Days when I mark the roll in the first 10 minutes of class often result in a small sigh.
On Monday I clicked through the class list, looking up to check the heads of students bent over their books. The boys at the back table were gossiping under their hands. Girls were shifting their ponytails away from their work. Others sat, still selecting the right pen – not bad.
Most were on task. I was ready, but at the front table I could see the shiny backs of four blue chairs. In the middle on the right were another two, and then a couple of odd empties at the back. Jarrod, Andrew, Shanae, Carrie, Stephen – absent.
Outside the sky was grey and it had been raining in cold thick splashes all morning. The classroom was warming up and I wondered what they were doing, not here.
I imagined them in the dull blue-grey glow of shoot-em-up games. A blur of night-time dessert raids lit with cold-white gun flashes. The light reflecting on their faces from computers their older brothers made them.
I imagined them trekking bare-headed along the railway tracks to to buy a soft serve, 13km away.
I imagined them walking around town, hands in their pockets.
I wondered if they spend their time watching TV. I wondered if they were looking after brothers and sisters, helping out the family.
Sometimes they tell me, half boasting, about how they stay up until the early morning. They are on computer games, Netflix, or with friends.
I thought about the adventure of staying up with the navy air on your cheeks.
I thought about catapulting emotions in to the night with your besties.
I thought about first meeting your boyfriend or girlfriend from another town.
I thought about the heavy joy of sitting at home, headphones on. The joy of discovering the deep, dark music that sounds exactly how you feel Right Now.
I thought about those I suspect stay at home to read or draw, away from school and the noise of it.
There are so many things about school that can irk you. The rules, the strange plastic outdoor chairs, the navy uniforms, the clamour. The rubbish in the halls, the novels you don’t understand. The tormentors from way back who still offer jibes.
The claustrophobic, terrifying, inevitable, unchanging nature of high school is not easily escaped. Not when you’re trapped in the maelstrom.
I understand a little. In the middle years, it was fear of parental disapproval that dragged me to school, butterfly-stomached. It wasn’t any love of learning or desire to be there.
I was bored, disengaged and confused about who my friends were and who I was. Because I’d never lived through anything else, I thought it would never end.
But it does end, and not all institutions in life are like high school – something we all get to discover. But as a teacher, an absent student causes a little drop in my heart every time I click NP.
This is not an easy problem to solve. I know that right now, schools and parents make amazing efforts to ensure that students are in school. We have reduced loads, quiet spaces. Leaders work to reduce bullying and teachers try to teach at the right level for all students.
But the task is a hard one and the red bands of absence that run through my attendance stats continue. They worry me, because for every day students aren’t at school they lose a bit of power after school. Even though they might feel powerless when they’re here.
The knowledge we give and the skills we practice are oh-so-valuable. They have every right to master those skills. I wish they were here to learn them.
