Teaching and Learning

The final assignment of my PGCE requires me to submit a creative response to the experience. As a proponent of social media, it seemed fitting to me to write a blog of, to borrow Mr Luhrmann's phrase, my own meandering experience...

Pupil 1: Miss, were you one of those lawyers like the ones on TV?

Me: Which ones do you mean?

Pupil 1: Like, the ones in those accident adverts?

Me: Err, no.

This time last year my life was very different. Unlike many of my fellow PGCE English students, I wasn’t in the midst of my finals at QUB, but was instead working out my notice at a City law firm. With only a month of my notice remaining, I had learned that I had obtained a coveted place on the course just a week earlier.

I still remember that call with my father when he informed me that my letter had finally arrived, and that yes, it was reassuringly fat. I had resigned nearly two months earlier, not because I was confident of obtaining a place on the PGCE, but rather out of my own determination that I wasn’t going to spend another year doing a job that made me miserable.

My mother had been telling me for years that I should be an English teacher and, in turn, my brilliant English teachers had done likewise. Those who know me will, however, attest to my innately stubborn nature (the same nature that kept me working as a ‘golden-handcuffed wage slave in a corporate sweatshop’ (as my friend, and fellow former English student, so eloquently put it) for four years and if someone (and especially my mother) suggested that I should pursue a career as an English teacher, you can be sure I was going to do ANYTHING but become an English teacher. To use a good Norn Irish word, I can be terribly ‘thran’.

Don’t get me wrong: I loved English at school, but to become an English teacher just seemed rather …prosaic. My beloved grandmother was expecting Great Things from her only granddaughter and when I was eight, my primary school principal told my mother that I was “Oxford or Cambridge material” (my mother laughed). I sometimes wish I was the kind of person who could laugh off comments like that and blissfully follow their own path, but I am one of those sensitive people, anxious to please everyone, who, to this day, feels the weight of the expectations of others. I also disliked the tendency of people to say, “Oh, so you’re going to be an English teacher…”, when I told them what degree I was reading (there’s that thran nature again).

In my final year at university I became increasingly aware of my friends attending drinks receptions laid on by big City firms, held in fancy hotels or those rooms in College reserved for conferences and the sort of functions which necessitated the consumption of Port. Never one to turn down a (free) canapé, (free) glass of wine and some (free) branded stationery, I duly attended. Despite the fact that they tended to provide the best haul (this was pre-‘Credit Crunch’, never mind recession), I quickly learned that a career in Investment Banking or Asset Management wasn’t for me (far too many references to Excel), but a career as a solicitor in a City firm began to seem appealing: life in London sounded exciting, they were going to pay me a ridiculous amount of money for someone who had just graduated and, best of all, it involved two years of further study. Application forms were submitted, vacation schemes were undertaken and I returned to College in the Lent term of my final year clutching a training contract with a City law firm. To me, the greatest part was that I was now free to concentrate on my Finals, knowing that the next four years of my life were planned out; the fact that it made my grandmother visibly swell with pride was all the proof I needed to know that I was doing the right thing.

Seven years (two years at law school, two years of a training contract, a year back at Cambridge doing an MPhil in Real Estate Finance (I know...) and nearly two years as a qualified solicitor) later and I had decided that while a career in law was both intellectually challenging and financially rewarding, I found it neither fulfilling nor enjoyable. So when one of the secretaries (who was studying an English degree at the Open University) asked me to read her Shakespeare essay before she submitted it, (easily the most enjoyable twenty minutes I had ever spent in a law firm) I knew I had to start listening to my heart. English was, and remains, my passion and so I found myself preparing to return to Northern Ireland and commence a PGCE.

Pupil 1: Miss, how much did you make as a lawyer? I bet it was, like, loads.

Me: I'm not telling you.

Pupil 2: Miss, can we go round the room and we'll each say a number and you tell us who was closest?

Me: Err, no.

Pupil 2: I'll start: £200,000?

Me: (Sarcastically) Close enough. Congratulations!

