Why It Matters To Me

My face is drawn and sallow. Wiry white hairs protrude from my beard. My eyes hide in darkly cavernous recesses. My gym-hardened body has become softer, doughier. I have had backache for weeks. I've been a teacher for less than two months.

I rise at 5:15am for the double-bus commute to school. A strong coffee is slurped on arrival as I gather resources and double check my lesson plans for the day. I deal with yesterday’s emails, admin and endless requests for data as efficiently as possible, then close down this potential distraction until I feel ready to deal with another barrage of demands on my time.

I deal with the reprobates in my form who simply cannot control themselves despite exhortations from me, their parents and senior leaders. I sign and stamp my Y7 form’s planners, trying my utmost to shower deserved praise on those who are performing so admirably in their first term at big school. Often time constraints prevent this, which saddens me.

I teach. I teach to the very best of my ability and, modesty aside, sometimes I am marvellous. Momentarily I feel I have finally cracked it; broken through and become the brilliant practitioner I aspire to be. My pupils amaze me with their insight, empathy and ability. Behaviour is spectacularly good, they learn loads, they love me – and I love them in return.

More often than I’d like, I am awful. I am thrown early on by a room change, an incident, a distraction. I never wrestle the lesson back from its shaky start. Or they don’t get it. Occasionally they are bored. Often, I doubt myself. Sometimes I sulk. Always, I punish myself.

Maybe I care too much. Maybe I should relax a little more. I should definitely stop being so hard on myself. But I really, really fucking care.

I rarely leave school before five. I almost always work when I get home. My weekend lasts just one day: on Sundays I plan. I have 20% PPA time and it isn’t enough. I have 24 lessons to prepare. Six class’ worth of marking to do. Three subjects to teach. I have numerous shortcuts to help me in all these areas and I am getting faster, but the fundamental problem remains: I am inexperienced and everything is new to me. Things take me longer. I recycle, I borrow, and occasionally I improvise. But sometimes I need to learn something myself before I can teach it to someone else. I don’t know the mark scheme by heart. I can’t level a piece of work by looking at it. Not yet. 

I am seen as competent and confident by my peers and superiors. They trust me and my ability. I’m heartened by this. I take pride in it. The pupils speak highly of me. But I’m like a swan, gliding serenely over the water’s surface, my legs pedalling and kicking furiously, hidden beneath the calm exterior.

I am not unique. I am not a martyr. I am not special in any way. There are thousands like me.

I do this job because it is worthwhile. It’s essential. It matters. I do it for all the selfless reasons you do it. And I know you do it because only a committed, caring, conscientious teacher would spend their leisure time reading an article written by a colleague.

But I also do it for selfish reasons. It validates me. It makes me feel valued and valuable. I came to teaching in my thirties, having earned better money in mind-numbing, spirit-crushing jobs which ended when they ended - and asked nothing of me but my minimum.

So when the DfE, Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings or anyone else suggests that PRP will improve my performance, that an unqualified teacher might be better than me, that my students’ genetic make-up determines their fate, that there are very few talented teachers, that I am ‘gaming’ the system, that my PPA time might be threatened, that I leave work at 3pm or any number of the many  insulting, insidious and pejoratively poisonous statements they make, my blood boils and I ask myself this simple question:

Why don’t they come and watch us work?

Why Bother With My PGCE, Mr Gove?

Once again, and to nobody’s great surprise, Michael Gove has announced another ill-considered and absurd attack on the nation’s teachers. Now, in his infinite wisdom he has declared that anyone can teach in his academies without a relevant teaching qualification. Mere life experience and expertise will be enough. But where does this leave me as I prepare to embark on my PGCE year?

Firstly, I concede that experience and expertise are important. I’m almost 33 years old and have plenty of ‘life experience’ (I actually cringed as I wrote that) and relevant work experience having performed various training, coaching and management jobs over a varied career. More important than any of that, however, is the two years I’ve just spent working in a school. With young people. And teachers. And a national curriculum.

Assuming that being a genius in your field enables you to teach is plainly wrong. It’s the same wrong-headed attitude that sees those with first class honours degrees awarded three times the training salaries of their 2:1 toting contemporaries. The misguided assumption is that the better you are at something, the better you’ll be able to transfer that knowledge to your young charges. Anyone with opposable thumbs and a modicum of commonsense could point out that this is utter horseshit. The way that message is conveyed, the ability to relate to young people and making that learning memorable so that it sticks is what’s important. You don’t need to know string theory to teach kids GCSE physics. But you do need to inspire them and interest them in the subject – knowledge alone is not enough.

Without having yet embarked upon my course, I know that I’ll spend hours observing existing teachers, taking their advice, looking at the theory behind education and managing a classroom, coping with different behaviours, differentiating by task and outcome, setting learning objectives, continually assessing my students, applying my subject knowledge to the syllabus and correcting any gaps or weaknesses, absorbing the atmosphere of a school and countless other tasks, exercises and activities designed to raise my skill levels and my pupils’ attainment. Presumably Gove sees no value in any of this, instead preferring to assume that my knowledge of my subject will seep by osmosis into every child I come into contact with? 

I took a huge risk to leave a well paid career behind and work as a teaching assistant for two years (scraping by on less than £8000 a year). I’m now committed to a further year of study which will cost me £9000 in fees and will see my existing student loan debt swell beyond comprehension. I did these things because I needed to do them to follow this path, because I felt they would put me ahead of my contemporaries and because they were requirements of the job. I made sacrifices that I deemed to be worthwhile because I really, really want to teach English.

