in the classroom
Ghost in the machine
Brendan Murray . Photo : Yanni
One teacher on his school and the many ghosts who haunt it .
By Conor Burke
Brendan James Murray is haunted . Well , to be specific , his school is haunted , but Brendan is tormented by the ghosts that wander the halls .
The ghosts of children with unfulfilled potential , ghosts of others who couldn ’ t be reached and the more literal ghosts of pupils who died in the world outside the confines of the school gates .
There are also the kids who are ghosts in the sense that they are an ephemeral presence in the classroom : you never know when or if they will turn up at all , and when they do often cause havoc .
Murray writes about them all in his new book , The School : the ups and downs of one year in the classroom .
His book starts with these ghost stories , and like all good scary tales , it is overcast , tense and foreboding .
“ I wanted to show that certainly in government education when you ’ re working with people who might come from backgrounds of trauma or backgrounds of disadvantage , that one of the real challenges of the job is that you ’ re exposed to that ,” he tells Education Review .
“ New teachers discover that very , very quickly , and for some of them I think it ’ s quite a hard thing for them to deal with , particularly if they come from a more middle class background .
“ It ’ s a big part of the emotional toll of the job , because you really worry about and care about these kids and you know they ’ re often in difficult situations .”
Early in the book we read about Murray ’ s own schooling . We find him as a boy , bookish and quiet , and the prey of a vicious school bully .
“ The bully that I write about in the book , I think he – and these are just my reflections years down the track on my childhood memory , so it ’ s hard to say – but I think he fell into a slightly different category and a much rarer category of an almost sadistic kind of bully that you see very , very , very seldom as a teacher ,” Murray says .
Murray writes of the ongoing harassment he suffered at the hands of this particular child . He writes of one shocking incident in which he was nearly killed by his bully , who hurled him down a concrete stairwell .
“ He was a foot taller than me , probably twice my weight , athletic . I knew there was no point running ,” he writes .
“ Jude shoved me in the chest with sudden , explosive might ...”
“ As I flew , no part of me was in contact with the ground .”
Murray was suddenly caught by another , older student as he crashed headfirst towards the concrete , and in his reflections he feels lucky to have come away from the incident with his life .
It ’ s a wonder then that he felt that teaching was the occupation for him ,
16 | educationreview . com . au