‘Man
-I’-festations and confessions:
the
socially constructed oxymoron of being a woman mathematics teacher in a
historic all-boys independent school.
by Dalene Swanson
Sometimes
past events in our own lives are re-evoked by other’s narratives and
they form interwoven threads that inform our identities in social
relation with others. These threads seem to weave a tapestry of a much
larger narrative, although we are unable to see the whole from the
perspective of the past. Often, these past happenings fragment our
identities and we choose to have it so by breaking the threads and
tossing them aside as if to dismiss their relevance to our greater
purpose. But the threads float, never far from our fractured selves,
forever wanting to find meaning, wanting to play a part, wanting to
create new creative patterns of being, … and searching for the center.
Without our realizing it, they coalesce and intersect with other
threads of our lives and soon there is a texture and coherence which
we, perhaps, did not initially see, looking for it elsewhere, until we
could no longer ignore its relevance and place within the whole.
I
was still very ‘young’ when I was asked to apply for a post as a
secondary mathematics teacher in an all-boys traditional and historic
independent school in South Africa. I was an education student and the
school concerned had enquired about me at my university and ‘done their
homework’ as to who I was, what I could do and how I could ‘add value’
to their school. When the telephone call came, I was taken aback! There
were very few jobs available and too many graduating education
students. Very few would ever get the chance to teach, let alone be
offered an interview. And now ‘they’ were calling ‘me’! The country had
been through ‘states of emergency’ and the economy was very weak. My
only option, if I wanted to try and teach, was to apply to teach in an
‘all white’ school and, being classified ‘all white’, to become a
member of an ‘all white’ teachers’ union, if I was ever offered a post
at all! That, in principle, I could not do! So, it was a mixed blessing
when the call came. “At least,” I thought, “it is a multi-racial
environment, albeit an elitist traditional all-boys school.”
I
taught at the school for almost a decade, and, for the most part, it
was a positive experience and I have sacred and tender memories of my
interaction with students and staff, and of the role they played in my
life and I in theirs. I loved to teach and I naively thought, at the
beginning, that that was all that would be needed for acceptance into
the school. I soon learnt the rules on the ground and the social codes
for survival in this very patriarchal environment. I learnt, at first,
that I had to be very many times better than any other male teacher to
be granted a modicum of ‘respect’. And ‘respect’ was key to survival!
‘Respect’ from the students and ‘respect’ from the other staff members.
Respect, in this context, was something that had to be ‘earned’. You
had to prove yourself and, being a woman, that meant proving yourself
over and over again, ‘beyond doubt’. I offered my students my
enthusiasm, my love of teaching and my joy of teaching young people.
But I also knew that I had to ‘get results’. And that I did! My
students achieved well and I developed a reputation as an ‘effective
teacher’ in the community and further a field within the independent
school family. But this was still not quite enough within the teaching
environment at the school. I was still a woman…
There
were very few women teachers at the school at the time and none that
were ‘young’ and female, other than myself, teaching in a prominent
curriculum subject such as mathematics. It was an alienating experience
for me as a woman, but the satisfaction I felt from my interaction with
my students greatly compensated for it. I tried to blinker myself from
the blatant chauvinism I often was forced to endure and accept, keeping
my head down, focused on my work and my students, and hoping outwardly
that if I didn’t ‘make waves’, it would somehow go away or, at least,
become more invisible. Inside me, I knew it wouldn’t, that the layers
of ‘white patriarchy’ were deeply entrenched and hegemonic, informed by
the rituals and traditions within the school and the dominance of its
colonial cultural ethos. I realized that this was how the power of
prejudice operated, … that it makes its mode of control invisible and
irreproachable in context and that it takes some legitimate power base
from within another context to begin to contest it. I was alone,
vulnerable and weakly positioned within the context, all because I was
a woman, and there was no legitimate space for a woman’s voice in this
place. But, I needed the job, I loved my job in the classroom, and I
was trying my best….
