The Editor, John Surname, Ant Rogenous, Jeremy Sear and Craig discuss:

* Nukes
* Hybrid cars
* Dagwood dogs
* Fashion and dress codes in education
* Nudity and the fall of the Roman Empire
* Lesbians

** Because Jeremy Sear’s new copy of Windows Vista has crashed again, use only the “Play in popup” link or the “Download” link. **

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Details are still sketchy but news is spreading around the teacher gossip network like bird flu. It seems that teachers — who have been locked in negotiations with a government that didn’t really want to negotiate for 18 months — have successfully told education minister Bronwyn Pike to stick her sub-inflation offer of 3.5% per year and instead grant Victorian teachers (the worst paid in the country) pay parity with their NSW colleagues. With virtually no productivity trade-offs teachers have been offered payrises of between $5000 and $10,000 with a John Howard-style $1000 once off bribe payment thrown in for good measure. Again, I’m not sure of the exact details but will update this post when they are officially released.

UPDATE: From ABC Online

The Premier John Brumby says the salary of a graduate teacher will rise by about $5,000 and senior teachers will get a $10,000 pay rise.

“We’ll make the classroom teachers the highest paid anywhere in Australia,” he said.

Mr Brumby, says they gave the teachers more than the original offer of 3.25 per cent because the union has agreed to boost productivity by spending more time with students.

“They will get an extra 10 minutes of tuition everyday.”

The Education Union’s Mary Bluett says top teachers will get a 15 per cent pay rise and graduate teachers 9.5 per cent over three years.

“The salary will actually reflect the importance of the job of teaching,” she said.

“That would do a lot to retain the teachers that we have here in the state.”

Under the deal, three of the four pupil-free days will be moved to before the start of the school year and teachers will get a one-off $1,000 cash bonus.

UPDATE II: Check out the ABC’s apostrophe problems.

I blame teachers.

Tomorrow for the second time in my life I’ll be celebrating Easter. However, not for religious reasons like everyone else, but because Easter signals the start of school holidays. I challenge teacher-bashers who constantly shout “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GREAT HOLIDAYS?” to spend a term in a classroom trying to make 28 screaming kids learn against their wills, trying to placate 28 sets of parents who think their child is the centre of the universe, trying to deal with divisive and soul-destroying workplace politics, and trying to find time to actually teach because you’re so utterly overloaded with administration and non-teaching tasks.

I’m going to go and put my head under a pillow for four days.

Australian Education Union (Victorian branch) members today received an email from Branch President Mary Bluett. In the email Mary reiterated the reasons behind the series of four hour rolling stoppages that begin tomorrow and attached a recent letter (PDF) she wrote to education minister Bronwyn Pike, along with Pike’s response (PDF). Remembering that I am a total orthographic Nazi and a teacher, imagine my horror when I saw this in Bluett’s letter.

My retinas!

Firstly, Mary Bluett used to be a teacher so she has no excuse. Secondly, that must surely be somebody between Mary Bluett and the fax machine whose job it is to do a spot of proof reading and prevent that sort of shite ending up on the minister for education’s desk.

Mary Bluett’s school teachers obviously spent too much time forcing her to watch indigenous apologies, debate Australian politics and plant trees.

UPDATE (8:10pm): As Junaman points out in comments there is an error in Bronwyn Pike’s letter that I totally missed.

Bluett – 1, Pike – 1

Yesterday Victorian teachers stopped work in support of a pay rise that is above the rate of inflation and that reflects the fact that we are the lowest paid teachers in the country, a reduction in the number of teachers (20%) on short-term contracts, and smaller class sizes. I met my comrades from work at 8:30am for a couple of lattes before jumping on a tram to the city. Even though Craig isn’t a teacher, but a self-employed IT technician, he gave his boss the finger and went on a sympathy strike.

As we walked along the Yarra River towards the Vodafone Arena we sung The Internationale and swore pledges of allegiance to Marxism and Che Guevara.

Upon arrival at the Vodafone Arena we were heartened by the sea of workers proudly dressed in the colour of socialism.

After listening to stirring speeches about the evils of capitalism and unthinkingly endorsing whatever resolutions the union leadership told us to we marched as one towards Parliament House.

At Parliament House we shouted, screamed and snarled to let Premier John Brumby know how angry we were.

After chanting some witty slogans we did what all good teachers do in the afternoon of a strike day: we hit the piss.

Back in 2002 when I was deciding whether to quit my relatively young (but well paid and fast-advancing) career as a television director and retrain as a primary school teacher I made a list that looked something like this:

FOR
* Start at 9am, finish at 3:30pm.
* Tonnes of holidays.
* Autonomy in workplace.
* Gender imbalance in teaching workforce means lots of chicks to perve at.
* Really relaxed dress code.
* Chance to brainwash students with leftist ideology.

AGAINST
* Shit pay.
* Four poverty-stricken years at uni.
* Have to work with children.
* Actual responsibility.

It’s two days into term one of my second year in the classroom and I’ve had another 8am to 6pm day with no lunch break to speak of and work I had to bring home. I’d like to add one more item to the AGAINST list:

* Absolutely, totally, fucking exhausting.

Just had a job interview and in the middle of it had a bizarre out-of-body experience when I heard myself talking like Lachlan Connor. “You see a classroom is a community, and my students are part of that classroom, and so to build a positive school community I need to build positive students in my classroom.”

ps/- Why do I need to go to a job interview less than twelve months after getting a job? You can thank the Victorian Government’s over-reliance on contract employment for public school teachers. That’s one of the reasons that we’re stopping work tomorrow; along with the fact that Victorian teachers are on the lowest salaries in Australia. See you at Vodafone Arena at 10am.

