What teaching taught me

As a child, as my mother regularly reminds me, I wanted to be a vet by day, and a policewoman by night. Sleep, I had decided, was for the weak, and as for getting married – I gleefully told my mother that my husband would be able to stand in the corner, like a lampshade, whilst I went about my two jobs. Once I’d decided I actually quite enjoyed sleep, I turned to writing, being an avid bookworm as a child, and decided I’d be an author. I’d be the next J.K. Rowling, I just had to get on a train from Manchester to London and wait for my own Harry Potter to ‘stroll into my head, fully formed.’ A few years after that, I wanted to be a professional swimmer – a dream that sadly faded away very quickly, when I realised just how much I hated training at 5am. Still passionate about swimming, I then decided I’d be a swimming coach, because that way, I could coach people in the sport I loved, without having to actually get in the water and swim length after tedious length and without having to permanently smell like chlorine. I soon realised that I’d still have to get up at ridiculous o’clock, but really the real nail in the coffin was the fact that I’d never really earn that much money, and clearly, fourteen-year-old me was quite the mercenary type. By the time I applied to university, I still hadn’t really fathomed what I wanted to be, I just wanted to be clever. I remember (very) briefly considering studying law, before realising that I wasn’t remotely interested in the legal system. So, having always had a bit of a gift for languages, I decided that I’d study them, and embarked upon a four-year BA course. By the time I’d finished that, I was still clueless, but if I was certain of one thing, I never, ever wanted to be a teacher.

It was something I’d always been certain of. Throughout the years of muddling through various ideas of what I could be, what I would be, I never wanted to be a teacher. Not once did the idea of spending my weekdays in charge of teenage terrors appeal; I had no desire to spend my life parading around in front of the thirty hormonal adolescents, preaching the importance of Shakespeare or the many real-life applications of algebra (I remain, to this day, unconvinced that any actually exist, sorry to all the mathsy types out there). This was certainly not due to a lack of inspirational teachers: there are many that I could list who were really wonderful educators, and indeed truly remarkable humans. Their passion for their subjects and their unrelenting desire to see every single one of us do well never wavered, no matter how much we (or I) tested their patience. They pushed me to achieve, always believing that I was capable of great things, even, and most importantly, when I could not see it myself. To those great teachers, and to JHM, LBC and JN in particular, I will be forever grateful. I just didn’t want to follow in their footsteps.

My experiences of teaching by the time I finished my undergraduate degree were, quite honestly, limited. I’d done a week of work experience at my old primary school at the age of fifteen, during which I mastered the art of the photocopier and had my shoe stolen by a particularly excitable Year 3. Needless to say, this did not inspire me to pursue a career in teaching. My next experience of working in a school came some five years later, when I set off on my Year Abroad, which was to be spent as an English assistant in Quebec City, Canada. Before that year, I had never lived more than a fifteen-minute drive away from home, having chosen to study at my local university. But, bolstered by the idea of an incredible Instagram account filled with pictures of snowy mountains and maple syrup drenched pancakes, I set off across the Atlantic for what was supposed to be a nine-month contract. What followed was, as you may have guessed, not the social media sensation that I had imagined. Instead, it was four months of agonising homesickness, desperate Skypes and horrid depression.

The school itself was perfectly fine; staff were often kind and the students interested and interesting, but their system meant that I spent 18 working days working with each teacher and their classes, before being passed on to the next member of the department. Whilst a different person would have seen this as an easy ride, an opportunity to reuse lesson plans, I craved a system where I could get to know the students and see them progress. I saw little purpose in anything I did, and began to feel increasingly anxious about going to work. By November, I was at a point where I knew I couldn’t see out the whole year, so made plans to do the second half of my Year Abroad in Germany. I gave myself a good talking to, and decided that I would work until March at the school. My deterioration was, however, far more obvious to the staff than I perhaps realised. Having taken a few days off before Christmas to deal with my anxiety, they decided it was best for them, and especially for me, if I didn’t return to work in the January. All in all, they were right. I spent the next two months in Canada attempting to enjoy the beautiful country I’d ended up in, exploring as much as I could and watching anything and everything on Netflix, as well as writing for an online pop culture magazine. All of this, combined with a good therapist, who called me every week from the UK, and an incredibly supportive flatmate (thank you AG), helped me recuperate, giving me back a sense of purpose. But my idea of schools and teaching was tarnished more than ever before, perhaps (or so I thought) irreparably so.

