The classroom lottery.

"ANDREW BOVELL--who's he?" This was a Year 12 English teacher's response to a student after reading this name in the opening of her essay on the Australian film Lantana, his corrections having included two question marks above this apparently mysterious name. The student had completed an essay on Lantana, which had been checked by her teacher. The essay had been done as practice for the externally-assessed final exam, which, for this anxious student, was fast approaching.

"He wrote it," the student replied politely, doing her best to conceal her surprise that her teacher did not recognise the author of the screenplay of the text he was teaching. The student's slip in expression in her essay, by referring to Bovell but neglecting to introduce him as the author, had revealed the teacher's poor grasp of the subject matter.

When dealing with teachers, students are dealing with a section of the workforce who are, for the most part, separated from the consequences of their actions. When students make mistakes in their studies, they suffer the consequences. When their teachers make mistakes in their lessons, corrections, assessments or study advice, again it is the students who suffer.

This characteristic of the education system, which is currently reinforced by the industrial practices of the powerful teachers' unions and accentuated by the wide variations in educational standards intrinsic to "progressive" education, can have a significant impact on the motivation of teachers to produce quality work or to address their mistakes and rectify injustices. The dedicated, competent teachers are likely to do a fine job simply because it is in their nature to do so, but unfortunately there are others who will not follow their example. This wide variation in teacher quality puts the responsibility back on individual students to protect their interests by taking responsibility for their own education.

This means that clever, ambitious students, who want to do better than pass, need to treat the prevailing education system as more like a game of snakes and ladders than as a sturdy ladder of opportunity. While encounters with dedicated, competent teachers should be treated as opportunities to be seized, the inevitable encounters with teachers with a poor grasp of their course material, or of the nature of sound scholarship, present additional challenges that students must recognise and overcome.

Regrettably, that teacher with a poor grasp of Lantana is far from alone in his misunderstanding. From my vantage point as a private tutor, what I have noticed with too many English teachers is that they regularly refer to the authorship of a film with a routine phrase like "Ray Lawrence's Lantana", in a manner that incorrectly implies that the film's director is the sole source of the ideas in the film. They then instruct their students to throw this kind of phrase into their essays in a manner more akin to a reflex action rather than something based on careful thought and perceptive analysis.

Unlike most novels, a film is usually a collective effort. Dedicated, competent teachers would appreciate this and accordingly instruct their students to recognise and distinguish between the contributions of the author of the screenplay (who usually developed many or most of the film's ideas), the film's director (who contributed additional ideas by artistically interpreting the screenplay and directing its cinematic realisation), the production designer (who designed or organised the props and sets), and so on, and to incorporate this knowledge into their analysis of the film. This is the kind of knowledge students need if they are to perform well in high-risk, externally-assessed final exams.

Although there are academic debates about the attribution of film authorship, this teacher's comment cannot be interpreted as his having taken a position in these debates. He simply did not have a solid grasp of the material he was employed to teach. In addition to not recognising the name of the author of the screenplay, his clumsy attempts in class to analyse scenes from the film saw him engage in the embarrassing practice of trying to find meaning where there was really none. In other words, he muddled his way through.

Sadly, there are teachers, many of them well-meaning, who do not know their subject matter well and who teach intellectually shallow or erroneous analyses to their students. Unfortunately, the "poor quality lessons and study advice these teachers provide can inadvertently sabotage the chances of those students who trust and rely upon the guidance they receive in class.

IN THE WEEKS preceding the final exams, I prepare my students for the challenges ahead. This includes correcting mistakes made by students so they can perform at their best. However, with a number of students these potentially damaging mistakes did not originate with them, but were the consequence of poor quality teaching in the classroom. Diligent students who attempt to improve their exam performance by doing practice essays to be checked by their teacher, can unfortunately be giving an inferior teacher the opportunity to introduce costly mistakes into the students' work that were not there previously.

When students need exam scores of over 99 per cent to qualify for courses in Medicine or Law, one slip could cost them dearly. There are students in the classes of inferior teachers who will go to their exams with their trust placed in faulty knowledge. Their heartbreaking final results will represent the human cost of the wide variation in educational standards between different teachers that appears to be common in the age of progressive teaching.

Consider the contrast in educational opportunities afforded to students by these two Year 12 English teachers at the same school. The first teacher allows his lessons to go in whatever direction his mood or the circumstances take him. He intermittently reads aloud from the novel being studied, in this case The Plague by Albert Camus, and then asks the class questions, or chats, often making quaint jokes about the novel. In his unsystematic lessons he overlooks one of the central concepts of the novel, the philosophical notion of "the absurd", the idea that it is impossible for humans to find predictability or certainty in life, with the likelihood of chance intervening to disrupt the best-laid plans and expectations. According to this notion, quirks of fate could produce consequences that defy notions of certainty, fairness, justice or destiny.