Now, it seems I may have wasted my time. I could’ve wandered into one of Gove’s academies, given a whizz-bang interview and been hired thanks largely to my charisma and fancy-talk. Of course, as soon as I entered a classroom full of kids who weren’t interested in me and didn’t share my enthusiasm for Simon Armitage and subordinate clauses, I’d have been up Excrement Creek without the required rowing implement. 

What Gove stupidly assumes is that anyone can wander into a classroom and teach. They can’t. It is an art, a skill and a profession. Teachers are not knowledge-boxes to be tapped. Kids have got Wikipedia for that. They are not lecturers or key-note speakers. I’ve spent two years sitting in English lessons, have taught plenty of my own and have read dozens of highly regarded books on the art of teaching. But I am not a teacher. I am not ready to be one yet. I cannot do the job properly until I have been trained appropriately. For Gove to assume that just anyone can walk in from whatever sphere, and can do this complicated, demanding job is an insult to all educators, prospective teachers and, worst of all, our children.

Kids Are Not Dumb - Not Even The Dumb Ones!

The role of Teaching Assistant affords a unique perspective on the classroom. Placed amongst the students, the TA is neither a teacher nor a pupil. Accordingly, they are treated as a hybrid of the two: an adult the kids can trust and conspire with, but also learn from and admire. It’s a wonderful  position to be in.

Although it’s usually advisable to shut them up before they divulge exactly which laws they broke or how much vodka they imbibed at the weekend, it can be wholly instructive to listen to the pupils talk about school life. The truth emerges about playground rumours, their perspective on classroom incidents vary wildly from the staffroom equivalents and their true feelings about the teaching staff are laid bare. After two years of being privy to such revelations, i realised that students are enormously perceptive and hugely demanding when it comes to their teachers. Here are the three keys things i learned:

1. 1  If a teacher doesn’t turn up, they got no respect.
2. 2  If a teacher doesn’t do what they say, they get no respect.
3. 3. If a teacher doesn’t make a class work, they got no respect.

(for the uninitiated, respect is a huge fucking deal to teenage kids) 

Some of these ‘revelations’ might seem counter-intuitive or surprising. But they shouldn’t be. Kids are not dumb. None of them. Some might be less able than others, but every single one of them can see straight through a faker. They can spot a bullshitter. They know when you are ‘phoning it in’. They will hate you for it. And they’ll make you suffer for not doing your job properly.

1. There are a number of kids in schools who live unstable lives. It’s your job as a teacher to provide some measure of stability for them. This means being in their lesson EVERY SINGLE DAY. If you’re not there you are letting them down. You are failing them. You undermining your own teaching by suggesting that your subject is not important. You are implying that it’s okay for them to miss your lesson – after all, you do! Worst of all, you are leaving them with a substitute teacher and a shitty pile of pointless timewasting tasks which will never get marked: cover lessons are not taken seriously by anyone. Kids hate teachers who miss lessons and have absolutely no respect for them: do not be ill and do not put yourself forward for every school trip available: DO NOT ABSENT YOURSELF FROM YOUR OWN LESSONS.

2, If you show weakness and inconsistency, kids will eat you alive. If you fail to keep your promises or follow through on your threats, they will seek to take advantage at every available opportunity. They will quickly ascertain how to appeal to your better nature, worm their way into your affections and talk you out of your sanctions. Set out your standards for behaviour and then adhere to them ruthlessly. Contrary to what you might think, they will respect you for this - because they will always know where they stand with you. They will know your threats are never empty. They will not be able to complain that others are treated differently or that they are being victimised. 

3. Once you have managed to drag yourself into school and instilled some discipline in your class, don’t forget to make them do some work. Proper work. Set objectives and teach to them. Make them think for themselves. Communicate clearly and enable discussion, groupwork and peer-to-peer learning. Make them write things down. Ensure they can recognise their own progress. And then mark their books, grade their oral work and praise them to the heavens. Kids like doing work. But they don’t like boring work. They like fun tasks, variety and thinking for themselves. They like clarity in their teaching and they like the work they produce to be appreciated and graded so they know how to make improve the next time. You would not believe the number of times i’ve heard kids moan about teachers who “never make us do any writing” or who refuse to work because “it won’t get marked anyway”.

Isolated from the reality of the classroom, cocooned in their bubbles at the front of the room, too many teachers are blissfully/painfully unaware of the demands their students have of them. I’ve sat through too many shitty lessons with ill-prepared teachers to ever make those mistakes myself: if i want my kids to respect me, i have to treat them with respect too.

An Introduction!

At the age of thirty I decided to become an teacher of English. This was a problematic/idiotic decision for a lot of reasons, chief amongst them my complete lack of relevant experience and my completely irrelevant degree. So I started at the very bottom of the teaching ladder: I became a teaching assistant.

Two years on, I'm about to embark on my PGCE. I've worked with every age group in my inner city school, working exclusively in the English department and observing the whole secondary English curriculum taught by a variety of teachers. I've clocked up hours of teaching time myself and learned enormous amounts about life in schools: hopefully this will give me a massive head start as I work towards NQT status.

Predictably, I learned most from those teachers whose style and approach I held in disdain - and there were plenty of shitty teachers in my school. But there were also wonderful, inspirational staff members whose success lessons I will seek to emulate, copy and shamelessly pass off as my own for years to come.

Over the course of the summer I'll be detailing what I've learned in my teaching career so far. Names will be changed to protect people's identities and salaries - but I'll not hold back from corruscating criticism of those who deserve it (teachers with appalling attendance records, my feckless manager and Michael Gove will be getting both barrels). The many positives (and they far outweight the negatives) will also be detailed.

From September I'll document my journey through my PGCE, share my lesson plans and thoughts on teaching, and hopefully inspire debate and conversation amongst fellow students of language, literature and education. Here we go...