12 Emotions of Christmas themed: Lord of the Rings

Whaaaaatsupppp, internet. I haven’t updated in a while because I’ve been busy teaching and shit. Updates from my teaching career: there’s a student in school who I literally hate, I’ve lost sleep out through genuine child-related fear, sheer mirth was had by all at the Christmas production and I’m optimistic about my next placement. Quite a smorgasbord of emotions, I’m sure you’ll agree. I’ve read that people enjoy lists, so, here, below, for your own personal perusal, is a list of emotions that have beguiled me in the last few weeks. 12 Days of Christmas, 12 Days of Trainee Teacher emotions.

I'm watching Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring as I type this. My writing, my sentiment, my very purpose is being crafted by the Fellowship that has guided me since 2001.

1. Hate.

There’s a student at school I literally hate. I don’t know why. They are really popular, not too stupid, not too clever, they enjoy a bit of banter, they’re outgoing, polite and take on responsibilities and duties around the school. Great stuff. I just hate them. I’ve got kids who paw at my arm, who cry and throw tantrums, who refuse to work, who run around the class, bouncing off the walls, telling me they haven’t had their medication yet, kids who swear, kids who talk back and I don’t hate any of them. In fact, I quite like them, I feel attached to them. But this other child…man, I don’t get it. All the other teachers love them. I do not.

It started off small, just a mild dislike, but now I actively loathe the little child. I think it’s because they’re too aware of how good they are, how popular, you know? And they’re lazy. It takes me ages to cajole them into getting pen to paper, and the whole time, they’re making wise cracks and being “sassy”. They think they are the bee’s knees. And all the other teachers are on board. But not me. I think it’s because they are capable but they refuse to really engage; they prefer to try to be cool. And whenever you set them a problem, their first impulse is to say “I don’t understand”. They refuse to engage their brain. But they’ll shout out what they think are funny comments. They don’t immediately do as instructed either; either because they’re too lazy to interpret instructions or because they think they’re above it. I don’t know why I’m writing this down. I think I just need to vent; none of the other teachers will hear anything bad against the child. But you will.

2. Guilt (is that an emotion?)

I had two nights of lost sleep in the previous week. The first came because I was sitting in Science, working with a small group and, as I gesticulated in an effort to convey my passion for the subject, the pencil I was holding pierced the back of a student’s hand. Their little hand was wandering into my close personal space, I wasn’t that wild, and I apologised and checked their hand and the

y said it was ok, but later, I caught sight of the child’s hand and there was an actual grey pencil point, surrounded by inflamed, red skin. Shit. I felt so guilty. It was such an accident, such a nothing moment but it really stuck with me. That poor child, just sitting in class, and then wham, attacked by their teacher, in an unprovoked gesture that literally scarred them. It must have actually hurt. Shit. Alongside that, I kept expecting her to report me for abuse or something, and then I’d have to explain myself to the head. Why was I sitting down? Why was I holding a pencil? Why did I not take the child to A&E?

3. Fear

The second night of lost sleep came from a similar scenario. I was at XC club (that became a total failure, btw. I only had about 3 kids in the end. One kid said to me she wasn’t coming anymore because she didn’t like running. Good. Decision), so anyway, I was at XC club and one of my faithful couldn’t take part because he’d sprained his ankle but he requested to stand and watch anyway. No worries. Anyway, on our way into the school, one of the other children didn’t hold the door open for me and the injured boy and it slammed shut on the kid’s injured ankle. He cried out and I think I had an out of body experience. I just drifted away. I felt detached from reality. That’s how terrified I was about the boy doing further injury to himself. He said he was fine and brushed it off but I got him an ice pack anyway and just trotted around after him for about half an hour, making sure the bone wasn’t sticking out of the skin or anything. I lost sleep that night, expecting to go to school the next day and find the boy’s mother there, complaining that her son had been allowed outside, that he’d re-fractured the bone, that it wouldn’t ever heal properly, that he was on double medication for it, who allowed this to happen, where were my safeguarding skills, black mark on my record, cause for concerned, failed QTS.

4. Cognizance (I know this definitely isn’t an emotion but it is necessary)

All paranoia; neither of these events came to anything but, still, it made me think. It made me realise. It made me achieve cognizance. One second could turn around your whole career. One misjudged incident, one misconstrued event and, suddenly, you’re glad you did join a Union. Everything could turn to shit.

