The Unteachables Podcast

#142: My English teacher saved my life (and she will never know it). The episode you need to hear if you've ever doubted your impact.

• Claire English • Season 7 • Episode 142

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This episode is personal. Raw. Vulnerable. And honestly… one of the most important stories I’ve ever shared.

So if you’re a teacher who’s ever doubted the impact you’re having, especially with those students who seem like they couldn’t care less? This one’s for you.

Today, I’m taking you back to my own high school days. Not the shiny, well-behaved student success story, but the version of me who was skipping class, stinking like cigarettes, and seriously thinking about dropping out altogether.

And then… there was Miss Povey. My English teacher.
The one who saw me. Who actually saw me.

I’ve shared little bits of this before, but never like this.

Inside the episode, I’ll walk you through:

  • What was really going on for me during those high school years
  • The moment I nearly dropped out and the one thing she said that changed everything
  • The ripple effect of her belief in me (spoiler alert: it’s why this whole Unteachables thing even exists)

This is for every teacher who's ever wondered if that one sentence you wrote on a kid’s paper, or that 30-second conversation you had, really mattered.

I’m here to tell you, it freaking does.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why one teacher’s belief can be enough to change a life
  • The impact of seeing a student beyond their behaviour
  • How academic disengagement is often masking something deeper
  • A powerful reminder that your presence, your consistent, persistent presence, is more impactful than any program or policy

Have a question, comment, or just want to say hello? Drop us a text!

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SPEAKER_00:

