Elsewhere contra mundum

Part the third: I arrive at Bumbledore's annex in Darwin at 8.30 am on Monday for what I'm hoping will be a more adult style of workshop delivery.  Since there are only small numbers in the second-year group for the course in question, I've been able to book a small room at the annex, rather than having to take things out to Bumbledore Barracks.  Besides, I'll probably go seriously crazy if I stay out any longer in the tropical hinterlands.

I told the students that class would start at 9.00 am (an adult time, as opposed to the usual 8.30 -- Bumbledore's usual institutional cycle is so early, they're served dinner at 5 pm).  I'd been expecting them to make an appearance a bit earlier, given the institutional lifestyle they've been living. But 9.00 am comes and then 9.15 am, and still no students.

Another lecturer tells me that earlier this morning he saw my students hanging round the motel where his students are also staying.  I give the motel -- I'll call it 'Bongoland Apartments' -- a ring, and they say yes, my students are still there.  I ring Bumbledore Travel and ask why there hasn't been any transport organised for my students.

'We don't do daily transport,' they tell me, 'only travel.'

So they'll fly a student from the backblocks of NSW to Darwin, but they won't organise a five-minute cab trip from their motel to the annex.

I ask how my students are expected to get to class -- couldn't they provide some cab vouchers? 

No, it's all up to me: daily transport is the lecturer's responsibility.

'No one told me,' I say

'Oh, we thought you knew,' they reply.

Mr Learner, the other lecturer with students at the same motel, has organised a bus.  He picks up his students at 8 am every morning.  Travel suggests I see if mine can hitch a lift (is Mr Learner an enabler or what?)

I book a staff car and drive over, still in a fury.  My students are all hanging round the front, mildly amused, used to stuff ups as they are.  But this time, amazingly, they're on my side.  Why should I be having to pick up students?  How is it my responsibility?  Is it part of my duty statement?

It isn't, except in the most general terms, but it's policy and every lecturer has to do these things (in fact, organise everything, as I explained in my last post).

When we get back to the annex, a disability support tutor is waiting for us.  This seems nothing short of miraculous, as I had no confirmation that she was coming, despite ringing and visiting the disability support mob the week before (no one was ever there).  The disabled student is well-pleased tho her accommodation is all wrong.

The students tell me that the night before when they arrived at Bongoland Apartments, nothing was booked for them.  I don't understand how this can be, given that I booked the rooms weeks ago.  They were put in any old room that was available.  The disabled student is in a totally inappropriate room in which she has to squeeze between beds.  Complaints are brewing.  They know it's 'not my fault': it's taken them about eighteen months to get to this point, but at least they're there. Now they understand why I'm always slightly disorganised and vaguely flustered. It’s a bit like when you realise that parenting might be a hard gig after all and your parents were perhaps doing a ‘good enough’ job. All the same, some of the students are determined to complain (once you get into the culture of complaint, it seems difficult to get out of it).

That is, except for S: 'I'd sleep under a tree so I could attend this course.  I can't get anything like this back home.'

(She comes from Melbourne -- hah!  She tells me the nuns took exception to her as a child; I don't know how they could have.  I should pay her to say things like this.)

And another thing: I'm supposed to have the students' meal allowance cheques.  No one's told me this and I can't find them any where.  I ring Bumbledore Travel: no, they don't have the cheques, and if they're not in Darwin, then maybe they're en route to Alice, since that's where I'm from. They'll do me up another lot and post them to me in Darwin.

Great.  I shell out a couple of twenty dollar notes so the less financial students won't starve.

The disability support tutor looks at me empathically (she's big on capital 'E' empathy): 'It hasn't been a good start, has it?'

'No, but at least you've turned up... that's something,' I say with a forced smile.

After lunch, when everyone's gone, I find the meal cheques in an envelope taped to the side of a box of printing materials...um ah, perhaps I was meant to notice this before, in the way I was meant to know about daily transport.  I think of ringing the students to 'fess up and organise a quick cab ride into town to the bank where the cheques are meant to be cashed, then think the better of it.  It's about a quarter of an hour before closing time.  I'll just have to come up with some story about the cheques arriving in the afternoon post.