5. Impotence

I had to fill out in another class the other day. I was talking to one boy, who was refusing to work, trying to gently encourage him to start writing, trying to create a rapport between us and make him respect the task. He wasn’t having any of it. He kept just talking at me, without taking breath, just, words, words, words, in a high pitch, squeaky little voice. It was like being stuck in a Mickey Mouse clock. Apparently, he had some gripe with the kid sitting next to him. Honestly, I cannot find the language to convey how this kid was talking. It was like the lid of the Ark of the Covenant being lifted and the rays of divine glory shooting out, blasting off people’s faces, left, right and centre. I was such a face. I was being blasted away, by the sheer volume of words that this child could fit into a second, as he fixed me with an intense stare, totally oblivious to the work in front of him. He didn’t pause for breath, so I just overrode him and said “move to that spare desk over there, if he’s winding you up”. That shut him up and he rather quickly gathered his book and his pencil, ready to move. The kid next to him muttered a taunt under his breath and the boy dropped his book, dropped his pencil, grabbed the kid’s head and just started punching him. It wasn’t a single punch but a series of punches. A sentence of punches. I had never witnessed child on child beatings during my teaching career before and I did not know how to react, how to act, how to stop it. I was frozen in utter bewilderment. So, instead of doing anything, I did what everyone else in the class was doing and just stood and watched. The TA reacted better than me and dragged both boys out. I turned around and carried on with the lesson, as though nothing had happened. I highlight this escapade because I envision most scenarios that I might encounter in my daily life as a teacher and how I should deal with them but I’ve never considered what I should do if two children in my care start fighting. I’m reluctant to touch children because of the emotions in 2-4, so I’d be hesitant about getting involved in order to break a fight up. But I can’t just stand and watch again, in the vain hope that the aggressor will run out of steam eventually and the beating with cease. I guess I’ll just have to man up for next time and if kids start pounding each other be prepared to take their hands, like the TA did, and escort them from the class. We don’t get training for that. I think we should. Mandatory training, not just special physical restraint courses. Mandatory training on what to do if two little kids start a-tussling.

6. Mirth      

We had our Christmas production- and it was hilarious. Not all of it, but that’s for another entry. This entry is for hilarity only. We spent so long rehearsing, performing, practicing, acting, cutting out costumes, doing the sets and backdrops, and, on the actual day, 83% of the kids forgot their lines, came on at the wrong times, sung the wrong bits. Oh man, it could have been a scene out of a sitcom. If you’d have told me before that the production would start to come apart, that screws would start to rattle loose as the performance went on, mirth would not have been the emotion I’d have predicted for myself. I’d have said all the other classics; anger, shame, impotence, cognizance. But no, it was mirth. I sat at the back, hidden amongst the unimpressed parents, and laughed and laughed my way through it. Hahaha. Ha. I think perhaps my mirth did stem from a well of shame or humiliation but it is the mirth that stays with me now. The parents around me slumped their shoulders and moaned under their breaths at every new string of opening bars for a song, at every occasion a new character with a new monologue was introduced, every time a child forgot their woods and stood, staring out into the dark audience, hoping for divine illumination. I had to hold my nose to stop the laughter from being audible. I’ve never been in that situation before; physically restraining myself from laughing. I kept catching the eye of a TA who shares my sense of humour and thought my gall bladder might burst.

7.   Anger

Right, so, fucking Christmas production. Hello! All those hours of rehearsing,

performing, practicing, acting, cutting out costumes, doing the sets and backdrops- more than half of these kids aren’t on course for their expected progress. Most of them struggle to spell and do their six times table. Why was so much time wasted on clobbering together an unintentionally hilarious Christmas production? It was stressful- not for me, granted, I’m just a trainee who was told where to stand and what to do, but for the actual teachers, it was stressful. Getting all the lines and songs right and all that jazz, whilst also worrying that targets were not being met, that children who need to make two levels of progress before June were out 3 out of 5 hours of a day, singing. All in all, it was great fun for me but for real teachers, it pretty much pissed them off. And I imagine, when I’m a real teacher, it’ll piss me off too.