I had a terrific (and completely unrelated to this tale) time in Germany, and was restored to my former self almost single-handedly by a short German man, out of whose backside I believed the sun shone. Needless to say, it didn’t, but the less said of that, the better. I returned to the UK for my final year, renewed and a good stone (and the rest) heavier than when I left – I blame the German beer. By Spring 2015, I was nearing the end of my degree, and I had little more clue then as to what I wanted to do with my life than I had had four years earlier. There were vague notions of a Master’s in Translation, mostly fuelled by that continuing to desire to just be clever, whatever that meant. At the time, though, there were no postgraduate loans available (the introduction of which is one of the only things the only thing I am grateful to a Conservative government for), so I knew I’d have to take some time out and work before doing a Master’s in anything. There was, however, money available for people willing to do a PGCE in Modern Languages. £20,000 tax-free, for a year of reciting verb conjugations to ungrateful children. Despite having never earned anything more than minimum wage, and doing some pretty grim jobs to earn it, even £20k was not enough to make me consider teaching for anything more than a second. Several people I knew decided to go for it, through schemes such as Teach First or School Direct, but my response to them was always the same: “Ha! Rather you than me, pal.”

It was just before my final exams that I received an odd email from my secondary school. My secondary school was, and remains, one of the best-performing comprehensive schools in the country. They take great pride in their impressive reputation, and have an incredible number of alumni on the staff. They emailed, as I found out later, some of their top performing students who had finished school either three or four years earlier, and who were now graduating university. The job they were offering was the role of Graduate Intern, where successful candidates would be able to help out in various departments of the school, shaping the role for themselves according to their own interests, as well as as and where the need for help was greatest. It was a paid role in a familiar environment, and with no other plans, I decided to apply for it. I’d discussed it with my parents, and we’d decided it was a good idea to go for it, and I could avoid classroom situations as much as possible, and instead spend time doing administrative work and helping out in the drama department, which had always treated me well at school.

I don’t really remember my first day, other than how odd it was to see all of my old teachers now as colleagues and to have them introduce themselves to me by their first names. I spent several weeks shadowing Key Stage 3 students, understanding the way that different subjects were taught and observing different teaching styles. Mostly, I felt like a bit of a spare part at the start. A lot of it was very geared towards teaching, and I was still firmly opposed to any kind of teaching in my future. I would repeat to myself during dull lessons or on days that seemed to last weeks, “I’m here to save money for my Master’s”. It became my mantra and my go-to response when anybody asked why I was working in a school. I don’t remember when I stopped repeating it. Maybe it was the day I first helped a Year 7 get through their Maths work, or the day we first started rehearsals for the school musical. I can’t quite place when it was, but one day, around three months in, I decided that maybe teaching wasn’t the hell I’d assumed it was after all.

The rest of the internship year ran away from me. By mid-December, I’d applied to two universities and the school I was working in itself for complete a PGCE in French & German beginning in September 2016. By January, following three successful offers, I accepted the offer from the school where I now felt established, even valued. I still hated the alarm clock in the morning, but I would go to school with a sense of purpose, and nothing made me more excited than the prospect of a drama rehearsal after school. Those were the moments that I started to see the pupils for themselves, not the nameless characters that walked quietly in their smart blazers or sat bored at the back of a maths lesson. I learnt to appreciate them as people, who were so much more than their predicted grades. These pupils were full of potential and they were dazzling, funny and interesting individuals, who had their own stories and quirks and the drama studio was the perfect place for them to come out. There were, of course, days when I would have much preferred that they stopped being so bloody hilarious (at least, that’s what they thought they were being) and would just get down to doing some actual work, but the good times always outweighed the bad times.