A primary school teacher responds to John Howard’s claim at the Liberal campaign launch that “Australia does not need an education revolution. Australia needs an education system that teaches its children to read, to write, to spell and to add up.”

As part of my longstanding policy of not blogging my own teaching stories but blogging those of my colleagues instead, I hereby present to you an excerpt of an email from my strongly non-Catholic friend who teaches in a Catholic primary school:

Difficult to believe that we are now in second term, hope everyone’s ok… I got an Easter card from my Indian boy on the last day of term one. He drew a picture of Father Christmas on it. l might have to review my Easter program.

“In short, we simply believe in individual freedom”
– Liberal party website

This guiding belief can be clearly seen in much of the federal government’s legislation over the years, such as penalties for not buying private health insurance and the ultimate clanger: WorkChoices.

The Editor: I’m nearly 30 and I’d like to purchase private health insurance.
The Liberal party: Great! We’ll support you in your decision.

The Editor: I’m nearly 30 and for the time being I’d like to remain within the public health system and pay a Medicare levy.
The Liberal party: No worries. We’ll just wait patiently and then slaughter you when you do decide to take out health insurance.

The Editor: I’d like to sign an AWA please.
Liberal party supported employer: Great! We’ll support you in your decision.

The Editor: I’d like to sign a union-negotiated collective agreement.
Liberal party supported employer: No.

As the weeks roll on I see more and more parallels between the Liberal philosophy of individual choice and the classroom management strategies employed in a primary school. In my first month of teaching I’ve tried hard to emulate the minister for industrial relations and avuncularity, Joe Hockey, by providing my students with Liberal style choice. I’ve found myself saying things like:

“I think you need to make a wiser choice about where you sit, student.”

“It’s time you thought about the choices you make in this classroom with regards to distracting other people, student.”

“You can choose to be an active member of this class and learn or choose to sit outside staring at the wall for the rest of the year, student”

It’s blindingly obvious that I’m not offering any real choice to the students but am trying to soften the command by giving the illusion of choice. Joe Hockey demonstrated this very philosophy in his “debate” with Julie Gillard last week:

JULIA GILLARD: I am happy to see workers sitting around and working out how they want to deal with their industrial arrangements.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Without a union, if they don’t want one?

JULIA GILLARD: If that is what they choose. And, to take an example, let’s look at the Queensland netballers, that’s been a big issue today. 20 women on the team, they play as a team, they want to negotiate their employment conditions as a team, and they can’t under the Howard Government’s legislation. Now, I don’t care whether they want the union involved or whether the 20 of them want to sit around and do it themselves, that’s entirely a matter for them, but if the 20 of them want to do it together, then they should be able to do it together, and they can’t achieve that under Mr Howard’s laws.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Joe Hockey?

JOE HOCKEY: You need to have flexibility in the workplace, Kerry. Flexibility can include individual contracts. Again, under the Labor Party, individual contracts were essentially based on the award system, they were a bolt on to the award. What we are saying is, there has to be freedom. If individuals want to negotiate individual contracts, that is great.

KERRY O’BRIEN: What about if the individual doesn’t want to but is intimidated into?

JOE HOCKEY: What choice does an individual get if they are thrown a collective agreement?

KERRY O’BRIEN: Well, which is worse?

JOE HOCKEY: I would say it’s worse to have a collective agreement thrown at you with no choice, or an award thrown at you which is negotiated by lawyers down at the Industrial Relations Commission in Melbourne, I think that is far worse than having an individual contract that you can tailor in negotiations with the employer…

JULIA GILLARD: Look, Joe has just tied himself up in a logical knot and I don’t think he’s ever going to get out of it. He is saying people should have choice, but let’s take the actual example of the Firebirds, the 20 netballers. They want a choice. The choice they want is they want to work together and have their own collective agreement. Under Mr Howard’s laws, what is getting thrown at them isn’t a collective agreement or an award. What is getting thrown at them is individual agreements they don’t want. So the Howard Government is actually saying, “You don’t really get a choice. If you choose a collective agreement, too bad.

But at least my teaching style will directly contribute to a stronger economy, less terrorism and more values.

Seriously, does a day pass at the moment without our national government attacking Australian education standards, curricula or teachers? Education minister Julie Bishop did it on Wednesday, The Man Of Steel got into it yesterday, and all on the back of a long, hot summer of teacher bashing.

Launching Kevin Donnelly’s book Dumbing Down yesterday, Howard fell back on his well worn themes of “relativism” in English and rampant leftism in the humanities. This man is seriously pining for the good old days of the 50s and is clearly out of touch with anything resembling the real world as it stands in the — gasp — 21st century. The sooner we put Howard in a retirement home (full of white, Anglo residents so it resembles the Australia he feels comfortable with) the sooner this country can stop looking backwards with blinkers on.

Oh, and I couldn’t help but chuckle when I read that Kevin Donnelly was “the thinking man’s Andrew Bolt.” That would’ve got Bolta frothing at the mouth with specks of snot flying out his nose while reading The Age over cornflakes this morning.

Went out last night with some fellow graduates to celebrate the end of our first week as teachers. This picture is a fairly good indication of how I’m feeling this morning.