When all those “wet behind the ears” student teachers bound into school on their teaching practises, a smile always crosses my lips. Before they enter the school environment they will have been fed with all the theory that they can eat from university lecturers who haven’t set foot in a school classroom for real for a number of years. They’ll be all enthusiastic about what activities they can try out on their classes and how they are going to make learning fun.
It is at that point they meet the classes they will teach. This doesn’t normally put them off, but does tend to give them a sense of trepidation. In our school we do try to give trainee teachers a range of classes – normally a top set, two middling sets and a bottom-ish set. It’s a similar type of timetable to what they would get as a qualified teacher, only half as many classes, because trainees only teach half a timetable, or maybe a little more.
Then there comes the teaching, or more accurately, the standing in front of 30 students truing to get them to do what you want. What they won’t tell you is the following:
· You will spend a large proportion of your time asking students to stop chatting about Eastenders, X Factor, The Simpsons or whatever, and that includes the nice, bright classes.
· Most lessons will see an argument of one sort or another, or one member of the class claim that they can’t be within 4 desks of so-and-so because they’ve fallen out.
· Any activity that you’ve designed will require the instructions read out at least 3 times, and even then a few will do it totally wrong.
· A significant percentage of the class will not have part of the equipment they require, be it their book or something to write with.
· At least half the class will say “I don’t get it”, or words to that effect, before having read any of the questions. I had one boy today claim that he “didn’t get it” before I’d actually said anything.
I could go on, but you get the gist.
On top of the students’ inability to fall into the rose-tinted view of school life, there’s the government of the school to consider, whether it’s centrally or locally, there will always be people in power suits prepared to tell people what they should be doing having never actually performed the role themselves. There’ll be new directives on marking, how to structure a lesson or how to discipline (or not as is the case nowadays) students.
We haven’t even mentioned the parents yet. “My Johnny wouldn’t lie” or “I can’t believe Hayley would ever do that” and “Steven is not staying for a detention because he has to get me a pint of milk on the way home and I’m gasping for a cuppa”.
And finally, at the bottom, sorry top, of the pile is Ofsted: the fear inducing body of ex-teachers who can’t cut the mustard as real teachers any more, so they go around telling everyone else how to do it. The fear is only felt by Heads, Deputy Heads and other senior staff, and mostly you’ll find that ordinary teachers couldn’t care less about the £200 million per year quango, but it affects ordinary teachers, because in fits of panic, headteachers pressurise ordinary teachers into doing worthless tasks in a bid to raise there Ofsted judgement to as close to “Outstanding” as possible.
If you think you can handle all that then train to be a teacher. If you want a job where the general public respect you and you feel like you are making a contribution to society, then do something else. Except be a traffic warden of course.
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