By the middle of the Easter term, I’d been trusted with teaching a Year 9 German class once a week. I had distinctly mixed emotions about this, as, although they were all incredibly nice individuals, they didn’t seem to have a lot of time for listening to some jumped-up ginger, who frankly looked young enough to be in the Sixth Form and surely couldn’t be old enough to be an actual teacher. I’m sure one day I will be thrilled to have been blessed with such a youthful face, but, standing up in front of 30 confident fourteen-year-olds, I can assure you that I was not thrilled then. It was perhaps most hilarious (and awkward) to sit opposite them with their parents at a parents evening, which was organised to provide advice on whether they should study German at GCSE. I could see the bemused look on the parents’ faces when they saw me, though admittedly it did fade away slightly when I started to wax lyrical about their child’s ability and impressive exam results. It remains one of the greatest moments of my teaching experience when the teacher I was sat with, who had only just taken over the class for their remaining two lessons a week, complimented me on my advice to the pupils and their parents that night. He said that I was more comfortable, confident and competent in that situation that many teachers he had seen that were several years into their teaching careers. Coming from him, a man whom I consider to be one of the best teachers I have ever met, I’m not sure I’ll ever forget how surprised and grateful little fresh-faced me was in that moment.

By the end of the academic year, I had established myself as a valuable member of staff at the school and I was confident that I could handle the relentless stress that my PGCE year was sure to bring. I had my philosophy of teaching firmly in my mind, which I’d formed over the course of the year. I’d known from those marvellous days of drama rehearsals that the pupils were more than just their academic profile, and I was determined to stick to that, to always see my pupils as real people with their own quirks, as well as their own issues. Alongside this, I believed that I could never ask of a pupil what I wouldn’t do myself. I felt it unreasonable to tell a kid that they should compete in a house event, or sports day, or join a choir, if I knew I wouldn’t do it myself. So I took part in staff versus student netball, I ran the staff relay at sports day (despite the fear that the whole school would realise that the real reason I wore so many beautiful, floaty dresses was to hide my frightfully wobbly middle) and I joined in all of the sports and games at the outward bound centre, even abseiling, when I repeatedly asked the instructor if there was any chance I could die. I even joined the choir, enthusiastically waving my hands around quite foolishly in front of the whole school as we did a rather wonderful arrangement of Toto’s Africa. These two principles were to form the philosophy of my teaching career, and I held onto them tightly as I embarked upon my PGCE.

Was there, you may well ask, an element of complacency, given that I had already worked, and indeed started teaching, in a demanding school? Undoubtedly yes, I expected to excel. I expected the teaching itself to come easy, and the workload itself to be the real shock. The reality? My teaching, which naturally improved over the course of the year as I encountered different challenges and employed different strategies that various staff shared with me, rarely felt like a chore; it was indeed the sheer amount of work that was suddenly upon me that hit hardest. Lesson planning, essays, teaching, reviewing, learning, reading, marking; it was all at once and it was all without a rest. It was a heavy weight that had been placed upon the cohort of trainees, as it is every year, and there were times when we felt that it was an insurmountable task, that that pile of books was one pile too many, that that essay was just one step too far. The large majority of us made it through the year, and most of my MFL cohort are now teaching in schools. Me? Towards the end of May, I crawled out of the school that I had rebelled against as a teenager and come to treasure as an adult, and breathed an enormous sigh of relief. It was my final day of teaching, and I was laden with presents and cards from my pupils and colleagues. But I had no job lined up for September, no big summer holiday planned before returning to smash my NQT year in style. No, my relationship with teaching had gone full circle: I had returned to “rather you than me, pal”, perhaps stronger than ever before.

