Fraser’s got a bad cop - is there a good one?
Ilooked out at the fresh young faces in front of me. They were the students in my foundation studies class. I was the lecturer and they were among my first students.
It was the class the school waggers and the drop-outs attended. The kids with no future were sent to learn how to learn and I was their teacher.
These kids were like the characters in the TV show Welcome Back Kotter. These kids were the Sweathogs. They were full of personality and street jibes, but no confidence.
I knew from the start these kids were likely to walk away, as they had so many times before. It was their only defence against the onslaught of more in-their-face failure. And they had experienced enough failure.
Their esteem on a scale of 1 to 10 was zero.
They were the nobodies that no one cared about. They weren’t the jocks or the popular kids. They weren’t the hunks or the babes who trade on social status for their esteem and place in the school hierarchy.
For whatever reason, these kids were uncertain of their place in life.
They were the school rejects who couldn’t find a foothold in school. They were lost.
They would find more empathy and support in their peer group of fellow waggers than the school grounds or at home.
Put it down to poor family life, or boredom or just laziness. Put it down to any number of things, but something soon became obvious.
I recognised these kids weren’t stupid or incapable of academic success. But they didn’t know it. They had been so hurt by home life or school life that walking away from the thing that hurt them was better than staying and getting hurt some more.
They were in constant defensive mode protecting themselves from the criticism that was part of their daily routine at home and at school.
I wanted them to know they were in a class with a grown-up with a similar story. However badly they had failed at school, I could beat their stories. I was way better at failing than they were.
Their faces lit up as I shared my tale of life-changing failure.
I told them my story, how I was the one who had handed in his final essay after deadline at Waikato University and had failed my final course after four years.
I wanted to hand in all my assignments typed, so I took time to make sure I had a 100 per cent typed track record and took one more day to put in my final typed assignment for marking. But it was 24 hours too late. It was rejected and I failed my final course.
During my time on campus, I had helped build a student radio station that would go down in Waikato University history, but the price was my degree.
It took me six years to finish that final paper and resubmit it on time and finally graduate.
My Foundation Studies students were captivated. In their eyes I, too, was a Sweathog. I had known failure.
I told them my story to show them that I, too, wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and I, too, had make mistakes that had consequences.
I told them I, too, had wagged school. I wagged trigonometry classes because I hated it, but loved Hamilton Boys’ High School English classes with Mr Duff and went to every one.
From that moment on, my Foundation students knew I had empathy for their life and learning.
The culture of the class changed from being one riddled with the spirit of persistent failure to one daring to engage with hope.
To this day, I refer to my Foundation Studies students as birds with broken wings.
All they needed was some nurturing, some encouragement and some praise for the small things they did right.
For many, it was the first praise they had ever received.
And so my Foundation Studies class came to life.
My students made progress and little by little, their wings began to take shape and some of them took to life with renewed confidence.
I couldn’t reach them all, but for many, they were on their way for the first time with a spring in their step. They had tasted success.
These kids changed my life and I soon grew to love working with them.
More than 10 years later, I can see these students are now young adults.
They are not rapists or imprisoned, they are married with kids, careers and friends and they now appear to have confidence in their sense of place in life.
And so when the junior Fraser High School students were told by principal Virginia Crawford that school waggers had a future that would be riddled with domestic violence, imprisonment, rape or suicide, I wondered how this picture would have helped my class of Sweathogs.
There is a time to scare students straight, which is what I assume Fraser High board of trustees and Ms Crawford were together attempting to do.
But the question is, did it work? If Principal Crawford was the bad cop in this story, where is the good cop from Fraser High School, ready to nurture wagging students into school and life success rather than threaten with bleak futures?