Teaching Ms Richards

SHE struggled during childhood to decide whether her future would see her being a paediatrician or a teacher, but after witnessing the death of her classmate during high school, Corrine Richards instead decided to focus her adult life on becoming a special education teacher.

Unwittingly, Richards has managed to use teaching as a tool to heal the wounded and suffering children she interfaces with on a daily basis. And perhaps the demand for this has never been so profound as it is now in her present post as principal for the Kingston High School, a hospital of sorts for some of Jamaica’s most broken children.

“I was really surprised and taken aback at the school and what I saw when I came in terms of the sort of disruptive behaviour and all of that, and the whole place just looked almost like something people had forgotten about,” said Richards of the school, which is surrounded by derelict buildings which once housed productive businesses that were forced to close due to ongoing gang feuds over the years in the area.

“The first year was like being thrown into a whirlpool with nothing at all, no life jacket, nothing. I was in a constant war zone. Like for the first six months, it was like every day there was a stab up, some sort of war or violence. You would have like two cars rushing out with students going to KPH (Kingston Public Hospital). When you went up the stairs, you had students just lounging in the classroom smoking ganja,” she recounted to the A l l W o m a n during our visit to the teaching institution last week.

Richards admits that she had not known much about the school prior to her interview to become principal. While she had prayed fervently to God to direct her to her next task following years of working with special-needs children and training teachers on how to deal with them, she was still shocked when a man called her while she was shopping at the supermarket one Saturday, to enquire whether she was still interested in the job. She said she had no recollection of ever sending in an application for the post and told the caller this. Nonetheless, she told him that if he had seen an application, then she must have sent one in.

Upon taking up the post as principal in 2010, Richards became very aware that there was a role for her to play, however, she went home every day begging God to give her a different assignment, as the challenges were too many and the resources very few.

“Gradually what came to me was that these children, more than just needing academics, needed to be healed,” she said.

“They needed to be healed because I started investigating the backgrounds of most of my students and I found out that these students were so up close and intimate and personal with violence of all makes, including murder, that they were just broken children. Many of them had been abused, many of them don’t know what it means to have a loving and supportive family structure, most of them had a single parent,” she pointed out.

But the principal was determined to change their mindset and started doing so the very first day she got to interact with them.

“My first day on the platform the Monday morning when I had general assembly, I looked at them and I said to them, ‘I love you’. And it’s something I felt I needed to tell them, and to also let them know that as of today, I was now your mother and you are now my children,” said the mother of three boys who was keen to let her students know that she would encourage and chastise them as a mother naturally would.

The healing still continues, but Richards has seen much improvement in the students’ attitudes over the past two years. While there is still the blaring of sirens on the school compound from time to time signalling that the police were called in to quell or investigate a dispute, the students, she believes, are now taking more interest in school, rather than seeing it as a place where they come to lounge. For the first time too, all the students are registered for one the country’s exit exams for secondary high school students.

Richards herself has undergone some amount of change, too, in the past two years. She no longer feels detached whenever she sees a news report of a child who became the victim of violence; she now sees that child as one of her own, because this is the life most of her own students are exposed to. And she no longer prays for God to reassign her, because she thinks being a principal is part of her calling.

“I do not believe that teaching is a job, I believe with all my heart that it is a vocation, it is a calling. For me, I’ve viewed my ability to teach as my gift from God, and so I don’t consider myself a good teacher [just] because I am bright academically,” she said.

“Whenever I go to work with children, I see this as something that I am doing to make a difference in this child’s life and so my teaching does not only centre on academics, but also the entire child — physical, moral, spiritual, academic,” she added.