8. Sloth

We have an assignment due in January. I spent a day writing mine, after a day planning it, before a

day clattering about with the appendices and referencing and stuff. All in all, a good batch of work, right? Wrong. I read through it after a few days letting it mature in my desk drawer and it was average at best. I’m not even sure there’s a lucid train of thought running through it. It bounces from point to point, rambling from one shoe-horned in quote to another. I suppose that idea isn’t such a huge stretch of the imagination for you reading this blog because I’ve just read through some of my past entries and they’re all a bit like a blind horse going through a maze. But it was a surprise to me. I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of a D.H. Lawrence but it turns out, I’m more like Franz Kafka. And not his coherent stuff either; I’m talking The Castle, with no real plot, no ending, just an entire exercise in linguistic futility. And did I decide to redo the essay upon this revelation, did I steel upon myself to go back and start again, to put in a truly eloquent and impressive piece of work? Did I fuck. I resolved myself to leave it as it was. It was three days work, I wasn’t going back, I wasn’t wading through that again. It was done, it was dead and done.

9. Pride

Is pride an emotion? Well, it's a sin, so here it is. During the holidays, I went back to my parents'

house and, whilst ambling through my old desk, I opened up a drawer and discovered clutter. Clutter, with a capital C. I abhor clutter. I like organisation and structure, I like order and routine; witness my lovely folders, complete with file dividers, flags and colour coded cross referencing system. So, the sight of this drawer was no pleasant to me. I started at once to set it into order. It was all my old university stuff- notes, hand outs, readers and my old assignments. I spent one hour and seventeen minutes reading through feedback from my old assignments. It was like looking through the best of your own profile pictures and masturbating over them. These assignments had not been written in the same spirit as my current assignment. They had been written with creativity, wit, articulacy and sound subject knowledge. And my tutors said pretty much the same thing. I was amazing, I was brilliant, I was D.H. Lawrence. Could I ever be that good again? Did I still possess that talent? I just sat and basked in my own glory for several minutes. What a load of self worship, self wallowing and time wasting. And it leads straight onto the next emotion.

10.   Loyalty

So, now, I have to go back and redo my assignment. I’m not doing it for QTS, I’m not doing it for my students, I’m not doing it for my own pride and career. I’m doing it for 20 year old me, who spent so many hours crafting the perfect essay, ensuring every point threaded together, that every conclusion was carefully teased out and presented, that every piece of evidence was not only necessary to the narrative but enjoyed and treasured. I’m doing it for that person, that ghost, who exists now only in memory. I’m going back to the assignment and I’m going to do that person proud, so that in years time, I may come back and read the feedback from this assignment and think ‘tha

t was a good piece of work. That makes me proud. I must have been D.H. Lawrence back then’.

11.   Hope

I have my second school placement coming up after Christmas. It’s where you go to another school to experience a different cross section of children, from a different year group. I was planning out my lessons the other day, trying to work on my targets from last term, which include using ICT more in class. I wasn’t really sure how to do it, so I put my planning to one side and started drafting out this blog entry, all the time thinking, ‘how to put ICT in my lessons more. How? How? I can get the kids to research stuff in a Webquest type thing (more on that later) but that’s boring after one less. How could they present their work using ICT? How could they showcase it? How could they utilise their ICT skills and show off their work? How? Is there even a way? Am I tormenting myself over a riddle with no answer here?’ I’m hoping you got to the answer quicker than I did. The answer, of course, is, get the kids to create their own classroom blog. Amazing! Stupendous! No one ever had such an idea before! Of course, they have. The internet is awash with classroom blogs. Awash. A. Wash. But still, a good idea, no? Each child can put an entry up, we can have them recording fact files, putting up images, their own research and writing challenges. And it’s something that I can physically show to my visiting tutor and use as evidence for my folders. Who cares if every Teacher, sub and head has already done it? I haven’t. But I’m going to start at this new school. And it is going to be good. And it fills me with hope.

12. I’ve run out of emotions

I think that covers my emotional calendar since last we spoke. Instead of just putting in a token one here and then making a follow up paragraph to explain it below, I decided to just be honest with you guys. The 12 Emotions of Christmas didn’t work. It’s the 11 Emotions of Christmas at best. And I tell you what, guys, that there, that right there, is reflective learning. That is an evaluation. That is formative assessment of work. That is all the skills I have been taught as a teacher. That is a lesson that you can’t tell. That is one that has to be shown. Man, it’s like we’ve reached enlightenment.

That could have been the twelfth emotion. Honesty could have been the twelfth emotion. I could have gone back and changed it. But I didn’t. Because I’m being honest with you guys. Because I’ve reached reflective enlightenment. And reflective enlightenment involves, nay, is founded on, the idea of not erasing your mistakes, not covering up errors, but learning from them, building on from them, using them to inform your greatest achievements. As this entry surely details. D.H. Lawrence eat your heart out.