With what is a difficult novel to interpret, students may not appreciate its meaning without expert guidance from their teacher. The irony is that without an understanding of "the absurd", any confident expectation these students may have of performing well in an exam on this text, on the basis of what they have learnt from their teacher, is seriously compromised, no matter how diligently they study the notes they took in class. Because of their teacher, these students are handicapped without knowing it.

Meanwhile, the second teacher at the school has a more traditional approach to education. This teacher industriously prepares lessons that constitute detailed summaries of every chapter of the novel. Rather than meander through lessons according to laid-back progressive teaching approaches, her lessons are systematic and comprehensive. Consequently, her students learn a great deal in class about the novel that will assist them in their final exam.

What is worse is that the first teacher, who inadvertently misled his students about the meaning of the novel, would have assessed the course-work on that text that is officially allocated for internal or class-teacher assessment. This teacher would be prone to reward with high grades those students whose essays closely reflected his erroneous understanding of the text, thus reinforcing their confidence in an erroneous interpretation and making them likely to repeat this performance in the final exam. Unfortunately, they are more likely to find themselves penalised by the unseen external examiners and left bewildered as to why their results were so disappointing when they did everything their teacher told them to do.

Although educated at the same school, the students whom fate placed in the second teacher's class were fortunate. The students in the first teacher's class were not.

THE MISTAKES made by some English teachers are so elementary they would warrant concern if made by a student. When made by teachers, they raise serious doubts about the ability of the education system to meet the expectations of parents, students and governments. For example, several of my students have encountered English teachers teaching Shakespearean tragedies, like Macbeth or Hamlet, who did not seem to know the specific meaning of "tragedy" in literature, a term that refers to a genre that traditionally centres on a great man or hero who falls from grace due to a flaw, or flaws, in his character. This in turn provides a warning to members of the audience to guard against similar flaws in their characters. These teachers instead imposed on their students the unscholarly notion that a tragedy simply meant a sad event.

One Year 12 English teacher even sternly reprimanded a student in front of the class who, when asked, had correctly described the character Hamlet as principally a tragic figure. After the lesson, this unflinching teacher warned the student that she would fail him in his forthcoming essay if he referred to Hamlet in this fashion. This was the student's last piece of class-teacher-assessed coursework before the final exam. Fortunately, the student had the insight to humour his class teacher (as I advised him to do) by providing her with the kind of answer she wanted to hear, while saving his more scholarly answer for his performance in the externally-assessed final exam, for which he received an "A+".

This student had learnt the survival skills necessary to manoeuvre nimbly through an education system that presents many pitfalls to the unsuspecting. Sadly, it is the most trusting students who are likely to suffer most, due to the confidence that they place in an inferior teacher who they regard as their principal means to achieve academic success and social mobility.

Unfortunately, for students who are yet to mature sufficiently to acquire a protective shell of self-confidence, an unexpected severe downgrading in assessment resulting from the idiosyncratic erroneousness of their class teacher risks crushing the very initiative and capacity for independent critical inquiry that the advocates of progressive education claim to foster and that most university academics and employers value highly. There are human costs that result from bad teaching. It hurts young people. It can damage their lives.

In this context, the widespread assumption, often held by teachers, potential employers and even by many students and their parents, that a disappointing school result was solely due to the student's shortfalls, warrants careful reconsideration in many cases.

Fortunately, the existence of dramatic variations in teacher quality has an up side. There are dedicated, competent teachers who provide opportunities for secondary school to be both intellectually rewarding and enjoyable. However, for students to avoid suffering the adverse consequences that can result from relying upon any ill-informed, unscholarly class teachers allotted to them, they need to seek other sources of learning to avoid becoming dependent upon any teachers who may not live up to their trust. They should read widely and purposefully, and they should cultivate relationships with the dedicated, competent teachers at their school.

If necessary, and without their class teacher knowing, they should ask these dedicated, competent teachers for study advice, handouts of notes, or recommendations for further reading. They should also present their practice essays to these teachers for feedback, instead of their class teacher. These dedicated, competent teachers are often kind and helpful people who are delighted to be appreciated by students. Their consequent feelings of validation would be small compensation for the fact that they are often paid the same as their under performing colleagues.

In an education system that allows for such wide variations in teacher quality, secondary students need to take precautions to ensure that they are successful. It is beneficial for students to listen to their teacher. However, they should listen with discretion. With this realistic attitude, students can be successful both because of what the education system has to offer and in spite of it.

Dr Mark Lopez runs a private tutoring business in Melbourne. He is the author of The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics 1945-1975.