STORY - "Swansong"

Duilio Rufo, principal of St Therese's New Lambton, talks with Denis Murphy about teaching and teachers....

Q Denis, you've just hung up the chalk after a career which actually spans five decades. Can you sum up your teaching life in a single paragraph?

A Sometimes I feel I have done the lot! I've taught from the Victorian border to the Queensland border, and from east to west of the divide. I've taught in a one teacher school, and in a school in one of the biggest cities in the world. I've worked in infants, primary and secondary schools, as well as state, private and Catholic systems. I have taught in a small, struggling parish school, and a wealthy, private, international school. My smallest enrolment was 10 children, my largest enrolment was 3,600. I have been in charge of some of these establishments, and in others I was the last on, with the class no-one wanted.

The important thing is, this history has provided me with an incredible range of experiences and privileges that have so helped me in everything I have tried to do in schools and in life in general. I am particularly grateful for that.

Q What are some of the changes in schools you have seen in that time?

A : When I started teaching the world was very different. The Americans had not yet landed on the moon, rural Australia received mail twice a week, the Education Department paid me a Forage Allowance for travel to and from school, which amounted to the cost of one bale of hay per week and Ana Phylaxis was a little Greek girl with no ESL (English as a Second Language) support. School life was uncomplicated and by today's standard, the educational curriculum was rather pedestrian.

The biggest change has been in the kids. Today they are speaking, reading, writing, questioning, analysing, performing much better than they did years ago, and I think that this attests to the good job that we all have done in teaching such skills, and the array of challenges the classroom provides today.

I began my career teaching the 3Rs. Today, you have to be very organised to fit them in! This is a cause of great dissatisfaction among us, but today's society is so much more complicated, and sticking to the 3Rs would not help our pupils learn to operate successfully in that society. We need a rich curriculum and less teacher tension.

Q How would you go about solving that one?

A I think that principals have a big role to play in helping their schools work out priorities for their particular educational setting. We should try to do less, and do it extremely well. It does require a certain commitment and courage on the part of principals. Our masters at a systems level also have an important role to play, and can be a great support to principals who attempt to bring some common sense and organisation into the daily workload. I am thinking, particularly, of the politically motivated areas; for instance, I think our schools should refuse to rank pupils in reports and our system should refuse to rank their schools. I cannot see how this fits into our Catholic outlook.

Q How do we overcome the fact that Governments are linking school compliance in that area with funding?

A Such a threat says more about the Government and the related legislation than the school system. I did say that our leaders require courage, and the current ranking demand gives us a forum where we can show that courage and say publicly, “We are not going to rank our pupils or our schools! It's not what we are about!”

Q What constitutes good educational change?

A Some of the best things I have seen in schools have come from the classroom. Committed teachers, motivated pupils, supportive parents have led to a classroom climate where pupils are only too happy to branch out into new areas, try different approaches and, generally, punch above their educational weight. A classroom that doesn't hold kids back doesn't need acceleration programmes!

Q Has the experience of your own education influenced your teaching?

A Anyone who was educated in a Catholic school in the ‘50s had their own experience of hell fire. When we donned our little grey Stamina suit, it was a ‘coming of age' garment: it indicated that you had left the nuns behind and had entered the grey world of the brothers, or as we called them, the Marist Mafia. I was unhappy at school, and found it very difficult.

We were only allowed to be top of the water adventurers. You know? We were never encouraged to look under the water and see the brilliant colours of the iceberg. So it had a major influence on my classroom and I have always insisted on underwater adventure, in colour. I've taught some great underwater adventurers and they just made my heart sing.

Q Did your upbringing influence you to become a teacher?

A I suppose it must have. We were literally as poor as church mice. We never had any money to spare and I was conscious of having little or no pocket money and never going to the canteen. In my last year I learned that a top paid teacher earned £2000 a year. I thought it was a king's ransom, and I suppose it seemed an easy way out of poverty.

Q What do you feel is at the heart of good teaching?

A It's crucial that a teacher is able to form relationships with pupils: healthy, active, public and replicated 30 times!! We are dealing with little human beings, and teachers who can form working relationships and open little hearts can really do wonderful things in the classroom.

Q Have you met teachers like that?

A Yes! I have! They are alive and well and teaching in our schools all over the place.

Another important thing that good teachers do is define the boundaries for their pupils. Everyone in the classroom needs to understand how we treat each other, how we speak to each other. Respect for persons, opinions, property, space and personal endeavour and achievement, respect for individual difference - all those things are pivotal to a harmonious classroom and community. We can still encourage underwater adventures within boundaries. Good teachers can arrive at a happy balance between allowing and disallowing, consistently.

Q You must have some teaching highlights?

A A lot of highlights came when teachers reported some success after my advice. That was always a good one for me as I felt I was really doing something useful.

