Teaching

1986: Dip Ed

In early 1985 I made enquiries about doing a Dip. Ed. The University of Queensland seemed to be the best option. Maths and Physics would have been my preferred subjects, but they told me that my background in geology didn't make me suitable for those and that I should apply for Chemistry and Multi-strand Science. They also said that if I completed a couple of 2nd-year maths units, I would have a better chance of being accepted.

So I did a unit in statistics and one in combinatorics externally during Semester 2 of 1985. I was accepted and did the Dip. Ed. in 1986 with Chemistry and Multi-strand Science as my teaching areas.

My prac teaching was at Ipswich State High school. Fellow Dip. Ed. students had told me horror stories about schools and school kids, but I found most of the kids there to be quite human and quite decent.

I graduated and was offered a job at Marsden State High School in Logan.

1987-1990: Marsden State High School

Marsden was a new school. It started in 1987 with just Year 8s, around 270 of them, and 13 teachers. My job offer was conditional on doing a week at the school in December 1986 to plan for the setting up of the school and the coming year.

All of the 13 teachers attended. Most were given a week off from their present school and paid for their work. Because I wasn't yet employed, I had to work for nothing. On top of that, we had paid for a unit at the Sunshine Coast for that week, and, of course, I had to miss out on that. Anyway, the week was worthwhile and the 13 teachers got to know each other well.

I made a lot of mistakes in my first year in the way I handled the kids, in particular, not being firm enough. It's not easy to change approach part way through the year, but I gradually formulated a plan for the following year. Second year was a lot better, and my kids behaved and worked better. In my third year there, I had a girl called Peta in my Year 9 Maths class. She sat at the front, did her work and never said 'Boo' - an ideal student. I was surprised when I was called to a conference of her teachers to discuss her unruly behaviour. It turned out that mine was the only class in which she behaved decently. I took that as an endorsement of my approach.

On the other hand, in retrospect, I was probably a bit overly strict and impersonal, reprimanding kids for things that I really should have taken with more humour.

Some of the kids came from tough family backgrounds. Many ended up later on the wrong side of the law. One fellow greeted me about 5 years after I had finished at the school. He told me with great enthusiasm about how he was out of jail, having done his time for attempted murder, and how his mum was so proud of him.

Actually, it wasn't just the kids; one of the teachers, a man who sat at the desk next to mine in the staff room, went to jail shortly after I left there for molesting young boys.

In my first year at Marsden, I had 3 Year 8 Science classes and 2 Year 8 Maths classes. That reduced the amount of planning I had to do. At the end of that year, all the other maths teachers left, so, in my second year, I was put in charge of the maths department and got four maths classes and a Creative Thinking class, a Marsden special. I made up the curriculum for that as I went along, but it was just for high-achieving kids, so I enjoyed it.

In my third year, I got involved in a 16-day maths in-service project run for about 30 teachers across Southeast Queensland. Near the start of my fourth year, the maths adviser in our region resigned. As she had played a major part in the Maths In-service Project, and as I had been involved in the project from the start, I was offered her job. And I took it.

1990-1992: Regional Maths Adviser

As a regional adviser I had two main roles. The first role was helping schools with the implementation of a new maths syllabus for Years P to 10. The new syllabus emphasised teaching practices like problem solving, investigating, group work, student discussion and hands-on practical work, rather than the almost exclusive reliance on exposition and practice which most maths teachers had used up to that time. Maths teachers tended then to be a somewhat traditional lot, so there was often quite a bit of resistance.

The least popular thing about the new syllabus was that it specified the same maths for all kids up to the end of Year 10, with just a very small number of topics right at the end being optional. Previously, there had been three courses, advanced maths, ordinary maths and general maths, at different levels to suit kids' different abilities, different progress up to that point and different aspirations. The idea in the new syllabus was to use activities which were open-ended, that kids could take to different levels, depending on their ability. It is possible to come up with a few such activities, but basing the whole curriculum on them was really not easy. In the long run, it did mean a lot of kids were taught stuff which was inappropriate for them and which they had little chance of succeeding with.