One
day, after a little while at the school, a male member of staff
confronted me at a mathematics department staff meeting, suggesting
that my students were ‘doing so well’ simply because I had seen the
examination papers beforehand and I was ‘obviously’ teaching towards
the exam. His evidence? Well, this was the interesting part! His
argument was that: “it is not possible for the students of a young
female teacher with so little experience to be achieving such
consistently high results.” The Voice was singular and uncontestable.
It was situated in a place whose values and principles allowed for such
blatant prejudice, illegitimating the voice of the victim. Although the
overlying principle of ‘respect’ was that you had ‘to earn’ it, this
was the underlying rule… that if you were a ‘woman’ you could never
‘earn it’, … that ‘earning it’ was the precinct of men only, that you
were exempt from these rules simply by ‘being’ a woman, and that the
‘right to earn it’ was beyond your control. I realized, even in my
outrage, that I had overstepped the mark of the rules of this context
in playing out the very rules that informed it… that I had achieved
‘too highly’, I had ‘earned the respect’ too well and I had shown them
up … and they didn’t like it … it made them uncomfortable and
threatened. It began to challenge the existing stereotypes on women
teachers and achievement, and made a mockery of the man-made rules of
this context. I was beating them at their own game. How dare I? Who was
I to challenge the existing social relations? I was being an upstart,
even in my silence, through being ‘good’ at what I was supposed to be
good at….
Even
as I expressed my outrage at the blatant sexism of the remark, I knew
that to take the issue further as a complaint to the principal or
school board, would be to provide it, in this context, with some
‘legitimacy’ and to forever feel the shroud of doubt hanging over me.
The other members of staff were obviously shocked by the male member of
staff’s unexpected challenge and in their bodily-visible discomfort and
embarrassment, they remained silent, watching to see how I would
‘handle the situation’. Would I ‘handle it like a man’, the only way to
‘handle’ situations in this context?! I was all alone, a victim in my
own department… no one daring to stand up for me like a decent ‘human’
would. I was caught visibly and firmly in a double-bind, although,
perhaps, it only highlighted that I had, in fact, never been otherwise
in this context. I was forced, yet again, as if I had not had to do
this enough, to ‘prove’ my innocence, to exonerate myself by turning
myself inside out, being more ‘male’ than the men. I was a suspected
criminal by being woman and I had to prove my ‘manliness’ so as to
divest myself of the charge of criminality.
It
was the practice at the school for each member of the mathematics staff
to be assigned the task of setting several examination papers in
mathematics and to moderate other mathematics examination papers for
each grade. I challenged the department not to give me any examination
setting or moderating assignments for the upcoming examinations and we
would prove the veracity or otherwise of the male member of staff’s
accusation. And so it was done. I quite enjoyed the freedom of not
having to set examinations that half-year. More importantly, I enjoyed
being able to teach my students with some freedom without having to
avoid certain kinds of questions because I had known that there were
similar ones on the examination paper. I knew that such a practice was
not accepted here… that it would be construed as providing unfair
advantage to your own class students over other class sets… a form of
cheating. And I say this with ambivalence, because I am not entirely
convinced of the unsoundness of the practice … as if preparing students
for an examination is so criminal… but these were the rules on the
ground and I knew them and, ironically, made sure to practice them so
as ‘to survive’. Ironically, not knowing what was on the examination
papers gave me the freedom to teach and prepare my students for the
upcoming examinations unhindered by these other considerations. It was
liberating!
And
so the examinations came and went and my students achieved even more
highly than before! I was elated! I had ‘proven’ myself unequivocally
at their own game. But it had no joy. I expected some announcement…
maybe some comment… I even hoped for an apology to be given to me.
Perhaps I still had, or wanted to have, faith in them … more faith in
them than they had in me…. I waited…. There was nothing…. Only
silence…. This time the silence came from them, but it was still my
silence they held inside it. It was a silence of power, with the
silence of alienation subsumed within.
