Madison Hamill - Specimen

Victoria University of Wellington Press

PO Box 600, Wellington

New Zealand

vup.wgtn.ac.nz

Copyright Madison Hamill 2020

First published 2020

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

A catalogue record is available from the
National Library of New Zealand.

ISBN 9781776563012 (print)

ISBN 9781776563234 (EPUB)

ISBN 9781776563241 (Kindle)

Published with the assistance of a grant from

Ebook conversion 2020 by meBooks

Contents

When I was ten, turning eleven, and until I finished primary-intermediate school, I had a teacher named Lance Woods. Like the lancewood plant, Lance Woods, or Mr Woods as we knew him, always had his eyes on the heights to which his pupils would one day ascend. Up there, in ghost form, were all the great leaders of history: Nelson Mandela, Ghandi, Harriet Tubman, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr, Kate Sheppard, Ed Hillary. It didnt matter what they fought for, particularly. Mr Woods wasnt a Christian, a Buddhist, an activist or a pacifist. What mattered was that these leaders had character, and character was made of values. Long lists of these values were written on thick marigold-coloured paper and pinned to the walls of our classroom. Initiative, Responsibility, Respect, Diligence, Loyalty, Helpfulness, Humility, Caring, Determination, Duty, Honesty... It was Mr Woodss mission to shape us from the lazy, disrespectful good-for-the-dole kids that we could have been into young leaders. Through hard work and determination, we would embody so many of these values that strangers would meet us and be inspired, and think to themselves, That young person should be prime minister one day.

Once, I asked Mr Woods what humility meant. Well, thats easy, he said. Its just thinking about others, as well as yourself, isnt it?

Wed always had Road Patrol badges, or it may have been that there had always been Road Patrol but nobody had thought to offer badges for it until Mr Woods came along. Road Patrol is the task of wearing an orange jacket and pushing out the orange lollipop to stop traffic at the zebra crossings outside the school.

Then he introduced the SAFE badges. SAFE stood for Safe and Friendly Environment. On SAFE duty, we were required to patrol the junior playgrounds, sorting out disputes, telling younger kids to wear sunhats and shoes, watching out for accidents, making sure no one was hogging the play equipment. Everyone in our class had a turn at SAFE duty, so it was no big deal, but to the juniors, we became akin to teacherspowerful, able to recommend them for detention or writing lines. They would find us in the playground and say So and so pushed so and so, and we would mediate.

Most of us liked being in charge, though there were some complaints at first. Arent we just doing the teachers jobs for yous? one boy asked Mr Woods.

Do you want to be a wee kid? said Mr Woods. Some people say youre just children and cant be trusted. But I know better. Youre young men and women now, and I think you can handle a bit of responsibility, dont you? As he said this, he was holding his hairy legs wide apart, jiggling one leg up and down and spinning a baseball bat around in his palm. Despite all this, we listened to every word he said. We were so used to being told we were just kids who couldnt be trusted that we felt a surge of righteousness. We could be in charge. We werent babies anymore.

Once SAFE was established, he brought out the PAL badges: Physical Activity Leaders. On PAL duty, we were in charge of starting a game at lunchtimesetting up the equipment, rallying people to play the game, and then supervising. Everyone was a PAL in our class, but we had to wear a green badge the size of a business card at all times. We liked the way our badges took up space on our uniforms and made us stand out from the younger kids.

Then came the silver leader badges and the gold leader badges. We were observed for how well we exhibited leadership values, how well we did our PAL and SAFE and Road Patrol duties, and how well we did our homework. The best were rewarded with silver leaders badges, and, if they maintained their record and somehow showed themselves to be even greater at still more of the listed leadership values, they would become a gold leader.

We wanted those badges as if they would make us famous and make our parents love us. Mr Woods was a fun guy. Even I, who was not fun and so did not have fun with him, believed that he was fun, as if it were an objective value independent of my experiences. He would take us out for PE every afternoon for the greater part of the day so we could play non-stop cricket on the big field. I could never keep track of the ball. For me, cricket was like watching the screensaver with the ball that bounces off the sides of the screen. But I was the odd one out in my opinions on sports.

Maths with Mr Woods was game after game of speed times tables. The whole class sat in a circle and a multiplication question was yelled at you and if you didnt answer quickly enough then you were sent to the bottom of the circle.

Once, we learned the one thing I was good at: story-writing. Mr Woodss advice was twists and turns, kids, lots of twists and lots of turns. He and his favourite student, Holly, wrote a story together in which every sentence had a lion or a sword fight or a freak accident or a magical resurrection. He read it aloud to the class, laughing. My own story had only one twist and no turns. It was about the seagulls outside the window. Ours is the best, said Mr Woods. Best story ever written. You cant argue with that.

Every morning when the first bell rang, Mr Woods gave a speech. These speeches got longer and more involved over time. We would gather around him as he praised those among us who were cultivating leadership values, and told stories about people overcoming obstacles and stepping up. When I was a bit older than you guys, he said, I was doing very well in footy, but I had a bit of an anger problem. When anyone did something I didnt like, I would lash out. But I had a coach who believed in me. He made me the team captain, and he said, Lance, if you keep behaving like this, youre going to go down a bad path. But I know you can do better. You have what it takes to be a leader. And he gave me a list of leadership values, the same as I have given you, and he said, This is what a leader looks like. I need you to show me you can step up. And I did. The next time one of my teammates said something to set me off, I stopped myself, and I thought, What would a leader do? And when I started doing this, I noticed my teammates started listening to me and respecting me. And thats how I became the leader I am today.

Even though I knew there was something not quite right about the leadership system, I wanted to be a leader so badly I prayed to God to make me a better person. I also prayed to Allah and to any other gods out there, just in case my parents were wrong on the religion front. I did my homework, researching the great leaders of history all afternoon and printing and cutting out pictures of Nelson Mandela to paste into my homework book. I tried to be kind. I gave money secretly to charity, tidied the classroom, opened doors for teachers, did my SAFE, PAL and Road Patrol duties to the best of my abilities, and tried hard in class. But the people who got the badges were the ones who were not just loyal, respectful and initiative-taking, but also talkative and good at sports, and they liked to fetch Mr Woodss coffee (six cups a day) from the staffroom unprompted during class-time. I was not extroverted. I rarely spoke in more than one-word sentences.