September 2012  - I’m on the right.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I started the PGCE. I had been told that it was a very demanding course but, somewhat naively perhaps, I thought that since I had worked long hours in the City, I would have the necessary stamina. While being used to the demands of my previous career definitely helped, I’m not sure anything could have prepared me for it.

The first six weeks at QUB flew by in a whirlwind of lectures, tutor group sessions and seminars. Not only was I getting used to studying again (flexing a lot of old muscles), but also getting used to being back in Northern Ireland after a ten year break. Before I knew it, the first six weeks were up and I off to my first teaching practice.

Me: How many of you know who Margaret Thatcher was?

Pupil 1: Wasn't she the first lady Prime Minister?

Pupil 2: (interrupting) No, she wasn't! She just helped!

I met with the Head of Department the week before my teaching practice started and I left that meeting feeling a mixture of excitement and terror - a set of emotions that followed me through my PGCE course and, in some ways, came to define it for me.

Apart from a few days spent back at my old school, teaching practice was the first time I had been in a school since I was a pupil and, despite the fact I had left school 11 years before, I spent the first few days observing lessons and feeling like I should be wearing a uniform. Every time one of the teachers addressed a pupil who happened to be called Catherine, I thought they were talking to me and went to answer…

Although I was painfully slow at planning (if a lesson lasted 35 minutes, it took me at least three times as long to plan it), I was really enjoying my time in the classroom, interacting with the pupils. While I focused on trying to ensure that my pupils were learning (or at least not psychologically scarred by my teaching), I was learning just as much, if not more. Some of the most important lessons I learnt were that just because a lesson didn’t end up exactly where I thought it was going to didn’t mean that it wasn’t a worthwhile lesson and that I could plan a lesson down to two minute intervals (believe me: I did) but that didn’t mean that thirty teenagers would be willing, able or ready to move through each of those stages with me and so I quickly realised the need to try and relax a little and let the learning happen. Try as I might, I cannot control what goes on in the heads of my pupils…!

I have been very fortunate that both of the schools in which I undertook my teaching practices had brilliant, supportive and enthusiastic Heads of Department – the kind of teachers that I was lucky enough to have during my own school career and the kind of teachers that I aspire to become. My first teaching practice, in particular, despite sometimes feeling like a baptism of fire, couldn’t have been a better start to my teaching career and really set me up for the second half of the course.

Pupil 1: Miss, did you ever send anyone down?

Me: Err, no, and you've been watching too many crime dramas.

Pupil 2: Did you have to wear one of those funny wigs?

Me: No, I was a solicitor; barristers wear wigs like that.

Pupil 1: What's a banister?

Me: It's what you hold on to when you climb stairs.

When I was a solicitor, between finishing off one item and starting the next one, I often had the freedom to go and make myself a cup of tea, close myself in my office and gather my thoughts before starting again. That just doesn’t happen in teaching. From the moment the registration bell goes until the last bell of the day rings, it is incessant. But brilliant. I have found teaching incredibly frustrating at times but I have also been encouraged, inspired and entertained by the pupils I have had the pleasure of teaching. I had bad days during my teaching practices, days when it was all I could do not to cry, but they were never as bad as my worst days as a lawyer (when I often did go and cry) and I have never regretted my decision to change career. Not even for a second.

May 2013 – Still on the right (but no longer blonde)

Me: Why does your newspaper cost “one guinea pig”?

Pupil 1: Y'know, Miss, in the olden days they used them to buy things.

Me: Do you mean 'guineas'?

Pupil 1: Ummm, I dunno. I thought it was guinea pigs.

I think the most important thing I have learnt during my PGCE is that teaching is all about people, and I have been incredibly privileged to have been guided along the beginning of this new path by some of the very best teachers, pupils and friends.

And now? Well, now I have been fortunate enough to secure a position at the kind of school in which I could only have dreamt about teaching a year ago. Once again I find myself experiencing a mixture of excitement and terror, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“No printed word, nor spoken plea can teach young minds what they should be. Not all the books on all the shelves – but what the teachers are themselves.”

 Rudyard Kipling

Tomorrows...

For a variety of uninteresting reasons I haven't blogged in several months, but tomorrow I'm meant to be doing something I really don't want to do, and I'm using this to help me convince myself that it's the Right Thing To Do.