Teacher training, Star Wars and nudity.

 Half way through term two and I feel alright. I’m keeping up. I feel like that bit in the end of The Phantom Menace, where Obi Wan and Qui Gon are fighting Darth Maul beneath the palace on Naboo, amongst all the power converters. And they’re fighting furiously and elegantly and masterfully and the flow is there and the prestige and the power and the control, but you can see the sweat on the Jedi’s foreheads and they’re starting to get out of breath and you can see them wondering how long is left, how long they can keep this up for, when are they going to break the Sith down and be able to breathe easily again. I don’t yet know whether I’m Qui Gon or Obi Wan, whether Darth Maul is going to cut me down and leave my fallen body on the edge of the waste pit, or whether I’m Obi Wan and I’m going to rise up and win the battle, like a boss.



My point is, the workload HAS increased. I have to plan lessons, prepare resources, teach, evaluate lessons, mark books, find evidence, file evidence , be set targets, achieve those targets, prove I’ve achieved those targets, plan assignments, do assignments, evaluate my assignments, and run my club (I now only have 3 kids at XC club. I think it’s a failure. The 3 kids that come have an unhealthy obsession with me as well; they’re always trailing after me, pawing at my arms, trying to hug me. They don’t care about running, they just want to creep around me. Next term, I might do an Audiobook club and just get the kids to sit quietly and listen to stories, whilst I do marking). I am capable of keeping on top of this workload, I am fighting it elegantly and masterfully, I’m in full flow, but for how long? Will I break it, or will it break me? Will I fall into step with all of this and master its will or will I falter and end up with a double ended lightsabre through my stomach? Who knows. I can only keep fighting, keep doing backwards somersaults onto other walkways, keep using
the force to push my enemy away, keep going.

I noticed something the other day and I’m going to tell you about it now. On a day to day basis, I, my mentor, all the class teachers, the TAs, all the trainees, vet every piece of material we present to the kids. Every story is checked for inappropriate language, distasteful references, pictures that might be distressing or confusing to ten year olds. Anything that presents a less than desirable effect or might elicit awkward questions is discounted. We have to comb through videos on You Tube, trying to find ones that are 100% appropriate for our class; no language, no gruesome cartoons, no poor role models, no adverts that have swearing or car crashes or unwelcome nudity. I was going to show a Blackadder sketch about the Civil War. 5 minutes, perfect for what we were studying. Stephen Fry as a Charles-esque Charles I, Rowan Atkinson as his somewhat loyal Cavalier and Tony Robinson as that same dirty man he always plays, discussing the events of 1649. It set the English Civil War up perfectly, it explained everything, it was funny. But I couldn’t use it because one of them said the word  “bloody” halfway through and Blackadder was threatened with a knife. Move on, find something else. This is the environment we work in. Everything is checked and double checked, purified and presented, squeaky clean, to our children, so as not to corrupt their sweet, innocent minds, so as not to concern them or worry them or teach them bad habits about the darker side of the wide world.

Then, the other day, we went on a school trip. This took up through a high street and I COULD NOT BELIEVE the amount of inappropriate images I saw. The main one was of a woman dressed in a bra and knickers, splayed out on a bed, looking up at the camera with big eyes and her finger in her mouth. This picture, as well, was huge. It covered three panes of a high street store. A high street store. All my kids walked past it. I kept looking for the minimise button. I kept looking for the ‘skip ad in 5 seconds’ button that sometimes appears at the bottom of You Tube videos. But there was none. This was an unvetted, unadulterated image that was presented to my class as a standard of the norm, as something acceptable. I don’t normally give a shit about the amount of nudism and swearing in our society, it’s never effected me before. It doesn’t bother me, it is of no issue. But after spending ten weeks ensuring my class of ten year olds don’t inadvertently come across inappropriate material, I did find myself quite shocked that this picture was thrust down our throats and there was nothing I could do about it. For their part, the kids did not give a shit. They barely glanced at it. I think they’re conditioned to just accept such material in their day to day lives, so maybe I should stop worrying.

