All about teachers

An exclusive extract from a new anthology edited by Megan Daley

This post is written by Megan Daley.

When Affirm Press approached me to edit an anthology about educators who inspire and create change, my first thought was 'I'm a titch busy (?!) but I will absolutely have to make time for this'.

So I did, and the final product is available in good bookshops and online today!

I firmly believe that good teachers change lives and that we need to support and celebrate teachers wherever and whenever we can and I'm thrilled that the stories in 'Teacher, Teacher: An anthology about inspirational educators' do indeed celebrate education and educators.

There were over 90 submissions for this project and it was incredibly hard to whittle them down to those that appear in the book. I spent well over a month reading submissions and The Beekeeper sent me away for a long weekend during this time to focus sans kids and cleaning – to an AirBNB called 'The Hive' which was hexagon shaped, his idea of a beekeeper joke! 

The selection I have chosen showcase so many areas of eduction from early childhood to university and the extract below is from my introduction, where I talk about the teachers who inspired me. 

Exclusive extract from ‘Teacher, Teacher’, edited by Megan Daley

Courtesy of Affirm Press

There is no single story that could effectively define what makes a remarkable teacher. The diversity of teaching experiences, from both a teacher and student perspective, is as varied as the students and teachers themselves. This anthology then, is a collection stories carefully curated to take the reader through the highs and lows of teaching – and to showcase teachers who nurture, inspire, champion and create change.

Each piece is an authentic account of lived experience, exploring the impact teachers can have on their students. As a collection, they travel from early childhood classrooms, into the primary school playground and non-traditional classrooms, to the high school years and off-site programs for youth at risk, all the way through to adult education. These eclectic stories span both the darkness and the light of the educational journey, coming together as an insightful, moving and impassioned whole.

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Like many of the contributors to this anthology, I grew up in household of teachers. Children of teachers recount stories of being the first kids at school of a morning and the tedious wait for friends to arrive as your parent wrestles (usually unsuccessfully) with the photocopier. They remember the hours they spent after school helping their parent cut up laminated resources, the confusion of watching their parent worry over other people’s children late into the night and witnessing the dedication, the despair and the occasional triumph of a teacher parent.

My mother is a teacher librarian and I am the teacher librarian I am because of the years I spent alongside her as a child, the middle grade and young adult books she fed me as she completed further studies in Australian literature, the library displays I helped her to build, and the mentoring she continues to give me. 

My father is a professor of criminology and his dedication, even now in retirement, to his university students and his area of expertise, is extraordinary. When I meet a past student who still talks about my father or see the joy he still gets from writing, or witness the dedication my mother has to the students she volunteer tutors at a local Intensive English Language school for newly arrived young people of refugee and migrant background, I witness firsthand that teaching is a vocation as much as it is a profession.

Megan Daley with her parents.

A profession is a career for which you are paid, a vocation encompasses not just your career, but your life’s work and often, your calling.

My parents are most definitely responsible for shining the light on the path to teaching, and they continue to walk alongside me, but I had more than a few brightly shining streetlights along the way who also deserve credit.

Mrs Allison Lamb was my kindergarten teacher and while I only have the vaguest memory of her face, I will never forget the way she made me feel like I was the most creative and clever student ever to have painted on an outdoor easels with a brush laden with gluggy, homemade kindergarten paint. My kindergarten portfolio has survived many a moving cleanout and cull because each time I open it, I can see and feel the joy in my paintings created for and with Mrs Lamb. It wasn’t what she taught me, it was how she made me feel.

Likewise, I still hold on to a narrative I created in Year Eight in my English classes with Mr Chris Chapman. Reading it now, I can see the technical flaws in The Land of Poinciana – the magical world of the Poinciana tree in my front yard, filled with dew drop-drinking fairies (clearly my sister and I) and annoying goblins modelled on my brothers. Again, I keep this piece not because of its quality, but because I remember Mr Chapman reading an excerpt out to the class and praising my work.

He was an astonishing teacher and I modelled myself on his style in my early years of teaching. He brought class reads to life with accents and costumes, once reading us Kidnapped in a kilt with a Scottish accent. Mr Chapman jumped on desks in excitement, he shared with us his fanatical love of urban foraging and organic gardening and he was ahead of his time in terms of immersive education.

If you were lucky enough to study History with Mr Chapman, you may well have found yourself in a recreation of a huge battle scene on the oval, or in the school rainforest in camo gear, crawling through the undergrowth and leaf litter as a soldier at Kokoda. His sense of fun gave you permission as an apathetic teenager to let go, play, laugh and immerse yourself in learning.

Like Mr Chapman, my mother was a composter before such things were the norm and she despaired at her inability to make her own children separate the food waste and dig the chicken manure into the vegetable garden. Meanwhile, my high school Agriculture teacher, Mr Barry Jahnke, had me rearing corn, identifying native trees and concerned about climate change within a week of stepping into his classroom.

I like to regale people with stories of Mr Jahnke and his band of merry young farmers. We followed him like sheep and he nurtured our understanding of the Australian climate and its flora and fauna as passionately as he cared for the rare species of native trees he planted and grew in our school rainforest.

I was one of the ‘People of the Trees’ and spent many a lunch hour carting barrow loads of materials to the school rainforest and many an afternoon working on my Agriculture plot – yes, digging in the compost and manure my mother had tried to get me to work with at home. Teachers of note are a part of the village needed to raise teens and I am sure my mother was grateful to Mr Jahnke and his composting.

These three teachers, along with many others, had a huge impact on my life and I hope that I carry some of their strengths, quirks and teaching methods with me now in my own teaching. Teaching is not for the faint hearted and I am so grateful to have walked the path I have walked, with so many mentors, streetlights and piles of compost to guide me.

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Each of the stories in this anthology will connect with you in a different way, depending on your own journey with education, and where you are in that journey at this point – perhaps as a parent, a teacher or perhaps as a school leader.

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Teacher, Teacher: Stories of Inspirational Educators, edited by Megan Daley, published by Affirm Press, is on sale now at booksellers everywhere.

Contributors include Jessie Tu, Tony Birch, Rick Morton, Jacqueline Harvey, Gabrielle Tozer, Eliza Hull and many more.

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