I have spent a lot of time since the autumn behaving in a purposely mindless way  because I really didn't (don't) want to accept the reality of a particular situation. The unfortunate problem with actions, however mindlessly undertaken, is that they have consequences, and consequences are often harder to ignore.

I had at one point wanted tomorrow to happen, or, perhaps more accurately, I did at least appreciate why it was necessary (those damn consequences again...), but the problem with appointments is that they aren't available for weeks and that provides more than enough time to talk yourself out of something, back into it again and then, for good measure, out of it once more.

Having been down this particular road before, I know enough about tomorrow to be sceptical (some might even say cynical...) but, other than not going, I don't have any other options and if I want things to get better (and I think at least part of me does), then I have to go. Except... not only do I have to go, but I have to be honest. It's not one of those appointments to which one can just rock up and then sit there while being prodded with a selection of devices, like a slab of meat. The probes will (I sincerely hope) be verbal and, if this to be anything other than a massive waste of time, I have to tell perfect strangers (please God, let them be perfect strangers) exactly what I have been doing since the autumn. Things I haven't told anyone, things which I don't like (am afraid) to admit to myself...

So why am I making myself do it? (Here comes the brutal bit...) Because if things don't change, then there is a chance that the consequences will prevent me from doing what I have planned (or anything much at all) and so I have to hope. I have to hope there is something better and that I can get back the person I used to be, the person who had vowed this wouldn't ever happen again, admittedly, but also the person who could trust her own thoughts and who wasn't going to let anything stop her from achieving her goals. I liked her.

We wear the mask...

I've just finished my fifth week of teaching practice. 

It's been a tough but enjoyable five weeks and, at times, I have wondered why I am doing this. One morning I even considered driving straight past the gates and taking myself off somewhere... I didn't though, and the Head of Department has been pleased with my progress, so it can't have been too bad a start. I do, however, feel like I've spent it wearing a mask: a mask of competence when I have most felt like I have no idea what I am doing; a mask of certainty when I have most doubted myself; and a mask of calm when I have most wanted to go and cry in the English Resource Room...

While I have enjoyed the experiences I have had in the classroom, I have also had moments when I have wondered whether this has been a mistake... That's not to say that I want to return to my former life - in many ways that would be easier - it's much worse to have a stomach-churning, 'I'm not happy' moment, fully aware that you weren't happy in your former life either, because that makes you feel like perhaps you won't be happy anywhere, and that's one realisation I could do without...

Six months ago I was an independent adult (although not always a very good one) and now I live with my parents (ostensibly in an annexe), am a student and, once again, a beginner. I'm not very good at not being good at something and it's hard to give myself time to learn and even (gasp) make mistakes...

This feeling of lack of control has triggered all kinds of reactions and suddenly (despite some resistance of my part) old, familiar coping mechanisms move quickly (much faster than ever before) from a momentary lapse, to a crutch, a friend... And before you know it, you're wearing an entirely different mask altogether: a mask that, ultimately, isn't much of a mask at all.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, 

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth our myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence Dunbar

'...we're not in Kansas anymore.'

 So. I now live in Northern Ireland.

I moved to England to go to university in 2002 and became one of those people who didn’t come back. Until I did…

I’ve been back for eleven weeks: the longest amount of time I have spent in NI in ten years.

It’s weird.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t regret my decisions (‘regret’ is a very strong word…) but it’s rapidly becoming clear to me that I have underestimated quite how unsettling the transition from London-living lawyer to country-dwelling trainee teacher would be…

I knew people would query my life-changing decisions because few people were privy to the months of agonizing and soul-searching that preceded them. Nevertheless, I am nonplussed by some of the responses my news has provoked. The questions I have been asked range from the incredulous (‘You did what?!’), via the pointed (‘So you didn’t manage to get a man while you were over there?’), to the disconcerting (‘Do you think you’ve committed emotional suicide by moving back to NI?’) and back again. There have been times when the clinical anonymity of London seems preferable to having to continually offer an account of my choices.

