Viviene O'Leary is still teaching English at Trinity Catholic College. I say still because Viviene is 81 and has been teaching for 56 years, but as you will learn, she still loves what she does. Maive McKenzie sat down with Viviene to get her life story.

First and foremost, I didn’t choose to be a teacher and certainly never intended to make a career of it.

I attended a top selective high school in Sydney in the 1950s, which followed a rigorous academic curriculum: absolutely no art, music, sewing or cooking! Skills I was sorely in need of in later life!

I did receive a first-class education from inspiring teachers, but while I loved the humanities subjects: English, History and languages, I had absolutely no interest and no talent for Maths and Science. I have never been good at doing what I don’t enjoy, and my end-of-school results in Maths and Science were so abysmal that I didn’t get a Commonwealth Scholarship. I was awarded a Secondary Teacher’s Scholarship instead, to Sydney University, (the best years of my life!) where the state paid all university fees, paid a living allowance, but contracted you to teach anywhere in the state for five years or pay it all back. 

Teaching is and has been my life, and overall, it has brought and continues to bring me joy. This is pretty amazing considering that on a school ‘retreat’ recently I was completely stumped by a journal writing prompt about ‘what brought me joy’. I would never have thought at that moment of using ‘joy’ to describe teaching! But yes, I am proud to say that I am a teacher and yes, my job brings me joy!

My joy is twofold: the joy of the kids ‘getting it’ (whatever the ‘it’ of the moment is), not just at the temporal level but at a ‘real’ level when they start to connect the dots: that there is so much in the world that is ‘wrong’; that despite huge technological and scientific advances we are not living the way it must have been intended; that history is cyclical; that there has been an end to civilisation more than once; the truth of Shakespeare’s epigram about duality in the world: fair is foul and foul is fair (‘Macbeth’); that literature is a not-so-pretty mirror of society; to ponder on the numinous when Hamlet says: … there are greater things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than this world dreams of; and to imagine ‘brotherhood’ when Tim Winton says in Cloudstreet: It’s us and us and us. It’s always us...’ 

(Viviene with Tony Durheim and Trinity Catholic College Principal Jesse Smith. Photo: supplied) 

The English syllabus would call this ‘developing critical literacy’, but I think of it as having a more soulful dimension than the mere mental process represented in syllabus jargon. I think of it as developing the ability to ‘read’ people and ‘life’ as the result of vicarious experiences in literature. This is, after all, what literature is for: to experience the turmoil of LIFE, in all its extremities, from the safety of an armchair!

The second joyful gift of teaching has been that it has enabled me to be the ‘forever student’ and constantly enrich myself with new ideas and realisations. As a teacher, I have been lucky enough to be on a lifetime journey of lifelong learning!

At first, this was a bit of a mystery, and it certainly did not come to me immediately, but after years of anxiety and struggle, I found that after I overcame the avoidance and anxiety of tackling some formidable literary analysis, the ideas would just flow out onto the page to the point where I felt ‘I can’t believe I wrote this!’ without realising how true this actually was. I call this the ‘download’! 

Like most female Arts graduates of my generation, I drifted into teaching for want of a better alternative and never intended to stay longer than the five-year bond. I was going to travel and be a cutting-edge journalist! Along, of course, with meeting Mr Right, living an adventurous, happy, fulfilling life and having a large and happy family (of course). So my first year out of teaching was where my education really began.

My first school was Cabramatta High in Western Sydney - co-ed and a pretty wild place in 1965. Immediately, I was confronted by pretty much knowing nothing about what I was supposed to be teaching: English and History.

As a privileged scholarship, full-time day student, I had frittered away my ‘study’ years, ‘partying’ and non-attendance at lectures, so it came as quite a shock to be confronted with what I was supposed ‘to know’ and transform into lesson plans – so ahead was a very steep learning curve indeed.

Unexpectedly, I found I liked the kids – probably because I was a typical ‘sixties’ person and was 20 when I started teaching – there was a boy in my Year 12 class who was older than I was! I discovered I loved learning and that it was so INTERESTING! This precipitated my escape into books and knowledge: an absolute journey of ‘discovery’, which consumed the intervening years, along with 2 marriages, 2 divorces and 5 children, which brings me to the present: aged 81 – teaching in state and Catholic high schools, for the last 56 years.

In my first couple of years of teaching I had to work incredibly hard to plug this gap. I found I liked kids, liked the job and was good at it when I was ‘prepared’. In 1968 I got married and moved to Mackellar Girls’ High School at Manly Vale and continued striving to achieve ‘academic excellence’. I had mostly senior classes, but I do remember a Year 8 English class, where students fought over whose turn it was to read Shylock in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ - something Year 12 balk at now!

I left teaching to have my first child and found I did not enjoy the drudgery of being a mother and housewife. I pined for intellectual stimulation and buried myself in books, which became my reality and something to cope with in between books. I also did an acting course with the Marion St. Theatre and got the Trinity College Speech and Drama qualification, and with a friend, started a local drama group for kids that was very successful. 

