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