My second role as an adviser was being part of the team of about 6 advisers from different regions that planned and implemented the Maths In-service Project. The project was concerned primarily with trying to assist teachers in developing the philosophy and required skills and teaching approaches to effectively implement the new syllabus. That work was with more open-minded teachers and so was better received and more satisfying.

One extra thing I took on in my last year in that job was to take one Year 8 class at Springwood State High School. Barbara, the head of maths there, was quite open-minded and she allowed me to experiment with a different approach to teaching the class. As far as I could, I didn't teach the kids any mathematical procedures. Instead, I gave them problems which encouraged them to come up with the procedures themselves.

At the end of the first semester, Barbara was sufficiently impressed with what my class were doing, that she decided to get all the Year 8 teachers to use the same approach in Semester 2. I provided the teaching materials and the teachers implemented them - with no real complaints.

At the end of that year, Barbara left and was replaced by another head of maths, who went back to the more traditional approach. But . . . Each year there was an inter-school maths competition called the Maths Team Challenge. Schools sent in teams who then worked together on a set of maths problems. The local competition had teams from maybe 20 to 30 schools.

Maths Team Challenge

Schools could send in several teams and, each year, John Paul College, a very competitive private school, usually got most of the top places. But in the year after I took the Year 8s at Springwood, in the Years 9-10 division of the competition, Springwood got 4 of the top 5 places. My approach seemed to be producing better mathematicians than the traditional approach.

I did the advising job for three years, then the job finished and I was posted to Beenleigh State High School.

1993-1995: Beenleigh State High School

Most of the teachers at Beenleigh were particularly traditional, but I did manage to implement some different approaches, at least for me and one or two teachers who were more open to them.

Beenleigh was another school in a not-very-affluent area. Many of the kids were from very mobile/vagrant families. In one year, I ended up with over 50 students in the mark book for my Year 9 class, even though there were never more than about 28 in the class at any one time.

One good thing the school did in my second year there was to separate the girls from the boys for Year 10 Maths. There were two advanced boys classes and two advanced girls classes (as well as all the not-so-advanced classes). I was lucky enough to get one of the advanced girls' classes. There were 32 in the class and no spare seats. I let the girls choose their seats, but they stayed in them all year. The girls worked brilliantly. The only disciplinary action I took all year was ask two students to swap seats because both were a little chatty with their neighbour. A few weeks later, they told me they had learnt their lesson and asked if they could move back. They did and they were perfect thereafter.

Every girl in both advanced classes got an A or a B at the end of the year. Meanwhile, many of the boys in the boys' classes played up and did minimal work, even in the two advanced classes. Most of the advanced boys ended the year with Cs.

The following Year I got the Year 11 Maths C class. (Maths C is the top-level maths class, really just for aspiring engineers and the like.) In previous years, they had never had more than about 8 in the equivalent class and they had generally been mostly or all boys. This year my class had 27 kids, of which 19 were girls. And at the end of the year, none had failed.

Unfortunately, the principal decided that he didn't want segregated classes in his school, so that year they went back to mixed classes. The year after that, the Year 11 Maths C class had 5 students, all boys.

1996-1997: Open Learning

At the end of 1995, I applied for and got a job writing senior (Years 11 and 12) maths learning materials for Open Learning in Brisbane. The materials catered for students who were learning without the full-time support of a teacher. The main clientele were distance education students and students who were home-schooled.

I worked in an office on the 9th floor of Gabba Towers, an office block that overlooked the Gabba Cricket Ground. We could watch test matches through the window, though only senior staff got the desks by the windows and lesser workers like myself were discouraged from spending a lot of times away from our desks.

1997-1998: Windaroo State High School

When the Open Learning job finished I was posted to Windaroo State High School, a school quite like Beenleigh. I started in 4th term and took over classes that had had four other teachers that year. They were mostly not convinced that I would stay and so didn't see a lot of point in taking too much notice of me. That was the hardest term of my teaching career, made worse by an almost total lack of support with discipline problems. If I took a problem to admin, I was generally told that I just had to work out how I was going to deal with it.

The following year, when I had classes from the start, was much better and apart from one Year 9 class, which I never looked forward to, all my other classes were reasonably enjoyable.