Oh, hi there, teachers. Welcome to the Unteachables Podcast. I'm your host, Claire English, and I am just a fellow teacher, a toddler mama, and a big old behaviour nerd on a mission to demystify and simplify that little thing called classroom management. The way we've all been taught to manage behaviour and classroom manage has left us playing crowd control, which is not something I subscribe to because we're not bouncers, we're teachers. So listen in as I walk you through the game-changing strategies, and I mean the things that we can actually do and action in our classrooms that will allow you to lean into your beautiful values as a compassionate educator and feel empowered to run your room with a little more calm, and dare I say it's a lot less chaos. I will see you in the episode. Hello, my lovely Unteachables crew. I hope you are having a great week or weekend or whatever you're doing right now. I wanted to start and it sounds so self-absorbed, which is probably why I don't do it that often. But I had this message on Instagram and it was from the lovely Diana. And Diana said, uh, don't want to sound like a weirdo, but can you give us a few more updates on your personal life on the podcast, like work life, your lovely husband, how your daughter is getting on in daycare? I like hearing about it every now and again. Um, so Diana, thank you. That's really lovely. And if you are the kind of person that's like, no, just give me the freaking, you know, classroom management help. Like, I don't care about your life, I care about what you can help me with. Um, then you can just fast forward through this little bit. But I thought I would start with a little life update uh because I am a human and so are you, and I think it is nice to give a little update. Uh so my little girl, Ava, she is three in January. And when I was writing a couple of little things down, I'm like, what has happened lately? What has happened since I gave a little bit of an update? But she's three in January, which means I've had this podcast for over three years, which, like, I don't know where the time is going. I started this podcast when I was heavily pregnant. I'm like, I need to do something like before she like I just felt like this massive race before I popped her out. I'm like, uh, okay, what do I do? I need to get a podcast ready. I need to like, I think I lined up something ridiculous, like three months of daily Instagram posts. I lined up months of podcast episodes in advance. And looking back now, I'm like, girl, just chill, like everything's okay. I just was so scared of what motherhood would bring. But yes, three years, fast forward three years, and I've got this little incredible, hilarious girl who is just as sassy as me, is just as much of a wind-up as my husband. And I just could not be more in love with her if I tried. Uh, she's just the best. Um, and for anybody thinking, are you gonna have another one? Because uh people love to ask that question and pry into that, don't they? Especially strangers on the street who see you with one toddler or family members, love to ask, like, are you having another baby? Um we will think about it maybe when she's a little bit older, because I am currently another life update is that I am writing another book. I'm writing my second book for Sage Publications, and I am so excited about how it's coming together. I don't think I've shared much about it on the podcast so far, but it is called the Low Level Disruption uh Playbook. The low level disruption playbook, I've got to get used to saying my new book name. And it is what it says on the on the pack, really, it is all about low-level disruptions. And the whole premise of the book is that it follows a teacher through a fictional teacher, the one that kind of like it spills up with all of the moments that we would all kind of have in our day-to-day. But it follows one kind of typical lesson where all of these behaviors are happening and it kind of pauses at different parts of the lesson and provides you with like a step-by-step of what to do, what the problem is. Uh, it's gonna be freaking awesome. And I'm enjoying writing it. But let me be honest with you, right? Having a baby, being pregnant, and then having a baby. I wrote the my last book, it's never just about the behavior. I wrote that when my daughter was between being a newborn and being six months old. It was if the manuscript was due when she was six months old, and it was amazing, but it was traumatizing. And I I honestly can't stand the thought of doing that simultaneously again. I would like to give all of my attention to the book, and I would then like to give all of my attention to a baby and not have to like, you know, do 20 podcast episodes that are like lined up, or do 90 Instagram posts and line them up. It's just not how I want to go into. Um, if I get lucky enough to have another baby, then that's not how I want to do it. Anyway, that is another aside. Uh, hubby is good. He is actually editing this podcast. So hello, hubby. I actually said a few episodes ago that I was a one-woman show, and then he scoffed at me as he um edited the last podcast episode. He's like, one woman show, what I'm here, because he has actually been working with me, which is really exciting. We moved to Australia obviously at the start of this year, and design work does not come as easy. He's a designer and uh design work isn't as flowing as it is in London. So um he's been working and doing some stuff for the Unteachables, which is great. If you've emailed me recently, the person emailing you back might have been my husband. But yeah, speaking of the move to Australia, we are settling and adjusting back to life here in Australia. Slowly, I say slowly. Uh, I really miss London. Like we left in like, you know, the start of 2024, I want to say. Yeah, the start of 2024, we left London, and um I still just I miss it so desperately, but I know that it's just so much better here for Ava in terms of like having family around and the sun is shining. Like it is spring here, and like the very start of spring, and on the weekend we were down at the beach and we were swimming, and