Teaching, for the most part, was an absolute joy. It must seem odd to see that, knowing what my attitude towards it is now. As someone who, admittedly, loves to be the drama queen, the centre of attention, parading around at the front of the classroom was so me. I’m certainly not the world’s best teacher, and I received plenty of feedback that would back that up, but I aimed to always be enthusiastic and engaging. I’m not sure I lived up to that entirely. There were moments that teaching felt like an Oscar-worthy performance, dancing around at the front of my Year 7 class, whilst they gleefully told me that French was a sexist language (a cunning way to make them remember that the masculine form of they, ils, is always used if there is a man in the group, even if it is only one man in a group of 248290349384 women), and laughing as they did so, whilst internally panicking about teaching A level German next lesson. But unlike a drama performance, the buzz created from the kids responding to your (often false) enthusiasm did not fade away when I stepped out of character. I was elated, thrilled at their engagement and their progress, ready to take on my Sixth Formers. There are moments that stand out so clearly from that year, sparkling diamonds in a whirling fog of lesson plans and yelling at photocopiers. I remember teaching my Year 10 students the subjunctive during my short placement, using Beyoncé’s If I were a boy as an example of the subjunctive (ish) in English. I remember one of my Year 11s finding me in tears on a particularly stressful day, and turning up the next day with a bar of chocolate and a heartfelt letter. I remember my Year 7 students fathoming out the new vocabulary I’d used in a mystery puzzle, and using complex grammar perfectly to write page upon page of work for their homework. I remember so many beautiful ‘eureka!’ moments, across all age ranges and abilities. I can’t say that I loved every second of teaching; indeed, some moments, such as when one of my pupils decided to wear the stationery basket as a hat for a good ten minutes, will definitely not be making the highlight reel, but, in the main, I loved it. I’d long been discontented by what I saw as my wasted potential, having been a very promising child up until the age of about 12, at which point I decided that effort was unnecessary. I’d frustrated my parents, teachers and various swimming coaches with my lack of effort despite obvious ability, and it wasn’t until I graduated university that I admitted I’d frustrated and disappointed myself. Teaching was not my redemption from this disappointment, it was better than that: it was my opportunity to make sure that none of my pupils made the same mistake I did. They were all young and full of potential, and I wanted to make sure they reached it.

So why then, despite the obvious real joy I got out of teaching, did it all fall apart for me? Why was the love of the actual teaching not enough? There are several reasons, and it’s honestly quite difficult to put it all together. An obvious reason is time. A trainee teacher works up to teaching a timetable that is around 2/3 of the timetable of a fully qualified teacher, in some cases up to 75%. I’d say I was probably at the lower end of that bracket, and I worked long, long days. I’d try to have Saturdays off, after a colleague advised me to always have one day that is completely work free, but some Saturdays I’d wake up at 7am, and be unable to fight the urge to get another set of books marked and out of the way. It became my life, I thought about it all the time. My boyfriend could (and still can) recount the details of every hiccup and issue I had during the year, because work was all I talked about. Teaching is an all-consuming profession, and it demands every piece of you. I have found few teachers who really master that art of not losing themselves in the sea of all the work and pressure. There are, undoubtedly, some, and to them, I offer my most sincere congratulations and confess myself entirely jealous.

What I found really difficult was the endless scrutiny. I have never been entirely fantastic at accepting feedback, and can clearly remember telling my A level English Literature teacher to stop reading over my shoulder while I was writing because I didn’t want her pointing issues out. She took it very calmly, which is probably for the best because she later became my (very lovely) colleague. Training to be a teacher was constant scrutiny, which is part and parcel of the job, and so I tried to get used to it, and there is no doubt whatsoever that it was useful. Wonderfully experienced staff gave me pointers, targets to improve on, and all of it was undoubtedly intended to bring out the best in me. But it was the scrutiny beyond the classroom that became most difficult. Working in a school was my first experience of working long-term in a large team of staff, and whilst I’d expected my teaching and my ideas to be scrutinised, I hadn’t fully appreciated that everything else would be too. The stress, the pressure and the workload weighed down on me heavily, and at times the scrutiny, which naturally had to lead to some negative feedback, pushed me to the edge. There were things I said that, in the clear light of day, a year on, that I would rather not have said. Those who had my stress-fuelled rage taken out on them, I can only apologise. Again.

