Miss for the Day

Over the past week, I’ve met hundreds of people who know me only as ‘Miss’.

Though I’ve printed my name on the whiteboard at the beginning of every class, I’m yet to hear a student use it. It’s nothing personal; at the Northern Rivers high school where I’ve been working as a substitute teacher, it’s the norm to address female teachers as ‘Miss’ and male teachers as ‘Sir’, regardless of their age, marital status or knightly qualities.

I’ve thought a lot this week about what it means to be a Miss in the teacher crisis. For the past three months, my boyfriend and I have been travelling around Australia in the campervan that we built together. As a doctor and secondary teacher, we’re lucky to be able to take our professions on the road, working casually to fund our year-long trip. Our van’s miraculous secondary battery means that as long as the car keeps rolling and the sun keeps shining, we’re basically self-sufficient, and we’ve spent most of our time camping in national parks. Aside from some logical divisions in manual tasks (including spider removal), we’ve been living a pretty genderless existence; we share the cooking, the cleaning and the driving, and have long abandoned the beauty standards we upheld in our previous lives. It’s a rare and liberating experience – for me, especially, I think – to forget about our reflections beyond the occasional glance in the rear vision mirror.

Substitute teaching has changed all that. Stepping back into the classroom for the first time since last Christmas, I can’t remember feeling more aware of my gender.

I already understood, of course, that teaching is a gendered profession. In 2023, 71.9% of Australia’s secondary teachers and 82.1% of our primary teachers were women. In light of these numbers, it’s hard not to see our national teacher crisis as a gender issue. The treatment of Australian teachers, who report feeling distrusted, maligned, ignored and abused, not to mention overworked and underpaid, is inseparable from the treatment of Australian women. Over the years, sexism has established itself as an industry norm that excuses teachers’ ongoing exploitation.

Working as a substitute teacher has given me a new perspective on sexism in schools. As a casual, I am spared from many of the responsibilities of my ‘feminised’ profession. Beyond putting out spot fires, I’m not expected to offer pastoral care. I don’t respond to emails outside of school hours. I’m comparatively well-paid, earning a daily rate twice as high as what I earned as a second-year teacher in Victoria. Yet despite being insulated from systemic forms of sexism, female casuals bear the brunt of acute sexism towards teachers. Unless you’re a regular, students don’t know your name: you’re a Miss for the day, anonymous and taken at face value.

I remember this sensation from my first days of teaching. When you enter a classroom for the first time, students decide how much respect they’ll give you based on a few narrow metrics: How big are you? How are you dressed? How loud is your voice? What energy are you projecting as you enter the room? It used to remind me of our family dog, who obeys my father while ignoring my stepmother and me. We may joke about our misogynistic spaniel, but his behaviour hints at the frequent and frustrating assumption that authority is a matter of physical presence.

Early in my teaching degree, I was advised that if you want to know how to dominate a classroom, look to small female teachers. Lacking the authority that comes with an intimidating physique or a booming voice, these teachers are often masters of behaviour management. As twenty-nine-year-old female teachers go, I fare okay: at five foot ten, I’m taller than most of the students I teach. I have a naturally low voice that I deliberately keep below a certain volume. I always make an effort to dress professionally for work, even when school policy does not demand it. But my three years in the classroom have taught me that when it comes to behaviour management, none of this counts for as much as being a Sir. And it depresses me, that the things I am proud of – my subject knowledge, my skills as an educator, my work ethic and commitment to the kids I teach – are all apparently subordinate to my sex.

I spent seven days working at Austinvale* High School. Each day I was reminded that my students saw me as a young woman first, and a teacher second. 

My first lesson at Austinvale was set to be an easy one. I was supervising a Year 11 English class who were watching a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello, and my job was to mark the roll, press play and keep students in their seats. The group seemed friendly: they were interested in me and my trip, and knew a surprising amount about Shakespeare. Once they were settled, I turned down the lights and breathed out for the first time that morning. This is okay, I thought, sinking into a plastic chair. I’ve got this.

Within minutes I was up out of my seat, standing close to students who were talking over the film. It’s one of the first behaviour management techniques teachers are taught: when a student misbehaves, start with eye contact, then their name, then physical proximity. The goal is to correct the behaviour without disrupting the flow of the lesson. I settled in an empty chair in the back row beside a blonde-haired boy who seemed to be the source of the disruption. On his other side, a girl with a nose ring and heavy eyeliner glared at me. Without breaking eye contact, she leaned into the boy’s ear and spoke in a perfectly audible whisper: ‘Miss wants to f*ck you.’

