What we don't see

Relief teaching, real teaching, and hippopotami

This week, I’m starting the next book in the Olympus Inc series: Aphrodite Unbound. Aphrodite is a completely different character from my Persephone in Persephone in Bloom, much less prone to careful consideration, much more prone to jumping off cliffs and worrying about landing later. She’s impetuous and self-assured, but also vulnerable. I didn’t have to think very hard about finding her voice; it was waiting there for me, as lively and vibrant as the woman herself.

Relief teaching

I love making things up and writing them down, and even when it’s difficult, it’s still interesting. My five year goal is to make the majority of my income from writing - this, like most of my goals, is ambitious, but doable. (When I turn on paid subscriptions, I think discussing the goals-and-money part of writing will be extra content for paid subscribers - what do you think? Does that sound interesting?)

In the meantime, I still have a mortgage, and I like to eat food and keep the lights on, and that requires money. So I’m relief teaching (substitute teaching, some of you would say) and it’s so much easier than real teaching that it honestly feels as if I’m getting away with something.

Relief teaching is what I think most people think real teaching is: I show up, I take attendance, I guide the students through lessons, I explain assessments, I encourage the students who need encouragement and answer questions for those who need help, I manage classroom behaviour. I’m the knowledgeable, responsible adult in the classroom, helping people learn.

And then I go home and write.

Real teaching

As a relief teacher, I don’t do all the invisible work real teachers do. I don’t do meetings, parent conferences, assessment development, literacy strategies, new curriculum and assessment discussion, photocopying, text breakdowns, unit planning, lesson planning, seating charts, reviews, admin emails, or endless, endless marking. I don’t do navigating fraught social dynamics between students, colleagues and family. I don’t do working through lunch, after school, in the weekends.

I don’t take the work home with me. I don’t dream about it. I don’t wake up worrying about how best to help the 100+ students it is my responsibility to aid with systems stretched past their limit.

Teachers in New Zealand were on strike last Thursday, and they’ll be continuing industrial action if the Ministry of Education doesn’t offer real solutions to these problems. Teachers strike not because of the work most people see but because of all the work they don’t see; the exhausting wave of it, which mounts higher and higher every year, while pay gets lower and lower against inflation and the rising cost of living.

No lie, teaching does have some awesome benefits. You get to work with young people! Your colleagues are often really awesome! The holidays are great! But they’re not very helpful when you drowned six weeks into term.

Hippopotami

A couple of weeks ago, I was relieving for a Fine Arts teacher, which was pleasant because I get to look at students’ art and interact with them on a level where they are the experts and I am the curious nerd asking questions.

Also, Art rooms have ART BOOKS.

During a quiet Photography period, I was looking through Flower: Exploring the World in Bloom when I discovered THIS little guy:

He is a blue faience hippopotamus, he lives in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was made nearly four thousand years ago in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom period, and his name is William.

(The name, of course, is not from the Middle Kingdom; there weren’t too many people named William hanging around circa 1900 BCE. He got the nickname in 1931, from a Punch short story.)

William is a cutie, but he’s a deadly cutie; hippos were and are dangerous beasts, especially for people who both depended on and were endangered by the Nile. Like most of what we have left of Middle Kingdom Egypt, he was “discovered in” (stolen from) a tomb, where he was part of the collection of objects buried with the deceased. Three of William’s legs were broken - probably deliberately, to stop him hurting people in the afterlife. The water lotuses painted under his glaze are a symbol of the cycle of life and death.

The Met is my favourite place to visit when I’m in NYC, and William is a famous icon of the museum, but I knew nothing about him before I sat down and opened that book. The world is always wider than we see and more marvelous than we can imagine.

My natural instinct with museum objects is to wonder about how they got there. Who made William? Who gathered the materials? Who formed him and painted him? Who placed him inside a tomb to invoke the spectre of death and the promise of life?

I’ll never know. But I think about them, always: the people behind the object; the invisible hands behind the visible work.