month, when she stays back for the school council meeting that starts at 5:00pm. Most of the kids hang around too, so she ends up having them in her care for 10 hours straight.

But even on a regular day, she will be working long after the kids are dismissed. Whether it's chasing parents for permission slips on the ferry, or doing lesson prep at home.

French Island is a unique setting with its own special demands, but the hard work and dedication are hallmarks of good teaching everywhere.

"I think you have to be made for it. You can't just think of the glamourised version of having 11 weeks off a year and getting to fingerpaint and play with kids all day.

"We get five weeks over Chrissy and then three school holidays of two weeks through the year. But the regular two week break, I'd use half of it as break time and half of it as school time, doing prep."

If you were doing it for the money, well...

In Victoria, a graduate teacher starts on $67,558. The maximum they could hope to be making by the time they retire is $111,214, as a leading teacher.

The contract nature of much of the work can make things like servicing a home loan or planning for a family stressful.

"The biggest thing that stands out to me with salary is the amount of time teachers put in that's outside of the 38 hours we're paid for," says Harding.

"There's lots of professions that I believe put in far more hours in the office than they're paid for, however those jobs are usually ones with significantly higher salaries than teaching.

"I also don't know a single teacher that doesn't use their own money at least from time to time to buy school things like books, supplies."

The job satisfaction can be high, but so is the potential for burnout. On French Island no teacher in recent memory has lasted more than three years.

"It can be quite tough. You have to remember the good days.

"For me it's when the kids have a lightbulb go off on top of their heads like an aha moment when they finally get something they've been struggling with and they get all excited. And you're like, yes that feels good, they've got it. But you're also like, yes, I'm actually doing something and I'm succeeding, I'm not just failing. We're getting somewhere.

"I used to think teaching was just about transferring knowledge to others, the challenge of finding a way to get content into a child's head because everyone learns differently.

"Lately, I've decided it's more about helping them grow into the people they want to become and yes, curriculum is a part of that, giving them options to do whatever they want to do with their lives. But there's so much more to it. It's about the whole child and just guiding them as they grow."

It's Friday afternoon and the kids fan out across the beach.

It's an excursion that reflects the marine environment that flavours so much of the kids' life on French Island.

Today they'll be collecting glass and rubbish from the sand, counting and categorising it.

It's the sort of day Harding is going to miss.

She's the kind of teacher a community would want to hold onto. But, like many of those who've come before her here, she'll move on next year.

'Mrs Harding' will become a memory to the students, and French Island a fond footnote in her teaching career.

Topics: education, public-schools, primary-schools, schools, elections, state-elections, government-and-politics, tankerton-3921, vic

First posted