Biography of Anne Newman as a teacher

This page is still under construction.
Although I am now engaged in making my way as an artist, an oil painter, my career in teaching remains immensely important to me. I am going to tell a story about my teaching career because teaching kids is a narrative with one main plot but many themes and chapters. My motivation to be a teacher and the plot that runs through my career was, and still is, to make learning just that little bit easier and if possible just that little bit more enjoyable. The greatest skill a teacher can learn is that it is okay to laugh, to smile, to enjoy learning with a child. And the second greatest skill is to see the learning through the eyes of the child and not those of an adult who has forgotten what it was like not to understand, not to know how to do something.
My greatest public contribution to teaching was to discover through some pretty hefty research that a large percentage of children fail in mathematics because they can't read nor understand the wording of the tasks they are given to solve by mathematics teachers. My categorisation of errors children make in mathematics has come to have considerable interest around the world and is commonly referred to as the Newman Error Analysis. I published my work on this around 1977, over 30 years ago, and I am still constantly amazed at how something so simple has remained so popular with mathematics educators. What I hope people learn from my work is that the answer to why a child isn't achieving the expected results can often be something quite obvious as not being able to read or understand. The way to help the child is of course far more complex. In endeavouring to follow my belief that teachers must teach and not just expect children to discover how to read, to spell, to add up or for that matter, to play the piano, I spend nearly 25 years as a senior lecturer at the Australian Catholic University in Oakleigh, Victoria, Australia. I remained true to my belief that we must find ways to show children how to learn and not expect them to plough their way through the maze of educational activities without considerable guidance. Of course experimentation and self discovery are essential ingredients of learning but a road map with some directional signs usually makes the journey just that little bit easier.
My other publicly recognised contribution to education was to co-write with my great friend Diane Walsh the Our English series. With the outstanding assistance of our editor Anne Sahlin we produced 8 books that focused on teaching children how to understand and write in different genres such as reports, stories, descriptions and so on. I am very proud of these books which I believe assisted many children and teachers in learning more about the English language.
I started my teaching career in 1966 in a small rural school in Central Victoria, Australia. Malmesbury in those days was predominantly a rural community with a small number of shop keepers and the newly arrived staff and their families of the recently opened Youth Training Centre. I was to teach Prep, and Yrs 1, 2 and 3 - about 35 children in all. There was only one other teacher, the Principal who taught Yrs 4, 5 and 6 and ran the school at the same time. It was a poor school and the only books I had was a set of a series called "Ring a Ring of Roses" or something like that. They looked like they had been published in the 1890s. The hard times taught us to be resourceful and to beg, borrow and yes even probably to steal materials that would help our kids learn. I learnt to ask very early in any of my romantic relationships what the young man's occupation was. A young American soldier from the mapping unit in Bendigo, my home city, provided my kids with reams of yellow and black photographic paper. The most popular people at this time were the butchers who willingly gave poor teachers any amount of the large sheets of blank paper for the children to draw and write on.
I got a brief shove up the career ladder within weeks of starting teaching at Malmesbury. One day the Principal didn't appear at school and soon after the bell had been rung and I had gathered my 60 or so kids together, his wife appeared.
"Harry's not coming today", she announced.
"Oh! When will be be back?"
"Never. I'm going home to cook him some breakfast. He's not been well."
I still remember this day as clear as ever. 'Count the kids. I must end up at the end of whatever is going to happen with as many kids as I started with.' Over the next few days which seemed like weeks I don't know how many times I lined them up and counted them and they obediently followed my instructions. I didn't lose one of them as I rushed back and forth between the two rooms of the school trying to teach them all something.
Within hours it was around the town and to the ears of the Mothers' Club that I was now the Principal - acting at least. Up they came.
"Did I have the power to sign as the Principal"
"Guess so. No-one else around. What do you want me to sign? Late notices perhaps?"
" The documents to cut down the pine plantation!"
"What pine plantation and why?"
At some time, probably after WW1 or 11 schools throughout Central Victoria planted pine trees as an investment. I really don't know the history of this but Malmesbury had a pine plantation. There are still many pice trees around the town especially up near the Malmesbury Reservoir. The communities, or State Education Department planted pine trees but no-one thought to buy books for the children to read or for that matter, paper so that they could learn to write. The Education Department provided each child with one pencil per term and two pieces of paper a day. I signed the pine trees away as I invested in the future of my Malmesbury kids. And I bought books with the proceeds and can now probably also accept responsibility for starting the hole in the Ozone layer. I have never regretted buying the books.
I bought the books from a travelling book seller representing an educational publisher. Twenty or more years later we were to meet up again when I wrote the Our English books as he was now working for the publishers Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich. We had a good laugh about how I made his day and probably the best sales for the year when I spent the proceeds of the pine trees on books from his van.