If I had been pinning my hopes of stability on my return to full-time education (and I had), I was to be somewhat disappointed... Last week was Induction Week on my PGCE course. It entailed a series of introductory sessions and was the first time all 140 of us were in the same room together. The actual lectures were very interesting (if a little overwhelming) and I’ve already become attached to the rather swish university library.  What I wasn’t expecting, however, was to be regarded with something approaching suspicion by many of the other students.  Yes, I’m approximately eight years older than many of them; yes, I haven’t previously attended the university I do now; yes, I have spent the last ten years in England and yes, I have already tried a different career, but I wasn’t expecting to feel quite so… detached. Admittedly, there is a chance that this says more about me than it does about them, but it’s a feeling that I wasn’t expecting to encounter.

For the moment, I’m seeking solace in my first week of lectures (while simultaneously being incredibly nervous about my first English Methods classes on Wednesday…) and subsuming my emotions with exhausting gym workouts (while I still have the time) and generally hoping that it will all settle down before I have to deal with my first eleven-week block of teaching practice…

Oh, and did I mention I’m living with my parents…?

"Once you label me, you negate me."

As a society we like labels. They help us categorise and make sense of the general chaos that is life. Lately, I've been thinking about them a lot.  A little over three weeks ago, I was a City lawyer with all of the (misplaced) connotations of glamour and importance that phrase conveys.  Two weeks ago, I was a Londoner with all of the anonymity and excitement that suggests. In six weeks, I start a PGCE course. Then, I'll be, in turn, a mature student, a trainee teacher and, simply, 'Miss'.

Even now, in my transitional state I have labels: I'm a daughter and a sister. Labels whose meanings have intensified now that I'm back in Northern Ireland and living in close quarters with my immediate family. Indeed, in a small place like Northern Ireland those labels have a further dimension; to some people I'm not quite a person in my own right: I'm so-and-so's daughter/neice/sister/cousin. As my return is recent, I'm largely anonymous when going about my business by myself, but recognisable and waved at and spoken to when accompanied by a parent or my brother. I haven't quite decided whether this is preferable to the anonymity to which I was accustomed in London...

My new home is my childhood home, about a mile and a half outside a large village. The sort of place with two streets which has grown rapidly over the last thirty years as its appeal for commuters was discovered and seized upon.  The sort of place where families (like mine) have lived for generations and where anyone still a first or even a second generation resident is considered a 'blow-in' and regarded with vague suspicion. There are a dizzying array of developments encircling the village (inhabited by these blow-ins), where, I imagine, it is possible to live a life of relative anonymity. In the more rural area where I live, without pavements but with cattle-grids, I can name the families living in all but a few houses along the surrounding roads. In London, when an ambulance raced past with its sirens blaring, it was barely noticed as it fought with the general cacophony of city noises. When a siren is heard here, you find yourself listening to see if you can tell where it goes and wonder who it might be for...

Moving back home has stirred up a range of emotions, and I'm still getting used to the rural mentality where people comment on who they saw in the doctor's waiting room and where I receive text messages from aunts which begin "Tell your mum 'X' is dead."

Perhaps London has changed me more than I had realised and my labels don't fit quite so comfortably as they did before...

Nothing but a number...?

I mostly deal in words: incessant (and insistent) emails from clients and colleagues; advice to clients; drafting documents; seemingly endless 'to do' lists; tweets and blog entries.  The numbers in my life are largely limited to billable hours and time-recording.  Recently, however, numbers have been playing a larger role: I have 13 working days left as a lawyer (hallelujah!); 27 days as a resident of London; 62 days left of my twenties; and 82 days until my PGCE course begins.

All very exciting and although I've been planning this for some time (maybe because of the fact I've been planning it for some time), it doesn't quite seem real. Maybe it's a coping mechanism? (I have a lot of those.) I just can't quite believe that I'm actually getting to leave law (I really don't like my job - in case you hadn't noticed), moving back to Northern Ireland, turning thirty (thirty! I'm not sure I feel seventeen, never mind thirty...) or starting on a new career path.