the sun was shining, and it was so beautiful. So there are some huge benefits of being back. Like Ava absolutely loves it here. Anyway, I think that is enough of a live update. So, Diana, thank you for asking. And anybody else out there who actually cares about uh my life behind the podcast. But if you were just skipping through that, that is also totally fine. You can come back in now for the proper episodes, which is actually another kind of personal life story. Uh, it is actually about one of my high school teachers. I shared this story with my behavior clubbers about two months ago on one of our live sessions, and one of my um members came and spoke to me after and was like, I haven't been able to stop thinking about this for a week. Like every time I walk into the classroom, I'm thinking about this story that you told, and it just made me feel so much better, and it's really the reminder that I needed. So I really wanted to bring it onto the podcast and talk through my high school experience and this one particular teacher. So, onto the story, right? I finished high school in 2007, so that is almost 20 years ago now, which I can't, I can't even, you know, believe that I am saying that I left high school almost 20 years ago. But there I was very recently sitting on my phone at an embarrassing hour of the night searching for my high school English teacher, Miss Povey. I was going on a one-woman man hunt, one woman woman hunt, a woman hunt, trying to find my hippie-dippy high school English teacher who I didn't think would have Facebook or Instagram or anything like that because of the person that she was. Like she's probably living her best life in Katoomba, uh, just reading books and you know, going for bushwalks. And I hope that's the last, I hope she's living just the best life. Anyway, if you have listened to this show from the beginning, or if you've read my book, you have heard, I'm sure you've heard me talk about this before. But primary school was great academically, you know. I was engaged, I was successful, but it was hard in other ways. Like I was really severely bullied. And if you've listened to my bullying no way week episode, you'll know more about that, about how I had a run-in with one of my former bullies and the impact that that had on me. Um, but when I was in school, like in primary school particularly, I was really lanky, I was tall. I had this huge growth spurt, and I was that huge person that had to kind of like stand right back in center for the school photos because I was the tallest, like I really was tall. I was really lanky. I also had really huge teeth, and I still have huge teeth, but I've grown into them more, and you know, they look a bit more in place now. And I had enormous ears again, like they're still enormous. And I don't know if anyone out there is from the same era as me, where we just I think it's actually come back around again, which scares me. But in the era that I was going to primary school and high school, we were all just obsessed with this like bowling ball hair look where we had to like slick our hair back as much as possible. And if one hair was at a place, it would look like social, you know, like it just horrible. So we had to slick our hair back, and not one hair was at a place, like putting heaps and heaps of hairspray on it. And me being this tall, lanky, like big-eared, big-teethed girl, uh, I was just like this Q-tip with big ears sticking out the side, and and kids can be really, really mean. Um, so it was hard in that respect. But primary school was great because my teachers looked at me and they just saw pure potential. They thought I was really bright. I was in all of the gifted and talented classes. I was a very avid reader, so I think that's probably why I kind of, you know, it was things came easy to me in terms of like my literacy. But then I went to high school and things at home changed immensely. Like overnight things changed a lot when my mum started to struggle with severe OCD. And overnight I felt like I went from being a child who, you know, was going well at school and had all of these prospects for the future, and you know, like all of those things, and just home life was it was it was good, you know. Like uh we didn't have a lot, and we lived in Western Sydney, and like, you know, we were week to week kind of struggle in terms of money, we were struggling, but I never felt like I wasn't loved by my mum, and I've got lots of good memories, and I I love my family, and you know, so things were good in that in that regard, but uh I went from being a child and a child that was quite happy to almost being a carer to my mum. Um, and my dad was not very much of a help, and he's actually not a very nice person. So instead of being a support during that time when my mum was struggling immensely with her mental health, and if anyone has dealt with anybody who has severe OCD, um, intrusive uh thought OCD, it's one of the most brutal things that um you can go through mentally. But my dad, he wasn't a very good support during that time because instead of being there and stepping up to the plate, he decided to spend all of the family money, whatever money we had, because we don't have a lot, on dating websites and hotel rooms for other women. And when my mum was no longer able to kind of wait on him hand and foot because she was like so absent, like just mentally not able to kind of cope in the day-to-day, he I was next in line to wait on him hand and foot because I was a girl, and that is the woman's role in the household, and that's what girls do. We exist just to serve men, which is also probably why my brother had a very different experience when we were growing up, and probably why he went on to be a successful accountant while I was still sitting there in my early 20s smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, trying to just like get through life. This, then, of course, when we were at school, translated into how I showed up and you know, when I showed up as well. Like teachers, they didn't like me, it was very obvious my teachers hated me, I was really disruptive, and because mental health and well-being