Despite this shaky start, the week gathers momentum.  I get the students to do editing exercises on each other's work in the afternoon, which I thought might be dead boring, but turns out to be surprisingly successful in getting them to give feedback in class.  The penny drops finally drops about a few stylistic basics I've hammered on about over the past year or so. We have some interesting discussions about Abl uses of tense and how white editors have responded to this issue.

The room we're in is seriously small.  We're crammed around a table like a family at a Christmas dinner, except with an overhead projector, a computer and lots of paper in the middle.  The whiteboard is at the far end from me: any time I want to write on it, I have to slide underneath the table.  I try and keep my whiteboard usage to a bare minimum. 

After observing this behaviour, one of my students says: 'I've been writing in my journal at night about you move like a cat.'

Me: 'Erm, yes, I often wonder if I've picked up some of my cats' body language.'

Student: 'Oh, no, it's good how you can move like a cat.  It means you can get under that table, see?'

A couple of days into the workshop, I begin to notice that lines are being drawn.  The people from a mission/community background always sit on one side of the table.  The people, erm, not from a mission/community background always sit on the other, along with the Disability Support Tutor.  The people not from a mission/community background always cry at the same time, along with the Disability Support Tutor, at each others' stories.  The people on the other side of the table remain stony-faced.

At the end of the workshop, the Disability Support Tutor says to me, 'I think I must be going through that thing -- what's it called -- change of life?'

Me: 'Menopause?' 

There's been a lot of menopausal subtext -- and just plain text -- in my workshops recently, with various directions to turn fans and air cons on or off.  I feel I'm learning a lot from my students on the subject.

'That's it.  I keep on bursting into tears when I hear some of these stories.  But then I look at you, and you're not crying.'

That makes me feel like a hard-faced bitch.  And this is the thing about disability support tutors: it's like that old saw about anthropologists changing the culture they observe.  Eventually their presence does something to the equilibirum of the group (and they always want to be writers or are 'inspired to write' after class.  Groan.)

She and the disabled student -- one of the weepers -- peer at me curiously.

'I'm probably just to tired to take it all in,' I say, feeling at best it's a flimsy excuse.

Apart from the fact that I'm used to hearing this stuff...which is something I definitely can't say to their facs.  Goodness knows how Lifeline counsellors get on.  I also feel there's a couple of people in the group who deliberately want to milk any emotions for what they're worth.  I almost cracked early in the workshop when someone was talking about DV: one of these people swung in close and looked at me hopefully.  I'm extremely tired and only just keeping a lid on things, so I don't want to disintegrate in a small heap in front of my students, like Obi-Wan Kenobi after he lost his fight with Darth Vader.

I'm so tired that in the evenings, I can't do anything more than lie on my hotel bed, read the next day's readings and lecture notes, then watch some TV.  One night, I go to bed at 7.30.  I feel almost as tired as I did with jetlag (and I'm fit -- this is a fit person feeling extremely fatigued).  I can't sit up straight at a desk to do any work on my own stuff for the MFA -- my supervisor is generally sympathetic to my plight but can't really understand why I haven't had the time or energy to write a review of Harper's in time for our monthly email group discussion. 

I begin to have clean white bed fantasies, like Maud and Roland in Possession (tho admittedly I'm actually in one most evenings) and to fantasise about escaping to an abbey.  I want to be with calm, sympathetic nunnie bunnies living in the now moment, without Bumbledore Travel to stuff it up for them.  I want a mother superior to tell me that whenever a door closes a window opens or whatever. (It must be all those ABC ads for The Abbey: but nunnery life looks almost as arduous as Bumbledore with its 4.00 am starts, from what I gather when I see the program.)  One evening, I go to see The Nanny Diaries (yes, I know, but it's Darwin we're talking about here).  I feel all emotional; it's my life.  I'm the nanny to my students, I've entered some fatal contract with them in which they've become dependent on me. I'm too emotionally involved not to feel torn should I think of resigning, even if it's not healthy to stay. (This is how a paternalistic model works: by exploiting people.)  They somehow get wind of my resignatory thoughts halfway through the week and say, 'Don't go, see us through till the end!', though one of them says, 'Do what the spirit tells you.'