In 1988 I had written an enviro-play and God the Father was complaining about general environmental degradation, saying, “This was a paradise when I left it!!!” He then turns on the audience and in his tirade he says “Is that raw sewage I see floating off my beach?” The next day, I received a phone call from the head of Hunter Water, complaining about the incorrect reference to sewage! How wonderful is that? When a small action of a small establishment can influence a local government instrumentality to the extent that the head rings up to complain!

Teaching Year 1 in my final years gave me heaps of highlights, from a mother reporting that at home her daughter doesn't draw glasses on newspaper faces, but draws hearing aids! to one little girl who wanted to know where I learnt to do “old man's writing”!

The big highlight with the little ones was pioneering a lot of original reading material and associated supports. It was absolutely wonderful seeing the little ones improve their reading on my material. As you know, six year olds teach you so much.

Q Over the years you have used plays as a teaching tool. These can be very effective, can't they?

A Yes. Effective as a teaching tool, and effective in giving kids a chance to perform and to deliver a message. My favourite play grew out of a classroom activity at St Francis Xavier's at Belmont . Year 4 had just finished a parables/miracles unit and I was using a quiz for assessment. Before you knew it, the classroom was transformed into a game-show format, with a host and contestants. We used it as a class display item, and then rewrote it for the school Cultural Festival. It was wonderful! We had Abu Ben-Cohen as host, Luke the evangelist, Ester of Caesarea (whose hobby was making unleavened bread), Joshua the high priest, and Matthew the tax collector as contestants. We had the compulsory bimbo, the winning contestant won a new donkey, and the audience held up signs saying, ‘Don Burke out of Gethsemane ” and ‘Hands off our lepers'! It was a great show and was called “Name That Parable!!” It was a case where something grew out of the classroom, and the game show format, while being a wonderful cultural achievement, is a familiar and useful teaching tool.

Q What motivates or nourishes you?

A Family and associated demands have been a great concern, and while the demands are great, the nourishment is great too. In recent years, I have been greatly nourished by mythology. When you start to get a handle on the great stories, your whole life opens up before you - universal truths and the connectedness of all things become so apparent that you wonder what you actually thought about life before these revelations. I think all schools need a mythology consultant! With my Gifted and Talented groups, I used stories from mythology as a launch for related activities, because of the richness and levels of meaning in the stories. When the kids see the intensity in the colour of their discoveries, I'm further confirmed in my beliefs that all these stories touch us on a soul level, and they are the tool for understanding the experience of our own lives. So I'm currently looking at developments where I can continue to expound this message of the myth. I think the myths are important to open kids up to something other than themselves, in the ways that the stories of Jesus do.

Q What is the message of the myth?

A Ahh! Myths are tools for understanding the experience of our lives. They are metaphorical pointers that can open us up to something which is greater than the life that we see before us, and they show us how that life is to be lived. You know, the hero never rejects the challenge in life, and the message to you and me is to accept our lives and live them as if we are heroes. I see this abundant life as that which Christ encouraged: living life to the full. That's the message of the myth.

Q Do you have any regrets?

A If I had the chance, I'd say that I would do everything differently, but I suspect that the outcome would be the same: a life of abundance and privileged experiences. Our regrets open us up to the learning that our successes never can. In some ways it's important to have failures and regrets. I think that individuals only go forward because they commit themselves to live life to the full. You know, slaying dragons, rescuing damsels, helping the kids with their assignment which is due tomorrow, bathing the kids while Mum cooks tea - these are the acts of the everyday heroes.

Q What does the future hold for you?

A It appears that the privileges and the abundance may continue. We are currently developing “Arethusa”, a 17 acre garden on the banks of the Williams River , where the natural beauty and plant and animal life are breathtaking. It literally is a place to be, a landscape of the soul, and I sometimes think I am living a continual meditation. We go with the flow of the seasons, and plant, reap and harvest by the moon. A lot of this is new to me but nature is responding. I was reading by the lake and a black swan comes steaming under the bridge, through the water lilies and glides past as if I was just part of the scenery!

It all started in a garden, so it's a nice thought to finish in a garden - except the Arethusa Garden doesn't have any traps, all are welcome to eat the fruit of any tree they wish, and no-one is going to drive anyone out. It's in its infancy, but it is a garden to be shared and to meditate on the message of the myth.

The first thing I did was plant a labyrinth. It was dug by hand and runs for 1.2 kilometres. The walk is an 11 minute meditation and is really a place to lose yourself. In another two years it will be so thick you will be able to lose yourself! I've also cut an amphitheatre into the side of the hill facing up the river, and I hope someday some kids can perform their own plays there. Truly, I have enough ideas to keep me busy for years.

So the future feels abundant. I have done more than survive teaching, I have been blessed by it, and I really am so grateful.

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