Teacher

Watching children learn is a beautiful and extraordinary experience. Their bodies transform, reflecting inner changes. Teeth fall out. Knees scab. Freckles multiply. Throughout the year they grow in endless ways and I can almost see their self-esteem rising, their confidence soaring, their small bodies now empowered. Given wings.

They fall in love with learning.

It is a kind of magic, a kind of loving, a kind of art.

It is teaching.

Just teaching.

Just what I do.

What I did.

Past tense.

In 2014, Gabrielle Stroud was a thirty-something dedicated teacher with over a decade of experience. Months later, she resigned in frustration and despair when she realised that NAPLAN education model was stopping her from doing the very thing she was best at: teaching individual children according to their needs and talents. When she wrote the essay 'Teaching Australia' for the January 2016 Griffith Review, she lifted the lid on a scandal that is yet to properly break - that our education system is unfair to our children and destroying their teachers.

In a powerful memoir inspired by her original essay, Gabrielle tells the full story: how she came to teaching, what great teaching is, how a teacher works and what it was that finally broke her.