So
eventually I raised the issue myself. I made an announcement! At a
department meeting I stood up and thanked the person concerned for
providing me with the opportunity to teach my students with some
freedom, away from the tyrannical considerations of the evaluation
instruments at the school… I rubbed it in a bit… I had so little
opportunity to rub things in of this nature… I told them what a
wonderful pre-exam teaching experience I had had, that they should try
it some time … that it was a liberating experience and that last, but
not least, I was thankful and grateful for the opportunity for my
students to have been granted the opportunity to do even better than
before! Thank you! … There was silence. Nothing … nothing was said. No
comment was ever made about the issue again. I knew, though, that they
thought that I had taken it ‘like a man.’ I was still conforming to
male rules… I had shown my disgust, but, according to them, I had kept
my ‘dignity’ in that context, … in a context, ironically, that allowed
you no real dignity … that was the precinct of men!
I
continued to teach at the school for many years and after a time I
realized that I had become part of ‘their’ family whether they liked it
or not. They now tolerated my sex and reconstructed my gender because I
had become an old-timer. I was simply a familiar part of the fabric of
the school that could not be done away with. I had a part to play in
the history of the family, albeit an uncomfortable one for them, for I
continued to gain a reputation for ‘effective teaching’ and for my
students’ achievements. I realized that I had become an ‘honourary
male’ to them within the school, and at the same time, contradictorily
and similarly as usual, I was also the school’s mascot. They also
became a part of me, like a family with siblings you don’t always get
along with but love nonetheless. But, for me, the full trust could
never be regained. I learned to care for them, but unlike the way I
cared for my students, which was caring wholly, I cared for them
without full or real respect…. They had taken that from me forever! …
Once,
when I was still in elementary school, towards the end of my last grade
in that school, I overheard my mathematics teacher in conversation with
my mother. My mathematics teacher’s name was Mr. Nieken and he was a
strict and stern male teacher. But I hadn’t minded him. I liked
mathematics and he hadn’t been a bad teacher. He was telling my mother
how good I was in mathematics and that he believed in my abilities. But
then, as if he had said what shouldn’t have been said, he added a quick
addendum: “ … but, it is usually the boys that take over from the girls
later on. Usually, when they mature, it is the boys that become better
than the girls… I put my money on Brent Sharper,” he said. I was
heartbroken at the time. I had never thought of my sex as informing my
learning. I couldn’t understand what being a girl had to do with it …
or what it had to do with my future success or lack thereof in
mathematics. Why was being a girl a necessary limiting criterion for
success in this subject? Later, I learned that this was the agency of
prejudice and I never allowed it to prescribe the limits of possibility
for me, although I learned to see how it delineated the spaces of
‘success’ and ‘failure’ for others. I learned to see how principles of
power informed pedagogic practices, as well as ways of being and living
in the world, and I could recognize it when it was happening and
understood, to some small degree, what it must feel like to the
victim(s).
There have been times when I once dreamed of bumping into my old
mathematics teacher in the street and telling him that I had achieved a
B.Sc. degree in mathematics and that I was a successful secondary
school mathematics teacher. I may even have told him, in my dream, of
my future success in a Ph.D. program in mathematics education, just to
make him eat his words. But that has no appeal now. If I saw him in the
street today, he would probably be a very old man and I would be sorry
for him… sorry for him in case he had never overcome his prejudice….
sorry for him as a teacher of young people for the heavy weight on his
soul! I know that it would be a pitiful experience for me!
Over
the years, I have come to realize how the threads of past happenings
often tear our souls and that the broken threads of these come together
again, in good time, in a woven fabric that the paths of life inform
and which could be made to heal wounds. We can choose to listen, or
not, to the searching of the broken threads in their paths towards new
meaning. One way would be to weave a shroud to hide the pain…. Another
would be to weave a tapestry of vivid colour that tells the story of
lives well lived and makes visible its elements in ways that can uplift
and empower others, thereby claiming one’s own dignity. I have found
some dignity in my own practices, in the classroom, in my mothering, my
marriage and in my research work. I haven’t always succeeded in what I
have aimed to do, but I am still trying! And in that trying, lies my
dignity. I have found it through trying to push the boundaries of
possibility for those that I am responsible for, and for others where I
can, and by attempting to be a ‘worthy example’. This has been my
personal goal. I have gained my own dignity by recognizing the dignity
in others and trying to give back dignity … and by attempting to weave,
through my life stories, tapestries of hope!
Dr.
Swanson received her PhD from UBC in 2004