Starting Second Half Term II

How do, once again, everything is going along quite nicely. The work load has definitely increased since half term. We now take on about 30/40% of the timetable, and that includes all the marking. I have a schedule for when I mark each set of books though and if I stick close to this, I find everything works out. My biggest fear (OCD) is that I’ll forget to do something until 2 minutes before it’s needed. I think that is a real possibility. There's so much to keep in mind, it is inevitable. It's happened to other trainees and, one day, I suppose, it will happen to me.

Assignments.

Everyone is suddenly panicking about all these assignments we have to do. That’s a lie. People have mentioned assignments and I’m panicking because I didn’t think they were a big deal. There’s this one we have to do with a child who has SEND, like observe them and write a report and stuff. I’ve read the brief for that assignment and it seems to me that’ll it take a week. Small group work with the kid, look at their file to figure out what they have and why, type up the report, done. But people are treating it like it’s the blueprint for storming the beaches at Normandy. They’ve set aside weeks and weeks and meetings and meetings in order to ensure it is done to OUTSTANDING standards. Am I just doing the bare minimum? Or are they gold plating when there’s really no need? I mean, come on, time management. Isn’t it better that we just wank out this task, to tick the boxes for the training provider, and then focus on the nitty gritty of our actual practice, of our actual work within our actual school (teaching lessons, gathering resources, marking, doing displays etc)? Who knows. I’ll bash it out my way and see what happens. Personally, I think priority lies with the act of teaching and all those jobs, and the assignments issued by the training provider, whilst important, shouldn’t take up all our time.

Interventions.

We have to organise interventions as well. See above for my attitude towards these. Sure, do them, and do them well, organise the targets, set aside time, etc, but don’t go above and beyond the call of duty. Don’t do more than you would do if you were a regular teacher. I don’t understand this attitude that the other trainees have. It’s like, they put in a certain amount of effort everyday, but when it’s assignment or graded task, they suddenly feel the need to double that effort. I think that’s counterproductive. We should be being taught how to be consistently amazing. Not amazing most of the time and then bloody stupendous to the point where we’re not eating and sleeping correctly because we’re putting in so much effort. When we’re all actual teachers, we won’t be putting in so much effort for our interventions, so why start out that way, if it conflicts with other duties? The teachers don’t do it now, the teaching assistants don’t do it now. We should be following their example and delivering consistent and effective interventions, whilst also maintaining consistent and effective teaching practices in all other areas. I have the same feeling towards observed lessons, not just for the trainees but in what I’ve witnessed in actual, qualified teachers as well. When they know they’re going to be observed, teachers pull out all the stops, pull in all the resources and deliver a really good lesson. Why aren’t they doing it like that every day? It’s not indicative of their actual teaching practice if they only deliver OUTSTANDING lessons when they’re being observed. It’s all about consistency. Every day should require the same amount of effort, whether you’re being observed, whether you’re conducting an intervention that will feed in to your overall grade, whether nothing is happening and it’s just a regular Tuesday. Consistency.

Resources.

Getting resources together is a bitch. Any great lesson idea you come up with is nearly always hampered by the fact that you need access to the Room of Requirement to make it a reality. Take note.

First Half Term at ITT

I haven’t written this for some time because I’ve been otherwise engaged at the weekends. Everything at school is ticking along nicely though. Instead of me rambling on, here are some handily structured, itemised points of what’s been going on:

Visiting Tutor observation.

I had my visiting tutor observation, as in, a tutor from another school came to see me deliver a lesson. The overall lesson got a GOOD and I was sort of pleased with that, but it does mean that every lesson from here on in has to be GOOD or better because taking a step back will really dint my self esteem and other people’s confidence in me. Our training provider was going on the other day about how they want 80% of their trainees to be OUTSTANDING this year but I wonder if that’s a bit of a curse, to be labelled OUTSTANDING before you’ve even done your NQT year. I mean, anyone that employs you, is going to expect you to be THE BEST, in short OUTSTANDING. It’s high expectations, it’s pressure. I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to be labelled GOOD before your NQT, be employed on that basis and then dazzle your new head by producing OUSTANDING lessons. Similarly with this, my first visiting tutor observation, next time, my visiting tutor is going to expect something of equal standard. What if I can’t produce it? What if that was it? I’d have much preferred to get IMPROVEMENT REQUIRED on my first one and then slowly climb the stair to GOOD, instead of being thrust on the precarious GOOD landing and told I had to stay there or climb higher, in my big clunky, ITT shoes. To my delight, I did get IMPROVEMENT REQUIRED on my overall teaching practice; though this grade came from just me talking and no actual evidence. My visiting tutor was all “do you do this?” and I’d say “sort of, like this or like that” and she made a little note. There was no science behind it, so I have no faith that that’s an accurate grade, even though it’s the one I want. It’s laughable really because one of my targets from that discussion was to forge a good relationship with a boy in class who I find troublesome; that kid wasn’t even in class for the visiting tutor to witness. She only knew about him because I mentioned him in the discussion. If I’d have kept my mouth shut or said “oh no, everything is perfect”, would I have got a GOOD in my overall teaching practice? That’s what I mean about there being no science behind it. That overall grade seemed totally based on my own perceptions and assessments; in which case, I’m forever going to be an IMPROVEMENT REQUIRED. What a stupid title for grade 3 anyway. Even OUTSTANDING teachers require improvements. Even the best teacher in the entire world can do something to be that little bit better. Everyone requires improvement. Grade 3 should be SATISFACTORY or AVERAGE. REQUIRES IMPROVEMENT implies there are some people who don’t. So, what was I saying? Oh yes, actual lesson was GOOD, and this makes me nervous for the future because I have set expectations high. Overall teaching practice REQUIRES IMPROVEMENT and this makes me confused because it was basically my own assessment and my own assessment of myself will never improve.

