A lesson in all this: schoolwork minus distractions equals more time
It was lucky we were going to Europe by ship. It was the only way we could have carried the schoolwork. I was 14, going on 15, my brother was 17. I was due to sit the NSW School Certificate (the now vanished year 10 exam) that year and my brother, the Higher School Certificate. It says something about the times, or my family, that neither of my parents seemed to think it negligent to take their kids to live in a small village in Portugal in the year we both had major exams, so that my artist father could spend the time painting there.
It was not that my mother, who, let’s face it, was the one in charge, didn’t care about our education. She was convinced that living in such a place was going to be an education in itself, which it was; and two, she had tremendous faith in The Correspondence School, as it was called then, a distance education system. It mostly serviced kids in remote country areas.
I don’t know why she had such faith, having never had anything to do with this rather creaky branch of the Education Department, other than to pass its headquarters now and again, in William Street, Kings Cross. It was there for years. Later, I’d come to know teachers who had fled to it, a kind of convalescent home for some whose nerves had been shot by face-to-face contact in the classroom and who now grew pale at the sight of chalk. The usual business of teaching continued there, minus blackboards, brutish headmasters, or, most significantly, kids.
So we sailed to Lisbon, lugging the boxloads of paperwork that was to be our schooling for the next 12 months. Could it have been the whole 12 months’ worth? I remember there was an awful lot, loads of crisp, white lessons that had the clean and daunting look of exam papers.
I’ve been remembering that year, now that coronavirus has suddenly turned thousands of parents into instant teacher's aides, whether they like it or not. I’m glad most have the advantage of computers and the internet, and lovely, dedicated real teachers doing their best from distant screens. We didn’t.
My mother's maths was no better than mine.
We had my mother, and the postal system. Everything went back and forth to Australia by ship, three weeks there, three weeks back, at least. If, say, I was stumped by a maths problem, which was most days, or stuck on some thorny bit of French grammar, I had to send for help to some anonymous teacher and then wait weeks for the answer. By then, I’d forgotten the question.
My mother, our supervisor, would take on the look I’ve now seen plastered on the faces of the newbie lesson-supervising parents, class of 2020. It’s a mix of assurance (faked), desperation (real), and boredom (ongoing). My mother hadn’t done French at school and her maths was no better than mine. She didn’t have a calculator or Google Translate. It never occurred to me it might be a strain for her to have two teenagers with her all day, or to feel a failure as a teacher.
I did learn something about school, however, and maybe the ‘corona kids’ are realising it, too: School doesn’t actually take very long. Not when you don’t have all the usual distractions. My brother and I would get through all our lessons in the morning, which left the rest of the day to go to the beach, winding our way down through a cool forest of inky umbrella pines, or hang out at the local village, or drive somewhere scenic with our parents, where my father would sketch and the rest of us would idle. (Not options in the present circumstances, sadly.)
It made me realise most of the time at school was taken up with other things. Discipline, for example, took up a lot, as did waiting for the music teacher to stop crying. Assemblies, prize-givings, mass dressing-downs. Waiting in silence for someone to own up to the graffiti in the boys’ toilet. The great migrations of children from one classroom to another. The taking-off of uniforms and putting-on of sports gear. Lost shoes. The sick bay. Standing outside the principal’s office. Chatting with the teachers you liked about their real lives. Recess, lunchtime, swimming carnivals, playground dramas.
I came to see that school is as much about school life, socialisation, being corralled in a safe place, and giving your parents a break, as it is about declensions or calculus (neither of which I have ever needed). There will be kids for whom this break will come as a blessed relief from the schoolyard bully, or classroom humiliation. Others will miss school desperately, and so will their parents, silently praying for a pandemic breakthrough. Either way, they’ll all remember it.
There will be kids for whom this break will come as a blessed relief from the schoolyard bully, or classroom humiliation.
Towards the end of that year away, I sat the School Certificate and a Commonwealth scholarship exam, sent over in sealed envelopes. I was a lone candidate in a room overlooking an olive grove, supervised by an ex-pat who had signed up to be my invigilator and took her duties seriously. “Pen down!” she’d cry. I did well in both, despite not knowing what fin de siecle meant, in the art paper. See above.
Back home again, I went into Year 11. Teachers, classrooms, timetables, the schoolfriends I’d missed. Education returned to normal. And then, halfway through that year, my mother died.
After that, it wasn’t the lessons or my lost destiny with mathematics I would remember from that year of patchy schooling. It was the freedom and the time we had spent together; my mother’s encouragement, her attention, as we pored over the correspondence lessons, however inadequately.