Peter Yager set me off when he wrote:

This was asking for trouble, as I had been mulling this very question over for the previous week. In fact, I had planned to be up in Brisbane in October (1997) to talk about this, but the builders were due, so I stayed close to base and wrote this instead. I still have a lot to learn about the day-to-day management of such a centre, but I now had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. Be warned: it is a long haul!

We have been using the centre since October last year (1996), and we are only just starting to come to grips with it. That is, I and a few of my colleagues are starting to come to grips with it, while the rest are still out of the picture, praise be. I am a small centre of plague infestation, waiting to break out, once I have enough key people in place, throughout the staff and the school.

In my own operation, perhaps the key issue is that it is more than somewhat anarchic. We have a large room with harbour views, and the layout is as shown somewhere in http://www.ozemail.com.au/~surfing

The learning centre is there to help students learn how to learn -- what they learn is important, but less so than the act of learning successfully. If I can socialise a rebellious adolescent or captivate a slow learner with my collection of rocks or challenge a bright student to make up a clerihew, that is all much the same. If I can provide a comfortable environment for a boy to discover pointillism (much to my Seurat :-) that's just as good, and if a Year 9 floats in before school and creates a web page on UFOs or a caricature of me, that has to be worn as well.

For my sort of LC, you have to be a risk taker, and be willing to lose a few, to be let down occasionally, to face-plant when you expected to soar -- it makes the actual flights all the more exhilarating when they happen.

We pinched a large spare classroom -- right over the science labs, so I can get gas and drainage at the back of the room for minimal cost. That is for the wet area: painting, modelling, science work (I am a science teacher au fond), there will be a video area with headphone sockets and an extension monitor on my desk -- kids get to put on videos when they need to watch. No door in the door frame, so when I hear "PHWOAHRRR!", I will know to look at the monitor. And I want a sound system later to play gentle music (my educational style is creative educational despotism -- they get to hear my music, not vice versa). But I remain open to persuasion . . .

It is also close to the computer room, one floor down (there were two, but I closed one of them) and the library, with which we will share access to a CD-ROM network. In a few years, we may take down a couple of internal non-structural walls and coalesce the library and the LC. Later, the library may get the Internet.

Boys come in under several guises. A few sneak in, some come in from over-full classes to work on set tasks, some come in for a week or two to do a set project. Some come in for a period to learn maths by spreadsheet, some are there to use the Internet, others are there for help in putting together a report that needs technology, others are the before-school, recess and lunch hangers-on. I take a cavalier approach to time off and free periods -- but at the same time, if I need to walk out when a class is in there, they know that the anarchy only goes so far.

(A. S. Neill had a foible -- no Summerhill child was allowed to leave his tools out in the rain, and if Neill could do it, then why can't I? I give them freedom and I have quite a few foibles, but the kids have learned to humour me.)

The aim of a LC is to help students learn how to learn, not to teach, but that doesn't mean that you don't manoeuvre the kids. Some boys are there doing tech drawing because we cannot run a class for four students. That is a bit hard for me, but when they work well, I sneak them out to see some carnivorous plants at the back of the school. Mind you, one got excited because he thought I said "Cannabis" -- but he also got wrapped in feeding an ant to a Drosera, and marked the spot with a stick so he could check it at lunch time. He learned, but I kept it a secret.

Opportunism is essential. If something comes up, I go into mischievous mode, and lead them astray -- if nothing else, it keeps them guessing, but it also keeps them alive to the other possibilities in something. That is, they think they are being led astray -- I'm either having fun, or setting out to share something or to question some assumption.

Subversion is important -- open-ended questions are a must, but support has to be close handy. The year 9 invertebrate project kids learn a whole stack of things like how to use the index of a book (which is probably a skill we won't need any more, once CD-ROMs take over, but for now I will cover it).

I have to be able to set examples -- either myself, in things I am seen to be doing, or using the work of students, train kids to use new equipment, and spread the ideas and awareness through the school. Once I get lab facilities, I will keep a pottering corner, breed a few slaters, make cube-shaped and spiral bubbles, borrow the CRO and mess with a few ultrasonics, things like that. I teach in a boys' school, and boys do not think it is cool to retain a sense of wonder.