The head of maths gave we a class of about 20 Year 10 students who had so far failed maths all the way through. The syllabus required all kids in Year 10 to be doing things like solving quadratic equations, but these kids had no chance of even really understanding what the equations were about, let alone how to solve them. Being fairly open-minded, the head of maths told me not to worry about the syllabus, but to do what I thought would best help the kids.

That was brilliant. I helped them to learn their tables, to add 2-digit numbers, to work out change and to know what things like 'a quarter' and 'percent' meant. If they worked well through the week, we played maths games in the Friday lessons. The kids passed tests, in most cases for the first time since entering high school and they completely changed their attitudes towards maths. I think they worked harder and learnt more in that year than they had done in any previous year. And they behaved well!

I got over half of that Year 10 class to enter the Australian Maths Competition (usually considered to be for the better students) on the promise that, even if they got every question wrong, they would get was a certificate of participation, which might well impress prospective employers. One girl got not just a pass, but a credit. When I took the results to class, I said to her 'You're better at maths that you make out'. She said that she couldn't actually do any of the questions on the paper, so she just went down the answer sheet (it was a multiple choice test) circling 'A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D, . . .   You never know your luck, do you?

1999-2002: Queensland School Curriculum Council

After Windaroo, I got a job as part of a team of four, developing a new Maths syllabus and support materials for Years P to 10. The new syllabus was to take an 'outcomes' approach in which students achieved certain outcomes and then moved on to work on the next ones. Each outcome was assigned to a level from Level 1 for students in early primary school to Level 6 and 'Beyond Level 6' (I don't know what would have been wrong with calling it Level 7) for the more advanced students in Year 10.

Students would progress through the levels as they were ready rather than at a time determined by a one-size-fits-all schedule. This fitted with my philosophy much better than had the previously existing system in which many high school students spent their time being taught stuff they had no chance of mastering (and would never need anyway) and being turned off maths by their constant failing. In the outcomes approach, no one failed: at worst they progressed slowly or stayed at the same level.

The team argued a lot about the learning outcomes and consulted with a wide range of stakeholders including classroom teachers, academics, union officials and so on. I must confess that part of my motivation in this job was to push my ideas and I sometimes did that to the detriment of achieving concensus and making overall progress.

I worked on this for three and a half years of the five or so years of the project. Then another interesting job opportunity arose.

2002-2004: Bronx, NY

Someone on the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers mailing list posted about a job as a classroom coach in the Bronx. I enquired and it seemed likely that I would be acceptable. Discussions with the family about whether we wanted to go to New York for a year, however, took a lot longer. Kara wasn't keen. This was in part because it would mean moving away from a boy in her grade at school whom she quite fancied, but hadn't as yet managed to get off with. That was Ben, whom she later married and is now living with in the UK.

We got to the stage of deciding against taking the job. Then, because the new position paid about four times what I was earning in Australia, I suggested that I go by myself for a while, even if just to improve our financial position. The rest of the family, including Kara, were then miffed that I would get the chance to experience life in New York and they wouldn't. Seeing it this way, even Kara decided that maybe she would like the experience. And we ended up going.

I left in August for the start of the US school year and the rest of the family followed in December after Melissa had finished primary school. We returned at the end of the school year in June, and everyone was very glad that we had decided to take the opportunity. I returned for three shorter stints the following year without the family.

My work was with teachers in middle schools (Years 5 to 8), observing, providing feedback and ideas, doing demonstration lessons and producing teaching and learning materials. Not being a teacher registered in New York, I was never left alone with students and was not responsible for student behaviour - something I was very pleased about, because the behaviour was often very challenging. All the schools I worked at had multiple police officers stationed in the school throughout the school day.

I spent most time in one particular school and the following is about that school.

Many of the students would skip lessons and just hang out in the corridors and stairwells around the school. The principal would walk through them and not challenge them.