and all of those things, they weren't quite in the mainstream yet. I truly fell through the cracks. Uh, I was just told by everyone, like no one could see the correlation between like my changes in temperament, my changes in, you know, like attendance or like, you know, work ethic. They did they couldn't see the the shift that happened and they couldn't well, they saw the shift, but it's like they didn't say we've got this 13-year-old girl who went from being really studious to going into the bush and smoking and not coming to class. They couldn't see the connection between those two. So instead of being supported and instead of somebody going, like, hey Claire, what's going on here? I was told by everybody, just leave school, do a trade. School is not for you. Academics aren't your thing. Like that was the dominant discourse all throughout my high school years. I couldn't relate to my peers. I felt very lost. I felt like, you know, everyone, I looked around me and everybody was able, like all my peers, like were able to just be kids, and they were talking about things that that kids would talk about, and you know, really normal childhood things, and I just no longer could relate because when I was going home, I was worried about finding my mum dead. I was worried about, you know, just not like being able to survive. Like I was I was in total survival mode all of the time, and the kind of things that I was experiencing on a day-to-day basis, I just could no longer see the purpose or the joy in being a child. Um, so it was really hard to connect at school, and I just felt so lost. Despite being told to leave school quite frequently by everybody around me, including my parents, um, because you know, sending a kid to school is quite expensive. And why would you want to keep sending a kid to school who seemingly doesn't give a crap? I did stay until year 12, despite everybody telling me not to, but I was very, very close. I probably just stayed because I didn't know what else to do, but I was very close to not showing up for my my HSC, my high school certificate, which is the end of school exams. So you'd call it different things in in different countries. Um, it'd be A levels in um the UK, and I'm not sure what it would be in the US, I'm sorry, but like the end of school, like the biggest exams when you finish school. So I stayed until you're 12. I didn't think I'd get through my exams. I would literally get to school and then hide behind a car in the car park and then get in my friend's car and be driven to McDonald's where we would sit there and have coffees with like 12 sugars in it and smoke a million cigarettes, and then I would go back to school and I would stink like Siggies. Like no teacher gave a crap about what I was doing or who I was because I was just this misfit. But throughout all of this, there was one like kind of beacon of light which got me through, which was the subject that has always come very easy for me, which was English. So I did every bit of English that I possibly could to give myself a shot at it. So when I was picking my subjects for year 11 and 12, I chose advanced English, I chose Extension 1 English, and I chose Extension 2 English. And I was taught by bum bum bum, getting to the crux of the episode is not just me trauma dumping, see, it was Miss Povey, my English teacher. And there are two significant moments in the Povey timeline that I want to talk about. The first is when I was preparing for my extension to English piece. For extension to English, if you're not aware, you have to do a big project. There's no coursework necessarily. It's just you putting together a big project that you work on for an entire year and then you submit it to the board, and then you get a result for that piece. So for my extension to English piece, I'm like, okay, what's the easiest for me? What's going to come naturally and what's going to take the least amount of effort? Definitely wasn't an extended essay. It was going to be a story. So I wrote a short story for my extension to piece. It was about, um, it was actually about fur farming because I was like a vegetarian at the time and I was really big on animal rights. Um, and I wrote this piece from the perspective of an animal in a I wish I could find that. My gosh, it'd be so funny now, but obviously not the content's not funny, but um I got so I was doing this piece and uh I submitted the draft because I I did do a little bit of work, uh, funny that, but Miss Povey wrote some feedback on the very little work that I was doing because everybody else was working really hard and submitting lots of drafts, and I finally got a draft to Povey, and she wrote on my page, she was like scribbling little notes, and one of the bits of feedback that she wrote was this here is truly brilliant. I actually remember very little detail about high school and university because I think that I've kind of blocked things out, but that sentence, this is truly brilliant, I can see that as vivid as a picture in my mind right now because that little thing, that little like nuggets of you are worth something here and you can do something here, that meant so much. I can't even tell you. Like to this day, 20 years later, I think about that line that she wrote on that piece of paper for me. The second iconic Povey moment was I was gonna pull out of my HSE. I said that before, like I just saw literally no point of doing the exams, I was gonna fail anyway, I hadn't read the books, I never read the books, I was gonna, you know, be rubbish anyway. So I was leaving Povey's classroom one day and I think she was calling me back and I said, I'm not gonna do it anyway, like, you know, effort, like not, I'm not staying, I can't be bothered. And she stopped me and she said, Claire, there's no way that I'm gonna let you not sit these exams. Like you are going to be sitting these exams. So you are not walking out of this classroom. You can do this. I don't care if you haven't bloody read the book. I haven't, I don't care if you do this. If you just walk into that room, you just walk into that exam hall and you sit down and you pick up a damn pen and you