Why my lesson was GOOD:

Just for all you wannabe teachers out there, reasons why my lesson got a GOOD grade: Pros =  good use of technology (kids had iPads and QR codes), good rapport with children, clear learning intention and success criteria, well organised in terms of resources, good diffrentiation. Cons = during the research part of the task, I could have been clearer for the lower ability pupils, as they were just let loose on the internet really, stop saying ‘two minutes left’ and then giving kids five minutes. Be exact or shut your mouth.

Classroom and colleagues handling strategies

I got to witness another teacher with my class the other day. It was quite an eye opener. The teacher that I work with is very firm, very direct. Their smile is calculated and controlled and children are made to work for their praise. The class all love this teacher though and there is never any fuss, never any trouble and everyone knows what to do and what is expected of them.

With this other teacher, it couldn’t be more different. First off, this other teacher encouraged the children to just wander over to him if they want to tell him something, even if they had work to be doing. He didn’t call for total silence in Guided Reading, there was no expectation to stand behind chairs or queue up correctly. Even the way he delivered the lesson was done with less confidence; he read his lesson plan from a sheet and referred a lot of queries to me. The class obviously liked him but they also, obviously, didn’t recognise him as the be-all and end-all of authority in the room. There was fuss, there was kids deciding they weren’t going to work, there was kids moving chairs and throwing notes across the room, there were kids talking (yes, talking), whilst he was talking. I couldn’t believe it was the same class.

The experience was an eye opener for me. On a basic level, it meant I had more work to do in terms of planning and delivering lessons because I was the only source of consistency for those few days. I don’t think I was OUTSTANDING in the work I did. I probably had some elements of GOOD and most elements of IMPROVEMENT REQUIRED, but I’ll take that for four weeks in. On a more complex level, it taught me about the different styles of classroom management. Sometimes, I guess, you have to be a bit of a hard ass to get the environment that you want. There’s always room for banter and warmth within a class but the starting point, the foundation, the biscuit base, has to be expectation, routine and the undisputed, all-powerful authority of the teacher. If you try and make the base out of cream and chocolate mousse, and then put the biscuit bit on top, it’s all going to collapse in on itself. Discipline won’t stick, is what I’m saying. Start with the rules and then lather on the sweet stuff.

We were having a little planning session the other day; a couple of trainees, a couple of class teachers, some cover supervisors and me. They were all throwing their ideas into the ring; how about this, no, this! That! Omigod, yes! Great idea! Sure! Even the other trainees were whipping out amazing, out of the box, kooky, cool teacher ideas, and getting standing ovations from everyone else. I had no such ideas. I don’t know why. Maybe if I was pressed, or if it was an exam, or if someone gave me a blank sheet of paper and a pen, I could have rattled off a nice list of decent plans. I just wasn’t very good at gathering my thoughts and then interjecting them into the fast flowing discussion, which was already interspersed with lewd puns and quips about people’s extra curricula activities. I am so socially awkward. I couldn’t get a word in. If it had been a Whatsassp conversation or classic MSN, I think I’d have been the STAR because no one is faster with their fingers than I am. This blog proves that. I’m writing this as you’re reading it. I’m the fastest typist in the east. Typing just unlocks my ideas. But talking? Articulating them with my mouth? I am as good as mute.