In many of the classrooms, most of the students who were there didn't engage with the lessons at all. They generally didn't harass the teacher, more just ignored them and did their own thing, which often involved a lot of noise and generally making a mess of classroom and the resources like books. Sometimes, there would be a steady flow of students in and out of the classroom, and that would include students from other classes. There were locks on the doors, but teachers weren't allowed to use them because of concerns about them mistreating kids behind locked doors. There were also bars on the windows to stop students getting out and/or strangers from getting in.

One day, the whole school had to stay inside the building for about an hour after school finished because there was a gun fight going on in the street outside.

In most classes, there was a handful of students, nearly always girls, who would sit together at a table at the front of the classroom and actually try to learn. But the teacher was often so preoccupied with disturbances going on, that he or she got very little opportunity to teach, and so even those keen students learnt very little.

At the end of Year 8, all students in New York have to do a standardised test to see if they are ready to go on to high school. In both the previous two years at the school, 98% of the kids had failed. Because keeping them back would be logistically impossible, they all went on to high school anyway.

I considered suggesting to the principal that she take the handful of students who wanted to learn out of each class and put them together in one or two classes so that they could learn. The staff member I worked with told me that, because of the principal's beliefs about equality of opportunity for all students, she wouldn't go along with it. I didn't approach her, but in retrospect I wish I had.

There were quite a few Australians in New York working for the same organisation and doing the same job in other schools. We were often amazed by some of the things we saw go on.

One day I walked into a classroom at the start of the lesson to help the teacher. There was a fight going on at the back of the room. Actually, more a beating than a fight: a big girl (she was Year 7 but bigger than me) was laying into a boy half her size. The boy got away and ran to the front corner of the room where she cornered him and got stuck into him gain. Eventually, he got out the door and ran across the corridor into the room opposite. That happened to be the deputy principal's office. The girl didn't worry: she chased him into there and continued the beating. The deputy principal's reaction was to get up from her desk, push the two back out into the corridor and close her door.

Part of the problem in New York was that education was funded by the local government, largely from people's land tax. Long Island had plenty of money and could employ the best teachers and provide the best resources. Teacher pay in the Bronx was far lower and so schools there mostly got the teachers who couldn't get a job elsewhere. Their buildings and resources were also way inferior.

Another problem was that many of the schools in the Bronx were buildings of 5 or 6 stories with no outdoor space. Kids came in at 9 and couldn't go back outside until 3. There were police at all exits to make sure of this. The day was divided into eight 45-minute lessons. Except for gym lessons (which were held in the basement), kids stayed in the same classroom at the same desk for seven of those lessons. They didn't generally get out out of their seats (not with permission anyway) except to go to the toilet. The other lesson was lunch. This was Lesson 4, 5 or 6, depending on what lunch shift the class was on. So some kids had five lessons straight before their break. For the lunch lesson, the kids were marched to the dining hall on the top floor and sat on a bench at a table to eat their lunch. Then they were marched back to their classroom. No one seemed to object to this: it was all they had ever known.

My work in the Bronx did give me a renewed appreciation of education in Australia. I should say that the schools on Long Island, where our kids went, were totally different. Kids were trusted to walk around, and there was outdoor space where they could go and play and do sports. Behaviour was totally different and the police presence was much more limited or non-existent.

2004-2026: Canterbury College

After finishing in New York, I decided to take it easy for a while, and I registered late in Term 2 for relief teaching at Canterbury College. Before getting my first day's work, however, they asked me if I would do a contract teaching maths there in Term 4. I was hoping to do just relief for the rest of the year, but thought that they might not be inclined to give me relief work if I turned the contract offer down. So I accepted.

I did a bit of relief in Term 3 and did the contract in Term 4. During Term 4, they offered me another contract for the whole of 2005. I accepted that too, though it turned out to be part time. They filled in much of the spare time with relief teaching. That was a good set-up.

In Term 2 of 2005, I was asked to mark Year 7 Maths papers left by the Year 7 Maths teacher when he resigned. This led to my developing learning materials for the Year 7s and eventually the development of the M1Maths website.

Details of the development can be found via the left button below. The M1Maths website can be accessed via the right button.