I didn't think turning thirty would bother me. I mean, there's not really anything I can do about it and everyone says your thirties are better than your twenties...Don't they? Don't they?!  It doesn't really bother me (honest), but it has made me wonder if I can still accurately and fairly be described as 'young'. At what age does that stop applying? When does 'young' just start meaning 'younger than me'? If anything, it's losing that moniker which scares me more than the whole turning thirty business. I'm definitely in the 'young' category at my law firm. There's a partner who, at 78, still comes to work most days, so that helps, but still... Come September, though, I'm going to be at university where I am a lot less likely to be in the 'young' category. And when I'm on teaching practice the probability of my being in the 'young' category only becomes a possibility when qualified to mean 'young member of staff' (and even then it's not guaranteed)... If I'm not 'young' any more, then what am I, exactly? I'm certainly not old enough to be classified as middle aged (for which I am very grateful) so maybe I'll just have to be moniker-less for a while. Rather than a fear of ageing (to which the many and varied contents of my bathroom cabinet are testament enough), I think I'm more concerned about what not being young means about my life; when I was eighteen, I probably did think I would have been married by now and I might even have had a baby. My own Mum had been married for eight years and had a six-year-old and a four-year-old by the time she turned thirty. But things were different then and, as she is forever telling me, I've had a lot of opportunities that she didn't have. Still, I definitely think there's nothing like getting married, getting a mortgage or having children for making you realise that you're now a Grown Up.  I have yet to do any of those things (if I ever do) so maybe there is part of me that is forever going to feel young. Admittedly, the fact that I'm going to be living with my parents probably isn't helping (even though I will probably be in the 'granny annex' (Note to self: think of a better name for that))... So eligible gentlemen of Northern Ireland: I'm going to be thirty, unemployed and living at home. Please form an orderly queue.

Maybe I drag myself over the coals about it all because I'm the oldest in my group of friends (I really need to get some older friends...). I also have a summer birthday which, in NI, means I was older than a lot of my school year and this, teamed with a gap year, made me older than the friends I made at university and law school, too. All but one of my Northern Irish friends are married and now my university friends are all lining up to follow suit. I also have friends with children (plural) and part of me still sees the sixteen and seventeen-year-old girls going to nightclubs in Banbridge and pretending to be French exchange students to get boys... To be fair to my friends (husbands and children aside), I think that most of them are still more than willing and able to don a silk neckscarf and give it another go...

After all, as the saying goes: growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.

"Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change"

My Mother is thoroughly bemused by my new-found appreciation for Northern Ireland and all things rural. There's no doubt that it is a beautiful place and I will admit that I have been guilty of taking such charms for granted in the past. It has made me wonder where else my attitude to something has, or could, change; after all, as Hamlet says, "...there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so".

Recently, I've been trying to eat more healthily and get some exercise, as I was alarmed to discover I weighed more than I ever have before. I think the most disturbing thing, however, was realising that about three years ago I weighed twenty-five pounds less that I do now... I know that I am very unlikely to ever weigh that little again (I had a lot going on at the time), but part of what shocked me was that it (finally) began to sink in just how tiny I must have been back then and yet I just couldn't see it. Plenty of people told me(!) but I couldn't (or wouldn't) see it. Even now, looking back at photographs from that time, I have difficulty in appreciating it. Our perception of something we are supposed to know so intimately (and you can't get much more intimate than yourself) can be not just incorrect, but so far removed from reality as to be irrational. Despite the fact that I let myself gain quite so much weight, I think (hope) I have a much more realistic take on what my body should look like.  The frustrating thing is having to find the patience to let it get that way in a sensible manner and in a sensible time-frame.

I suppose over the last eighteen months of so I've been re-examining and revising my entire life; looking at aspects afresh, deciding whether they still 'fit' and, if not, doing something about it: where I live, who I'm with and what I do for a living. Just because something, someone or somewhere worked for me when I was 21, 23 or 27, doesn't mean that will or has to always be the case.  Don't get me wrong, there is a lot to be said for having the tenacity to see something through, but I think the key (and the difficult part) is to decide when to fight and when to change tack entirely. As with so many things in life, you only get to find out if you did the right thing after you've done it...