The university side of things was similarly frustrating. There was the occasional workshop, often on discipline or special educational needs, that proved very useful and gave me ideas and strategies which I later used in my lessons. But what the university side often felt like was a desperate attempt to make teaching academic, through a barrage of terms such as ‘metacognition’ and forcing Bloom’s taxonomy into every possible situation (however inappropriate it may be). There are, of course, times when Bloom’s taxonomy, for example, is a useful thing to consider in teaching, but it was not the miracle concept that it was gleefully declared to be. They also encouraged us to look at schools such as San Diego’s High Tech High as the future of education, and to push for as much project-based learning (PBL) opportunities as possible. There is nothing wrong with these ideas, but they’re simply not practical for the majority of trainees who end up in schools that are reluctant to change, and those that would like to change don’t have the budget to do it anyway. This side of the university training felt like it was preparing us for an ideal future, where schools are forward-thinking and well-funded. As it is, schools are cutting more and more staff, side-lining more and more subjects, and MFL teachers are having to make the case for their subjects to remain on the curriculum more and more frequently. In a country where numbers of pupils studying European languages is rapidly decreasing, we needed to learn how to fight for our subject, not revolutionise the education system. There will be a time to revolutionise the system, and goodness knows I wish it would happen quickly, but it is not right now.

The education system is a mess. I cannot stress that enough. Older and more experienced staff are being pushed out to save money, departments are having their funding slashed here, there and everywhere. My department was described as being ‘overstaffed’, despite the fact that every single member of that department worked themselves into the ground just to get their planning, marking and paperwork done. They worked long hours, sacrificing time with family and friends, were relentless in their endeavours to make sure that pupils achieved their potential, and were absolutely exhausted by the time it got to each half term holiday. Goodness knows what it was like in departments that weren’t ‘overstaffed’. Teachers around the country are being expected to do more and more work, and yes, we know the holidays are good, but according to the Education Policy Institute, in 2016, 20% of all teachers were working at least 60 hours a week. I might not have the figures at hand for teachers in 2018, but I would bet my life savings (which admittedly, are fairly small) that that figure has not decreased. Quite the opposite, I imagine. Teachers are overworked, they’re exhausted. There is little understanding of the amount of effort (and tears) that go into teaching outside of the profession, with people saying it’s worthwhile because they ‘get six weeks off in the summer’.

But the worst bit of all? They’re undervalued. Undervalued by a society that treats them as free childcare and a face to blame when their child does something wrong. Undervalued by a system that is failing and underfunded. Undervalued by leaders who expect 60 hour weeks as ‘part of the job’.

Teaching was, to me, purpose and I took pride in it. I remain, no matter how hard I try, a teacher at heart, and I fondly remember my pupils’ successes. But being a teacher demanded the ultimate sacrifice – it demanded my soul. To teach, I’d have to have to submitted myself to 60 hour weeks, to the tears that the stress would inevitably induce, to the countdown of days until I could sleep for more than four hours. My brief experience of teaching had already given me tastes of that life, but worst of all, I’d watched, unresisting, as my dear philosophy of teaching was prised from my exercise book-filled hands, and smashed to pieces. You can’t teach 24 lessons a week and still make sure that every pupil reaches their potential both academically and personally. You don’t have the time. Something has got to give. In a system where a school is only as good as its GCSE results, it is not the academic development of the child that can be put to the side. Your investment, as a teacher, in their personal development is what falls away. It isn’t because you don’t want the best for the pupils, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Your ideas to help motivate them with insights into foreign cultures, to make them see languages as real living things that are exciting and practical, are cast asunder, because there are only six lessons to squeeze in all of the content before the end of module test and you’re struggling to get through it in time anyway. And even if you had the lesson time, that pile of Year 11 mock exams is calling and their results need to be submitted and standardised by tomorrow, so there’s no time to plan a cultural lesson…

Your good intentions of producing well-rounded individuals are replaced by the only intentions that matter: producing good results.

Is that fair? Is that fair on the teachers? Is that fair on the pupils themselves?

In all honesty, I remain unconvinced.