You are more than your occupation.

I was hiding from my previous occupation and wanted to run from my past. None of us can do that. We can only write new chapters so I retrained as a High School English teacher.

I’m sure some of you are actively questioning my current mental health knowing that I went from Policing to High School teaching, but it is a calling.

So when I first walked into a school after graduating twenty years earlier, my knees were shaking, my back was soaked in sweat and I was ready to turn and run. Wild animals could smell my fear, a good analogy for a year 10 class. Everything I had read in the text book went straight out the window. Classroom Behaviour management - was that a theory or a dilemma?

So there I was, Like the scene in a western film, the class fell silent. The piano froze and the bar-keep stopped wiping glasses. All eyes on me. My stiff movements would have creaked had they not been soaked in sweat. I made eye contact with each student as I inched to the centre of the room. A former colleague in the K9 unit always warned me against staring the police dogs in the eye…it was a challenge and couldn’t guarantee my safety.

In my left hand was my trusty lesson plan, left for me by the teacher who had called in sick…or maybe worse. The lesson plan was the most basic set of instructions for how to occupy them for at least 3 minutes out of the hour.. It should have had dot dot dot, dash dash dash, for if or when I needed saving. Maybe I was overreacting…maybe they really did want to spend an hour quietly appreciating the Iambic Pentameter and rhythmic nuances of 14th century Shakespearean tragedies..

They stared. They waited. Who would flinch first.

“Sir, do you even know what you're doing?”....It was on!

Weapons drawn…no gun anymore, just a whiteboard marker and a lesson plan doomed to fail. In a flash I remembered that great Australian attribute of ingenuity. Make do with limited resources, use what nature has provided and do the best like all of our predecessors. Back yourself.

“Shakespeare?” I offered…

A pause, then the same challenging voice started a cacophony of echoing support…”It doesn’t make sense, we don't need it, why do we need to study this rubbish…Its 400 years old, it has no impact, the writing makes no sense, why should we have to interpet…..

The whiteboard marker held firm, I turned my back on the threat and wrote a scrambled sentence.

Letters missing, largely illegible, upper and lower case mixed. Then I dragged the side of my hand through the final letters, smudging what was already difficult to solve.

I turned back and dropped the whiteboard marker on the table in front of me.

“That piece of writing was all I had from a ransom demand after a 20 year old woman and her baby were kidnapped. I was a detective in the worst parts of Sydney. You’ve got the rest of this lesson to decipher the message and save these people. Go”.

60 minutes flew by and they wouldn't leave the room. It was lunchtime, but they wouldn’t stop. I revealed how decoding Shakespearean text was an important part of learning, and life. It’s just a matter of thinking about where else you can use those skills. I realised that I had a lot more to offer than just my 4 year teaching degree. It didn’t matter that I was a former Detective, I could have been anything. It was about listening, then using what I had. I gave something of myself. Something personal. Invited them into my world. I shared ‘me’.

Like so many of us who change our ‘occupational identity’ which is a huge part of the Australian identity, I didn’t know what else there was for me. I realised that everything I had done in my life was centred on communication. I talked down armed offenders. I consoled victims, was a specialist child interviewer, negotiated workplace reform, and now I took words from books and made it real. Communication was my role. My contribution.



What's yours?