What They Don't Tell You About Teaching

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.

Do you want to be a teacher?

They’ve started showing the “Become a teacher, it’s great” adverts again. I have always wondered what the budget for those was – it has to run into the tens of thousands of pounds I would have thought. The one I saw tonight was of the science lesson where the children, who are around the age of 13 or 14 are designing space ships using toy cars, clay and drinking straws, before putting them into a wind tunnel. The students are really enjoying themselves, or at least appear to be, although presumably the lesson is actually longer than the 45 seconds that we see.

There are others, like the one about planets in the playground where students mimic the orbits of the planets in our solar system and have a super time. Does anyone actually believe that lessons run like this? What do the children actually learn that they will be able to recall in an exam? Do these lessons just happen or have other lessons been used to set the activity up?

Within the science curriculum the students do have to learn about how “forces are interactions between objects and can affect their shape and motion”, which mean that the aerodynamics are relevant. They also have to learn about “astronomy and space science provide insight into the nature and observed motions of the sun, moon, stars, planets and other celestial bodies”, the playground lesson with the planets is also relevant.

The trouble is that these lessons are extraordinary or as Ofsted might put it, “outstanding”. You can’t teach every lesson in this way, because at some point the students will have to sit and answer some questions, like they would in exams. To have a lesson as “outstanding” would mean that it stands out from the crowd. If every lesson was of a similar ilk, no lesson would stand out, hence there would be no outstanding lessons.

There’s also the fact that all the student appear to be engaged, totally focused on the task set and not distracted in any way. “Accidents” are laughed at (I’m remembering when a student breaks a necklace and the beads go all over the place) and everyone knows exactly what they are supposed to do.

Teaching doesn’t work like this, so why do the government mislead potential teachers?

I have performed lesson along similar lines with mathematical concepts and have encountered the following problems:

·         The students are incapable of listening to instructions.

·         The students find what they regard as being a better way of performing the task, when in fact the task has been designed quite specifically to show certain things.

·         The class moan that the groups they’ve been put in contain people they don’t get on with or doesn’t contain their mates.

Activities like the ones seen on the teaching adverts are brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but they take ages to set up (usually more than one lesson) and then are ruined or at least hindered by those who can’t help but mess about. I realise that the art of the teacher is to engage all of the students, but sometimes it’s nigh on impossible – just look at Jamie Oliver’s Dream School series on Channel 4 at the moment.

What the adverts fail to point out is that every day a teacher will spend around 90% of their time with 10% of their students – the ones who can’t behave for whatever reason, whether “medical”, “dietary” or whatever. The other 10% of the time has to be divided between the 90% who actually are trying to get something out of school.

I would never encourage anyone to become a teacher now. The pay is fine, but the working conditions are dreadful for various reasons that I’ll go into at another time. Most days are spent wondering what the point of your teaching existence is and getting more and more tired after increasing numbers of sleep deprived nights. The trouble is that once you’re in for a while, it seems very difficult to escape.

The holidays are alright though.