Halfway through the week, Bongoland Apartments rings me at work.  They've been after me, but I pull the phone jack out of the wall during classes so I won't get interrupted by administrivia or anything else.

They want to go through things, step by step, about the booking and why it fell through.  It's not my fault but...apparently I was meant to confirm things with a fax, though no one told me and why this isn't Bumbledore Travel's responsibility, I'll never know.  It's yet another administrative process that I'm to be coopted into.

And not only that: the woman at Bongoland wants me to tell her in advance next time which students should share which rooms so there 'won't be any fighting'.

'Mr Learner came out here and stayed a night,' she says, 'to get a feel for the layout of the rooms so he could book the right ones for his students.'

She seems to have been bitten by the Bumbledore Bug: the lecturer is responsible for everything, right down to sleeping arrangements. All my students are over the age of 35.  Surely they could choose who they'd like to share with.  Not only that, but hasn't she or anyone else heard of appropriate boundaries and professionalism?  And when is anyone ever going to treat Aboriginal people like adults?

When I tell my students about the Bongoland woman, they say that there hasn't been any fighting.  They think it's all ridiculous.

There's a mini workshop on the morning of the last day. The students seem to think that it's been a good workshop. It's miraculous that any one learns anything, in the midst of so much chaos.  There are a couple of shuttle buses scheduled to pick up the students and take them to the airport.  The students realise this is kinda silly, as their planes go within a couple of hours of each other's and decide to get in first shuttle when it comes.  I try and ring Bumbledore Travel twice to tell them of this suggested change in plans.  No one picks up the phone.  I give up.  I write down the number and hand it to one of the students to ring.  I have to go back to my hotel and pick up my bike; I couldn't get it this morning as there weren't any maxicabs available to take it before 8.00 am.  (Yeah, I took my bike.  It's like a security blanket.)

I go back to my hotel and do all my business with my bike.  I drop in at the annex en route to the airport to pick up a few more things.  There's a phone call for me.  I pick up the phone.  It's Bumbledore Travel.  Some of my students got on the early shuttle, Travel says accusingly, and when the next shuttle came, there wasn't anyone to pick up.  The shuttle service isn't very pleased.

What the fuck does it have to do with me?

'Look, I gave the students your number and told them to ring you.  I had to pick up some stuff from my hotel.  As far as I'm concerned, it's between you and them.'

I slam the phone down while the girl is in the middle of blithering on about the lecturer's responsibility.  I've been delivering workshops back to back for two-and-a-half weeks away from my usual campus but no one's prepared to cut me any slack.  And no one seems to understand that my core business is education. 

I write half of an email of complaint to a head honcho, then think the better of it.  I'm wasting my time and energy.  He knows it all already.  Better just have a nap on the plane instead. 

When I get back to Alice I think, as you often do after being away for a while, do I really live here?  In less than twenty-four hours, my nose is full of dried blood.  It's six per cent humidity after Darwin's seventy-eight.  I haven't been keeping track of the news much, but it seems that John Howard wants to do a whitefella-jolly-jumbuck act a la Germaine Greer and wake up every morning to the fact that he's living in an Aboriginal country...on his own terms, of course.  Perhaps he could consider Disability Support at Bumbledore.  Once he retires, of course. (Btw, my American mentor, the woman of scarves, thinks I look like Germaine Greer.)

Comments

[Laura]

I will never complain again about anything, El. Jesus god.

[ThirdCat]

xox
that is all

[Pavlov's Cat]

Never mind, poor thing, it's over now.

As I read these Chronicles from the Ninth Circle of Pedagogic Hell I kept thinking of that story (in David Marr's biography I think) of Patrick White on his way home after some arduous awards ceremony or other, wandering up the street singing, a la Roy Orbison, 'It's OOOO-ver! It's OOOOOO-ver!!!'

[M-H]

Oh God. I don't know what else to say. God. Jeezus wept. Comtinually.

[elsewhere]

Mm, thanks for the tea and sympathy. One of the ESL lecturers says it was much easier teaching in China than at Bumbledore, even tho she had 60 students per class.

[meli]

Unbelievable. Horrifically.

[Mikhela]

Or all-too-believable, unfortunately