Development of Materials           M1Maths Website          

I taught maths full time at Canterbury from 2006 to 2013, eventually becoming permanent. The kids were mostly much easier to work with than some of the kids had been in state schools. This was a plus. A negative was that, not being part of the state system, there were fewer opportunities for different jobs and I ended up staying in the classroom for over 9 years straight, far longer than I had spent on any previous job.

I took 2014 off to write a novel and to travel. Then, in 2015, I registered for relief teaching at a number of schools and received 2-3 days work a week, an amount I was happy with. However, by the start of Semester 2, I was getting sufficient work from Canterbury alone, so I stopped working elsewhere.

I continued doing relief teaching, interspersed with contracts, until Covid hit. Being old, I stayed home until vaccinated. After that I continued just a day or two a week until 2026 when I finally retired to prepare to move to the UK and then Perth.

While at Canterbury, I coached volleyball for a couple of years, then managed rowing.

In 2010, I decided to try to set up an astronomy club called The Dark Side. It ran until I resigned at the end of 2013 and for a little while afterwards. It was surprisingly popular and successful. More detail on the club can be found via the link below.

The Dark Side    

Queensland Association of Maths Teachers

Over the years, I have been involved in the QAMT. I was vice president from 1998 to 2000, and, during that time I edited their journal Teaching Mathematics and designed the cover graphics. The journals that I produced are shown below. Click on an image to read the journal.

I also presented at various workshops and conferences and contributed a number of articles to the journal. The articles in the issues above can be found as shown below.

Double Your Money - a Paradox:- TM 1998:1 Page 30

Constructivism in Action at Marsden SHS:- TM 1998:2 Page 6

Super-cheap Protractors:- TM 1998:2 Page 8

Assignment: Introduction to Calculus:- TM 1998:2 Page 10

Deaf Numbers:- TM1998:2 Page 23

Differential Equations in Senior Mathematics − an Opinion:- TM 1998:3 Page 9

Solving Differential Equations with Spreadsheets:- TM 1998:3 Page 11

Diamond:- TM 1998:3 Page 17

Mr Mean the Maths Teacher:- TM 1998:3 Page 24

Teaching e without calculus:- TM 1999:1 Page 13

Algebra as the Study of Relations:- TM 1999:2 Page 16

Mop Money:- TM 2000:1 Page 26

Sine Wheel:- TM 2000:2 Page 26

Articles appearing in other issues can be accessed via the following links.

Classroom Golf

Learning Mensuration Formulae

Setting Up a School Orienteering Course

Piracy - A Practical Application of Complex Numbers

Avoiding Confusion in Probability

Is 9 a Random Number?

Riffling - An Investigation for Maths C

Target - A Game for Developing Number Sense

What is Mathematics and How is it Learnt?

I also did a redesign of the QAMT website. The existing website uses WordPress. The new one was written in html. It was decided to stick with the old one because no one in the office could program in html. I didn't really mind because I did it largely to practise my html. If anyone is interested, the new version is available via the button below.

QAMT    

The actual QAMT website is at https://qamt.qld.edu.au

Conclusion

Teaching is hard work, and has gotten harder over the years as non-contact responsibilities have accumulated with no reduction of contact time to make up for it. However, the job has been no more demanding than the geological exploration in which I was engaged before. Admittedly, it pays a lot less than the geology did, but to make up for that, the work is secure and I come home every night. The long holidays are good too, although I have often done schoolwork through much of them.

Even if I had made it into academia as I originally planned, I'm not sure that life would have been better: the academics I know have to work very hard.

So, all in all, I have no regrets. I can't think of any other career that would have turned out better. I always fancied playing in a rock band, but as I can't sing or play any instruments, that was never going to happen.

Relief teaching is very much easier than full-time teaching. The pay is about the same, but there is no preparation, no marking and no administrivia - I turn up at 8 and go home at 3:30 with no further responsibilities. Once I reached the stage where I didn't need a full-time wage, it was the way to go. As of 2025, I still do a bit, though that probably won't go on much longer.

Canterbury has been a good school to work at too. Student attitudes and behaviour are excellent. Even as a relief teacher, I find the students to be very cooperative, good-natured and appreciative, and I enjoy the work. Easing into retirement with work that I can take just when it's convenient is a pleasure not everyone gets.