When my second child was twelve months old, I returned to teaching in 1974 as a part-time Drama teacher at Stella Maris College Manly. Again, this was a steep learning curve because, at this time, there was no Drama syllabus, and I spent the next few years doing as many acting and theatre courses as I could manage and writing my own programmes along the way.

This is where my ‘download’ for teaching really happened because I had to come from my heart and I could see what an amazing vehicle for personal growth drama was for kids and I just sort of followed my nose. When I look back on the ‘drama excellence’ of Trinity, I realise how absolutely amazing those kids were and how amazing the performances we did were because I can see that my lack of knowledge meant that I didn’t impose on them. 

Also, I have to put in a plug for the family values of the good old Catholic education system here: still at Stella when my fifth child was born very prematurely. I returned to teaching drama with him strapped on my chest in a koala pouch in the mornings; after lunch he slept in a portable cot in a corner of the drama room and woke up on cue at 3.30 when the bell went! That would NEVER happen in a state school!

I did operate, however, from a place of nervous energy and anxiety because I had no idea really what I was doing but was positioned by the school as the resident ‘expert’. My husband was a Sydney Symphony Orchestra musician who was mostly absent at night, at concerts and this gave me the necessary breathing space to prepare lessons.

Slowly, glimmerings filtered through. I thought about the old nun at my first Catholic school, who told me, when she employed me: Every time I place my hand on the doorknob of a classroom, I remind myself I am there to teach the students, not the curriculum. Recalling this twenty-five years later was revolutionary: really? You mean imparting knowledge and achieving top results is not the main event?

Gradually, it seeped through that being myself, divorcing myself from the authoritarian role of ‘being the teacher’ and treating them as equals worked a lot better for both of us. It did not exhaust me, and it didn’t antagonise them: ‘because I am telling you’ became ‘because I’m asking you to trust me’ to ‘well, I’ll leave it up to you; it’s your choice.’ I could feel that they didn’t always want to cooperate and sometimes didn’t, but that they respected me, that we laughed a lot more, and things were easier.   

In retrospect, it is the joy that predominates when I reflect on continuing to teach into my eighties. You never know who you might have sitting in front of you or what effect you might have on them. I have a litany of such moments. I recount them here, not to glorify myself as an individual, but to highlight the difference it is possible to make to the daily reality of the individual captives of a harsh system. Every teacher who is in service would have an equal number of such moments.

I think of the boy who sat in the back corner for two years, largely in silence, emanating hostility and disapproval, a dedicated Ancient History student, whose father was a university professor. He argued relentlessly and passionately with pretty much everything I said. He made me very nervous. I thought he hated me. He wanted to join the army. At the end of the HSC, he gave me a beautiful letter, which began, ‘Thank you for being my Penelope and weaving such a fascinating tapestry… ‘ and I was gobsmacked.

I think of the Extension 2 student, whose teacher asked me to edit her major work because ‘it is doing my head in’. She asked me to ‘see what can possibly be done with this’ because the student ‘refused to change anything’.

We had been studying the grim, dystopian novel, 1984 by George Orwell. Her story was set in a world of disconnection, distrust and emptiness, where the main character made a random connection on a ‘traffic island’ with a girl, who ‘grew into her fullness’ as their intimacy grew, but disappeared one day after a ‘plain brown paper box tied up with string’ was left on her doorstep by persons unknown. As he works through his grief, the boy starts to see the world is just ‘a reflection of shadows’ and not real. It is implied in a very understated way that as a result of this ‘painful awakening’ he is beginning to ‘grow into his fullness’, until one day he comes home and finds on his doorstep, ‘a brown paper box tied up with string’ …end of story.

All the way through the reader is positioned to regard ‘the brown paper box’ as an instrument of tyranny and the ‘disappearance’ in the context of terror, but by the end of the story, the writer has embedded enough beams of light, so that when the boy discovers the brown paper box on his doorstep, he is delighted and we feel strangely uplifted. I was stunned at the implications. When I asked the student whether she had been influenced in writing the story by 1984‘, she looked puzzled and replied, ‘What do you mean? I just had this image of a brown paper box, tied up with string’ and I wanted to write a story about it.’

When I asked her what was in the brown paper box, she said, ’I don’t know. It’s a mystery. Only the person knows.’ This major work received full marks in Extension 2 at the HSC. I think this is the ‘Download’ at work.

I think of the student, who slogged away at essay writing but never achieved more than a mediocre mark. When I asked her if she was disappointed with her HSC result she said, ‘Not at all. I loved it. It’s like you’re this incredible storyteller and I just get so caught up in the story, it’s like magic…I was just never able to put that in an essay.’ And the year 12 student who came back to see me after the HSC, who came into my new Year 12 class and asked if she could sit in, because she wanted to remember what it was like. I felt awkward and asked her to talk to the class about what they needed to do, on the basis of her experience, to get the outcome they wanted at the end of the year: she took over the rest of the lesson, wrote all over the whiteboard and told them to write down every word I said because if they asked me to repeat it, I wouldn’t be able to!