just write anything, you will pass this exam. I promise you. I didn't believe her. And she goes, You're gonna, you're not going to lunch. You're gonna be sitting here right now and you're gonna be writing me an essay based on the question that I put on the board. So, so that lunchtime she sat me down and she wrote an exam question up on the board and she said, Okay, Claire, I want you to write for half an hour. Like, that's it. Just write for half an hour. I want to see what you can do, and I really want to see like how you're going to go here. And I'll be very honest about how you'd go in the HSC. So I did. I wrote my wrote for half an hour like she needed me to, and she read it on the spot, and she's like, you would be an absolute idiot to not go into those exams and sit those exams. You are doing this, you are going to be fine. You will you will pass this. I promise you. If you've done this half an hour, no prep, just go in there, just try. Um that was that was iconic, Povey, because she frigging saw me. She saw me for more than my behavior, she saw me for more than the heavy makeup that I was wearing, that mask that I was wearing, the bleach blonde hair with my huge emo fringe. She saw me more than the, you know, the cigarette smell that I had. And like every single lesson, Povey, no matter what I was doing, she kept engaging me. She kept asking me questions. She kept freaking trying, even when my answer was, I don't know, or I didn't read the text, or I didn't do my homework, or, you know, just no answer at all. She didn't even get fluffy. It's not like she asked, oh, are you okay? Like she just kept persistently showing me every single lesson that I belonged there and I belonged in that class, and that she was always going to have high expectations of me when every single person in my life, including myself, was telling me that I couldn't do it, that I wasn't worthy, that I shouldn't bother, that I like I was so deep in it. I didn't want to get out of bed, I didn't want to go to school, I didn't see the point in anything, but she believed in me so much that I did. And I sat those exams. And not only did I sit those exams, somehow I went well enough in those exams to be invited to return to the high achievers assembly, which would be called the Ducks Assembly, because I became like, you know, top in the school for English. And I told you, English really came easy to me because I did not do anything. But it really got me through. And I think, as I said, like I think primary school just gave me a really great base for like reading and all that kind of stuff. But there was Miss Povey, right, in the crowds at that high achievers assembly, looking on. She wasn't shocked. She just looked at me like, of course, you went well. Like there was no doubt about it. I told you you'd be fine. And I never thanked her in the way that she deserved. But here I am 20 years later. Like I didn't sit down and go, oh my God, you've impacted my life so much. Oh my God, you've changed my life, or like, you're such a great teacher. I never said that, but here I am 20 years later, somehow sitting here as a fellow teacher and a damn good one at that. Like it's like I fell into something that was my like purpose in life, where I had no purpose. Um, you know, I'm talking about her on a podcast. I'm talking about I'm here helping other teachers to help students the way that she helped me. Her impact, the ripple effect that she had just by those high expectations that she had of me is something that we'll live on now in the teachers that I help. I'm not trying to sound cheesy, but here I am searching for her on Facebook and Instagram to try to tell her the impact that I had, like that she had on me. But this is what I'm always saying. We don't need to be counselors or psychologists to help these students who are freaking going through it. We don't need to be and or do all of these like big, big, big things. We just need to be great teachers who see the potential in our students and make sure they know that we see them as human beings. And that's it. Like as long as you can sit there and your students know that you care about them and you see the potential in them and you have high expectations of them, you're going to get students who will rise to that. And you might not get a thank you right. And that student might not be able to articulate articulate. Thanks, Perve. You didn't teach me how to say articulate. Um and that student might not be able to articulate exactly what you have meant to them or the impact that you have had because you might not even they might not even realize it yet. But that impact is going to ripple throughout their lives as well. And I don't know who needs to hear that, but I really wanted to share that on the podcast today. That was a really vulnerable share. But I thought it was after sharing it with my behavior clubbers, I thought it was really important to do so because they were like, yes, we we need that reminder. And again, this is not me trying to like put us on this pedestal and say that we're martyrs. It's actually the opposite of that. It's me saying that, like, just tweaking a few things or just making sure we're really great teachers. We don't have to go like spend bloody 20 extra hours putting together like SEL programs is just about seeing the potential in the young people that are in front of you. And it's just gold. I mean, that one line of feedback that I got on that piece of writing, you know, like it just it was gold. And you can hand out little gold nuggets everywhere and in everything you do, you don't have to do anything extra. Okay, I'm gonna leave it there because I really could just keep rambling and keep ranting, but I will stop. We're at 25 minutes. I like to keep this episode short and sweet, but I really hope, and if it did, by the way, please let me know if you got something from this episode. Um, but I will see you at the same place. At the same place, in the same place, at the same time next week. Uh bye for now, beautiful teachers.

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Claire English

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