Sita Walker

Like, I'm not even the best teacher in my staff room.

Definitely not my school.

Like, I think I'm good, but I'm, you know, I'm not working miracles.

Interestingly, I think all of them.

So everything that I've done over 20 years as a teacher and all the things that I've learnt, but not learnt as in how to teach in a classroom.

I mean, I've definitely learnt that too.

But I think what you really learn as a teacher is how to

how to see what's going to happen before it happens, how to read the connections between people in the room, the energy that's in the room, how to shift things so that whatever happens in the classroom goes the way that you want it to go.

I've brought what it is to be in front of those kids every day and kind of be connected to them.

So a few years ago, I had a fantastic class of kids.

It was a literature class.

They were really interesting kids, outgoing, smart.

So the energy in the room was sassy, like it was heightened.

When you get a whole lot of smart, bookish kids in a room, then it can go either to a really sort of introverted energy or you can just have everything come out at once.

And they were like that.

They were big and bold and interesting and I wanted them to love the subject and I thought, well, this will be the class to do this with and I asked them to memorise a poem because I knew that there was a real competitive element

edge to the room and they would do it just to see if they could outdo each other and they did and the poem that I asked them to memorise was Wild Geese by Mary Oliver which begins you do not have to be good

you do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting, which obviously speaks to me and I thought could speak to other young people.

And they took to this with great flight.

Not only did they learn it off by heart, they could recite it together.