She was amazing, and they were in awe. From time to time, they still reference pieces of advice she gave them, and the murmur runs through the class: Emily said… I received a postcard from a many years ago ex-student who, standing in front of a painting of ‘Electra’ in an art gallery in Florence, said ‘the hairs on the back of her neck stood up’ as she recalled the lines she had spoken as Cassandra in our performance of Greek tragedy. As I read the postcard, I could visualise the same moment and smile.

I think of the student in my Year 12 class a few years ago, an ultimate physical and psychological misfit in the system and an anathema to the entire staff. He was into conspiracy theories and rarely on task. He was great at hijacking the lesson and disagreeing with everything. He exasperated the class and remained a solitary figure. Often he would make comments that the rest of the class didn’t understand but were very perceptive. Very slowly, he became more cooperative, but he never completed class tasks and had to receive multiple warning letters before he would do assessment tasks.

At the end of the course, Year 12 students can nominate a few teachers from whom they would like to receive a letter, as a sort of ‘snapshot of our time together’. Again, it is very surprising to see who does and does not request a letter from you! Despite his not requesting a letter from me, as I gave out my letters, I handed him one, with a small crystal star inside a card urging him to ‘hang it up somewhere in the light so it would reflect back to him who he really was.’ He came to see me later with shining eyes, to say, ‘Thank you. It was a beautiful present.’ Again, this gesture did not come from me, because he tried my patience sorely: the ‘Download’!

Finally, of course, I should mention also that I taught our esteemed principal, the amazing Jesse Smith, in Years 11 and 12 and am so proud of the fact that all these years later, he can still quote verbatim from ‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘Cloudstreet’, ‘The Tempest’ etc. A Renaissance Man!

 Those are the glorious moments, but there is much about the current state of the teaching profession that is of concern. The whole system is propped up by teachers’ commitment to professional best practice and their goodwill to constantly go the extra mile for their students.

As an ‘older teacher’, I find the increasing ‘technologicalisation’ of education intimidating and alarming. I am critical of the increased dependency on ‘electronic learning’, which, although an invaluable resource to ‘bring education alive’, it is fraught with gimmicks and games that can become an end in themselves and eat up time, limiting opportunities for active engagement and practice of skills.

Gradually I have acquired the basics, but the goal I set myself every year is that I will become proficient in the use of the technological systems within the school and be able to use relevant teaching resources without the accompanying anxiety and stress. Still a work in progress. Artificial Intelligence is now the latest challenge to education remaining a meaningful learning experience as a pathway to professional competence and personal wisdom. Who knows where that will take us?

The HSC year is a marathon, involving stress: juggling time management, anxiety and exhaustion. Saddest of all is the inquisitive, imaginative, high-achieving student who tells you after the ‘recipe-driven’ experience of literature post-HSC: I never want to read another book. I’m never going to write anything again.

Along the way, I have to say I have suffered several periods of disillusionment, cynicism and burnout when it is so easy to sink into ‘giving up energy’ and blame ‘the system’. After one such protracted period of stagnation, I decided, yet again, that sadly, retirement was the only option. I had witnessed much younger colleagues resign because they ‘just couldn’t do it anymore’ and concluded that it must be time to go. If the body is exhausted and telling you it has reached its limit, surely you need to pay attention to the body and take measures that allow it the space to regain its vitality. 

What I needed was a strategy to get myself out of the momentum of ‘giving –up’. I embarked on a fitness regime at the gym and a lifestyle review. From this, I recognised the truth of listening to your body and that age does not disqualify you from being productive, energetic, enthusiastic and successful in the workplace. I learnt the wisdom of eliminating physical causes, before writing yourself off as being too old.

I have found mentoring young teachers a mutually enriching process. I feel confident, from the heart-felt feedback they give, that they have benefitted from my experience, and I have learnt a great deal from them. Having regained my energy and vigour, however, via my new health regime and having revised my teaching philosophy, I am confident that presently I enjoy the respect and, in some measure, the admiration of my colleagues. Many of them tell me I am ‘amazing’ and ‘an inspiration’. Having originally come for a year in 2000, I have been at Trinity for 25 years this year, and I am still en-joy-ing my job!

Teaching is a hard job. Both the system and the ‘pack mentality’ are brutal, but nevertheless, it is the joy that remains with me, a blessing punctuated by fairly constant frustration and exhaustion, but joyful still.

On the last day of term this year, as we trudged down to the lunch provided by the principal, after an exhausting morning of analysing HSC results, a colleague said to me in tones of sour sarcasm, ‘Well Viv, where would you rather be?’ I surprised both her and myself by saying, ‘Well, actually, I’m quite happy to be here, in my job and in my life. I feel blessed.’