I was glad I’d turned off the lights. My cheeks flared and tears pricked in my eyes as I stared doggedly at the screen. In an act of Shakespearean witchery, this sixteen-year-old girl had summoned the memories of a hundred similar encounters: of double entendres, unwanted touches, walks home late at night clutching keys between fingers. Of that run on the beach when an unknown cyclist called me a sl*t. Maybe she knew what she was doing, maybe not. I think it’s more likely that she didn’t want me sitting near her and friends, and targeted the only thing she knew about me: my gender.

My daily interactions with Austinvale students contained variations on this theme. Sometimes their behaviour was brazen enough to be called out – such as when a group of Year 9 boys projected pornographic images on the screen behind me as I marked the roll – but most of the time it was slipperier, harder to pin down. It was a matter of stance, or of tone. Supreme Justice Stewart Potter said it best when he tried to articulate the nature of obscenity: that while it’s hard to define, ‘I know it when I see it.’ Even the compliments on my appearance I received from students made me feel vaguely uneasy. On one occasion, a senior student interrupted my Year 9 lesson on Romeo and Juliet to ask me where I bought my pants. I’ve spoken with female colleagues before about how these exchanges can make you feel surveilled, self-conscious. As if a little bit of your authority has been chipped off and held for safekeeping in the fickle hand of adolescent approval.

After an especially rough day, my boyfriend took me out for dinner. He booked an Italian restaurant in the next town where we could safely avoid seeing students. Weeping into a negroni, I told him that I felt like some sort of emotional prostitute: that I was accepting large sums of money to be teenagers’ punching bag for the day. And that by failing to come down hard on their sexist behaviour — because I didn’t know their names, lacked access to their electronic records, or simply couldn’t be bothered — I was somehow complicit in a system that was making teachers’ lives worse. More than once, I’ve overheard full-time teachers complain about how students’ interactions with casuals are eroding the standards of behaviour they work so hard to set. And with over one thousand teaching vacancies in regional New South Wales alone, this situation is not about to change.

When a student ruins your day, it feels good to pretend that they are the sole source of the problem. That they knew exactly how their behaviour would hurt you, and went through with it anyway. But if I’m honest, I get it: a school system that is over-reliant on casual teachers sucks for everyone, students included. At Austinvale, I covered classes that had been taught by a rotating cast of casuals since the beginning of the year. These students’ first question was whether I was their new ‘proper teacher’, and it felt awful having to tell them no. ‘Don’t you like us enough?’ inquired one Year 7 girl, twisting the beaded friendship bracelet on her skinny wrist. After a morning spent reminding myself not to take things personally, I found myself giving her the same advice: ‘I’m sure they’ll find someone soon,’ I said, though we both knew I was lying.

The discontent is real. Yet the way in which some students are dealing with their frustrations — with sexism towards teachers — is unacceptable.

By the time I took that job at Austinvale, 33 Australian women had been killed by men this year. On my first weekend off, thirty minutes down the road, James Harrison murdered his two-year old son Rowan in an act of revenge against his former partner. It might seem like a long bow to draw a link between the treatment of casual teachers and Australia’s male violence epidemic, but experts say otherwise. Stewart Riddle, a senior lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland’s school of teacher education and early childhood, argues that ‘schools kind of work as a little microcosm of society … you can tell a lot about a society from its schools.’ They say that you can judge the calibre of your date by the way they address the waiter; I propose that you can assess the moral status of a society by the way its youngest members treat people they will never see again.

We know that students are influenced by what they see, even if they are not the direct perpetrators. The Albanese government’s $925 million funding package for combatting gender-based violence includes measures to protect young Australians from accessing misogynistic material online. But what about the misogyny they are witnessing at school?

The teacher crisis is causing chaos in our nation’s schools. And while the treatment of casual staff probably seems like an afterthought, I believe that students learn more than we think from their interactions with substitute teachers. At the end of the day, this is what schooling is for: to prepare students to step out into the world, where they will encounter Misses and Sirs and all manner of people. When they treat them the same, we’ll know we’ve been proper teachers.

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* A pseudonym.