Top buttons open, tie at an angle, occasional glances to the top desk. Reminds you of a dog off the lead, swift glances to check that his master is still there. Enough of simile — or is it metaphor? Fingers poking at calculators to multiply 7 by 3, to add 15 and 8; pens in mouths or twirled expertly between second and third fingers; glances at wristwatches — how much time left in this lesson?
Tom has no idea what to do, looks around in the hope of inspiration from the bowed heads of his classmates. 'Come up, Tom.' Tom is a big lad, second row of the scrum, too much time with his head stuck up a ... Never mind. Concentrate, you're the teacher.
He reminds you of the lad from Tangmalangaloo — knocks the benches all askew, upending of himself. Is that another simile? 'Sir, what does "solve the equation" mean?'
Oh God. You have been doing this for three weeks and he has never missed a class. But you explain it to him again, the rote set of steps that mysteriously rolls out an answer.
'Is that the answer, sir?' 'Yes, Tom, now you do exactly the same with the next two and come up again when you have done those.' But why are you sitting down anyway? Shouldn't you be moving around, looking over shoulders, pointing at little errors, whispering encouragement, monosyllabic hints?
But then the thought comes: is this any way to spend your life? Will it matter to Tom in ten years time that he cannot solve a quadratic equation? Will it matter to any of them?
Actually, it probably will, because someone has decreed that 15-year olds should be able to do this and if they cannot, they will fail. Well, not fail, that word has gone out of the school vocabulary, but they will be guided into a stream that says hod carrier, professional footballer, backbench MP.
Tom comes up. He has done what you showed him and got the answers. He is smiling. 'I can do this now, sir.' There is no bravado in that, just genuine pleasure. A small triumph, the one that explains why you love this job. Tom may not have many more classroom victories that day, but right now he is happy.
These are earnest kids: keen, wanting to succeed. And society has told them that to succeed they must be able to solve a quadratic equation, draw a parabola, find the vertex, state the axis of symmetry. This city has two million adults. How many of them ever heard of an axis of symmetry?
You used to teach Latin. For a while you taught computer programming: Assembler, BASIC, Pascal, Comal. But no one learns programming any more and that knocked the fun out of computers. So there's your life: Latin, Assembler, quadratic equations. Just as well you were not paid for any output useful to society. What do they call it now? Value adding.
There are calculators that solve quadratic equations but they are not allowed in schools except a few progressive ones in Victoria. They will do calculus for you too — you can't get inside the door of an American university without calculus.
Meanwhile, there are high schools in Australia which don't have a mathematics teacher for their junior classes. But that's all right because they don't call it maths any more. They call it problem solving and get the PE teacher or one of the science staff to teach it.
So here's a suggestion for those struggling with the national curriculum. Forget maths as a universal subject. Offer it as an option in high school to be taken by those with some ability in dealing with abstraction.
Then have it taught by properly qualified teachers, people who actually like mathematics, are inspired by it, regard Euler and Hamilton and Riemann with the same kind of reverence that their colleagues in English regard Shakespeare and Eliot.
We have inherited an assembly line model of schools — everyone of the same age learning the same material at the same time. Never mind that many are bored: they made sense of algebra the first time they met it, and now must wait for their slower classmates.
We are not talking about a few here: up to one third of the students of any unstreamed class are bored. Ah yes, streaming, we can see where you are coming from: you want us to go back to the elite of A, B, C, D, E, F classes. No, I don't. I would like to see a school with only A classes, where the talents a student has can be developed to a standard of useful excellence.
Henry Ford invented the assembly line, and now the CEO of his company is prepared to work for a dollar a year. There must be a metaphor there somewhere. Or is it a simile?
Frank O'Shea is a retired teacher. His book Keeping Faith: 40 Years of Marist College Canberra was published in 2008.