Having established that I know how to do a large number of eccentric things, I am allowed to not know things -- that also is essential in a learning centre. But I ALWAYS know where to start asking, so I can find out, and that is even more essential. I would not recommend the post to a young keen teacher who would burn out -- leave it to the old hams (not a term I use lightly or pejoratively -- in my view, the best actors go into teaching or the law, and only after that, into Thespian pursuits).

The users are mainly Year 9 and Year 10 in formal mode, plus a few invaders from the other years -- I take on my first formal Year 7 seekers after information next Monday. Once I get the network set up (almost there, end of term 1, 1998!!), I will reserve one computer for teacher use, and let people loose. The teacher reservation is typical deviousness on my part -- I want kids to see other teachers learning how to use the Internet, and learning how to learn. Then all I have to do is sucker my colleagues into coming along.

(This is not as cruel or as pompous as it sounds: no teacher that I know has any spare time: it is all committed to what they see as the most important priorities: I plan to subvert a few of those priorities if I can. This is the main problem that all learning centre people must recognise and face up to.)

We went modular, vertical, semestered, and that meant slightly larger classes in some cases -- the trade-off is that the teachers with those classes then get to spill 4-6 boys to me on a cyclical basis, so their numbers never reach the full total. I have also had a problem child who decided he would like to teach himself to touch-type. He got to 34 wpm before being shunted into a special 10-week course which might see him leave the school, but I suspect that he will be back and tend to become a fitting in my place. About half the students there at any time are completely independent, but able to ask for assistance when they need it.

I still teach Year 11 and 12 computing studies, dammit. The Principal always said he would operate in the LC as well, but that has not happened so far. That aside, he says it will be just me, because that way, there is somebody to take ownership (and be the mug who puts in the extra hours, but I'm not complaining).

I get as many as fifteen in there at a time -- and this is with no real equipment, apart from what I have scrounged. That's fine for a start -- I now have a bunch of kids across the school who have accepted the sort of ethos I am trying to foster. So now I wait for the new fit-out, with the wet area for science and art, the Internet on five computers not one, a decent Intranet, bookshelves and stuff, plus a small crowd of old 386s for WP hack work. After that, I would expect to have up to 20 people there at any one time, hopefully including the odd teacher, also seen to be learning.

I get Year 11 and Year 12 dropping in for all sorts of reasons at all sorts of times, and this will be more so in the future, as the "trained" kids move up, and still want to use the resources, and as better trained kids come out of the primary schools.

Mike Middleton talked to us in early 1995, and mentioned the idea of a Learning Centre then, and I made my move at that point, only to find the boss there before me, digging a pit for me to fall into. Fall? HA! I bloody jumped! Landed on his head!

Essential item: I have a phone line -- it's the modem line, but I plug a phone in at other times, and I also have my own mobile -- definitely more than a yuppy toy. You NEED good phone access, both for the students to phone up -- the phone is better than the Internet, often, and I also need one to take calls.

Further issues that I have not broached here: the contract approaches that I started playing with back in about 1972-5, and how I may or may not use those methods in the future, and why it will all take twice as long as you expected.

Or the brainfood series of challenges that I am developing to foster creativity -- just finished laminating the first 43 finished sheets today: clerihews, limericks, crosswords, clover searches, bird photography, library studies, nematode catching . . .

Or my gimme list: digital camera, underwater camera case (I'm fed up with those "disposables"), escape from classroom teaching to full-time subversion, microscope, digital video camera, time off to get my bus driver's licence.

Or what is coming: colour printer, laser printer, photocopier, the video area, lots of videos.

More about the main influences: A S Neill, Postman and Weingartner, a touch of Piaget, a lot of Bruner, Howard Gardner is in there, and I really do have to read de Bono on thinking hats -- the River Oaks people said it was great. But mainly, I don't give a hoot about syllabus aims: take care of the learning and the love of learning, and the syllabus aims will come tumbling home behind them.

Main fears: We have to go networking in the next few months. I profoundly distrust networks as the work of the devil who makes work for idle hands when my hands ain't idle. Fear and loathing, fear and loathing . . .

I am completing my fourth year at St Paul's College. I have never worked more than four years in any job -- and more commonly, I am gone after two. This is a sufficiently drastic change to allow me to break my rule and stay on at St Paul's, and exciting enough that I am not even reading the ads for jobs. I commend it to anybody who has got past the dangerous years without burning out. It's like bungy jumping without the risk of damage to ageing cartilage.