What's driving teachers out of teaching

When I first started teaching in the early 1970s, I tried to be the right sort of teacher. I was very young. Barely 22. I put on my mauve bodyshirt and wide purple tie and walked into Tenterfield High School trying to pretend I knew what I was doing. I had the words of the department’s man ringing in my ears. “Forget all this airy-fairy nonsense you’ve heard at university. Your place is at the bottom of the pile. My advice to you is shut up and do as you are told. In ten years’ time you might become a good teacher.” For a few weeks, I tried to follow his words, but before long I realised that I couldn’t be a standard-order teacher. I had to relax and be myself. From that moment on, I began learning how to teach. Because it was the 70s – and I was in one of the smallest and most remote high schools in the state – I was pretty much able to do my own thing. I threw Wordsworth out the window and taught Cat Stevens (as Yusef Islam was called then). I encouraged my students to draft and perform scripts; to write about what they felt and experienced and not worry too much about grammar and spelling. While I am the first to admit I went a bit too far with this, the fact is I got kids who hated writing to write. I took my class into the park and they performed Jabberwocky in the rotunda. I coached the rugby league team and drove a car-load of kids to their homes scattered around the district every night after footy training. Looking back, I have to concede I was a very opinionated 22-year-old, sure he knew anything and everything – and yet, the fact is I had a lot of success with those students. And the reason for that was the level of professional autonomy I was given.