Showing little in the way of understanding, the good doctor is in need of a wake-up call, writes BREDA O'BRIEN
HAVING FINISHED his article for The Irish Times, Ed Walsh capped his fountain pen and went to bed. The good doctor, having done the State, especially Limerick, some service, was accustomed to sound sleep.
Tonight, it was not to be. An appalling dream consumed him. He was in a building that resembled nothing so much as an old workhouse, surrounded by prefabs. A harassed looking middle-aged woman grasped him by the arm and said: “You will be starting with pass and foundation maths with 2B. Grand kids, but a lot of learning difficulties, and seven don’t have English as a first language. Oh, and there are two special needs kids in the class. They are grand, too, but one of them, Jack, has gone back a lot since he has had to share his special needs assistant . Crazy, really, to have only one SNA between the two since their needs are so utterly different, but there you are – cutbacks.”
The woman bustled him out to the yard, where it was now lashing rain. The principal, for so this woman appeared to be, apparently could only hear him when he went along with her fantasy that he was there to teach children.
He protested that he had no training to deal with children who did not speak English or children with special needs. The principal paused, looking at him oddly. “But sure, almost no one has! It must be a long time since you were in the classroom?”
Stepping around the bucket placed to catch the dripping rain, he went in. The prefab classroom seemed to be swarming with bodies. Drawing himself up and reminding himself that it was the quality of the teacher, not the size of the class, that mattered, he began to speak. After all, this was maths, and who knew more about how to teach it?
After an initial assessing glance, most of the kids paid him little attention, but a sweet-faced boy who seemed to have Down syndrome did smile encouragingly, as did an adult sitting crushed between him and another child in a wheelchair in the overcrowded classroom.
Walsh began to speak again, but was utterly disconcerted when within another few minutes, the buzz of talk had turned into full-fledged conversations. Two kids started pushing each other in a good humoured way. The pushing soon acquired an edge, and some of the kids had begun to pound the tables and chant: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Cold sweat began to break out on Walsh’s brow. No, actually, that was a new leak in the prefab ceiling. The special needs assistant left her place, and came to his side. “Er,” she said delicately, “did you not get a chance to prepare anything for my special needs child? And the other teachers often have differentiated versions for the kids with English as a second language? I know it isn’t easy. It takes hours.”
At this cue, Walsh felt on safer ground. “Do you know teachers have the shortest hours in Europe, and have the best pay?” The SNA looked startled, but then she laughed. “Oh, good one!” she said, “As if your so-called hours take preparation or correction into account! Or hours spent on debates or school plays. And loads of the young teachers here can’t afford a house, even with the fall in prices.”
She looked at the two pupils now shaping up to each other. Walsh went to separate them. One took it well, but the other shook off his restraining hand: “Get your hands off me. What are you, some kind of effing paedo?”
Every 40 minutes he was faced with another 30 or 31 faces. Always good at maths, Walsh figured that he had seen more than 240 kids by the end of the day, and this was no university. They all seemed to think they had a right to his individual attention. And what about the little brat in 5C who told him his teaching methods were sooo last century?
He was already drowning in corrections. There were no computers in most classrooms, and in the only computer room, the computers took 10 minutes to load, and three then crashed. Meanwhile, the kids explained to him that they could not print out their work, as paper and print cartridges were rationed.
Walsh began to lose the plot, and even caught himself thinking that it could be worse. He could be in Britain, teaching longer hours and attending 75 time-tabled meetings a year. And still not achieving what Irish teachers do. Then he heard a familiar Irish-American voice. “Hi, Ed,” said Chuck Feeney. “Been meaning to visit an Irish school. Looks like they could do with some cash.”
Walsh explained that if teachers were not gobbling up resources, there would be no need for philanthropy. It was the teachers’ fault. “After all, when I was setting up the NIHE in Limerick, my salary was only £4,000.”
“That was 1970, Ed, and if I recall, it was 80 per cent of the entire budget available for NIHE.”
Walsh protested that his salary hadn’t been exorbitant, but the sums being offered him to develop a third-level college were paltry. Feeney raised an eyebrow. Could it be that spending on education was still paltry? In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, only the Slovak Republic spent less than Ireland on second level, and maybe that was why the teachers’ salaries seemed to take so much of it.
Walsh repeated to himself like a mantra. “Teachers are seldom assessed, excellence goes unrewarded, mediocrity is tolerated, and the indolent find sanctuary.” As though reading his mind, a passing colleague said: “No assessment like that of an unforgiving teen, is there? . . . They’re good kids . . . Shame so few of them will make it to third level. They have such potential, but no one seems to care . . . except we bloated public servants who sank the country.”
“I just want to wake up,” said Walsh miserably. And in the best tradition of second-level essays, he did.