Thus, there I am, sitting there passively, contributing only “yes” or “ok!” or, sometimes, “great!”, and I think, you know, I have to define myself here. I have to establish myself as a key member of this team. The other trainees have done so, ten times over. I don’t want to be the weakest link. I don’t want to be the dud trainee. I don’t want to fall flat on the pop after such a successful snap and crackle. I have to say something, anything, of value. It doesn’t matter what they think of it, just get a flipping comment out there! So I pointed something out that had caught my attentions (namely the percentage of time we cover one subject). Man, you have never seen such a series of shoot downs in your life. It was like I was a wooden aeroplane, flying low, my propeller puttering apprehensively in the cold, morning air, and they just turned on the machine guns and tore my wings to shreds. The passion of their opposition to my comments startled me. I did a nosedive, plummeting rudderlessly towards the ground, smoke and fire streaming out behind me, scarlet flares shooting from the cockpit, parachute ready to deploy, and still they continued with their merciless barrage. It was as though I’d said “can’t we just leave out maths?” A series of emotions took place in me. The first, of course, was shock that my tentative comment had inspired such irritation from the rest of the team. This, however, was quickly followed by stone cold, steaming rage; because I had a bloody point, or so I believe. I was so angry, I couldn’t even articulate said point. Instead, my ears started to go red as I stared back at my main contender, plane valiantly trying to pull clean from the nose drive, swinging wildly left and right in an attempt to evade further rounds of machine gun fire. I didn’t say anything. I just went red and stuck my jaw out, thinking that if I opened my mouth, even for a second, it wouldn’t spin forth a concise, succinct and intelligent response to the discussion, but instead a series of cutting insults and threats. I, readers, was speechless. Then, some kind, decent, wonderful, fantastic! Glorious! Saviour! Decided to point out to me, in their nicest, most polite, most not-condescending-or-patronising-at-all tone, that, no, actually, in fact, it’s not what you think, no, it’s not like that, it’s like this. This began my third emotion of the scene: unadulterated frustration. Have you ever been in such a stressful or adrenaline-filled situation that when you replay the events to yourself later, you can’t remember minute details and the order that things happen? (there’s a book that details this exact phenomena but I’ve gone and forgotten it. If I remember, I’ll drop back). When I think back to that exchange, I honestly can’t remember what my retort was. I think, finally, I did manage to say something and, mercifully, it was on point and not a BARBARIC JAB, but I have no idea what it was.

All I can remember clearly, after the smoke had cleared from the ruins of my little wooden plane, buried head first in a freshly ploughed field, the discharge from the machine guns still drifting in the air, is that the table was suddenly very quiet and all the other trainees were studying their pens in a determined way, and the main teachers were gathering their papers with airs of sharp disappointment that they reserve for unruly students. Man, I think I made a few enemies today. Or, maybe, it’s all in my head and I just exaggerated the entire exchange and no one else thought twice about it or my conduct. I am socially awkward (see above). I hope that’s the case because, if it’s not, I really don’t know what I said wrong. I do believe I had a valid point- hence my untainted frustration. The helpful patroniser only pointed out what I already knew, and didn’t address the matter I had raised at all. No one had understood my point; my articulation was awful! I failed! Oh, Whatsapp! Where for art thou?! I have two choices. Find a way to articulate myself on another occasion and rub their faces in the validity of my point, or just move on and prove my worth in the standard of my teaching. I’ll get back to you on that too.

Highlights from the week: doing comparatives. Big, bigger, biggest. Tall, taller, tallest. Little, littler… Midget? No. Doing plurals: One monkey, two…. Trees? Two gentlemen, one…. Glass? No. Or how about the low ability child who wrote an amazing descriptive paragraph, filled with similes and metaphors, utilising his five senses, touching on personification, describing trees as dark as moonlit nights, snaking paths winding into the crystal clear sky, and finishing it with “and suddenly there was roast chicken”.

Cross country club went well. I lost a child from the week before but gained two more. I tried a variety of running based games with the kids and I think they enjoyed it. And I’ll tell you what; a cross country team we might be lacking, but if there was a primary school Ultimate Frisbee league, we’d be top.

Teacher Training Week Two (or three)

Hello. The workload has picked up. We’re into week 2 (or week 3 if you count the first two days as a week, which some people are), and the workload had defo picked up. I’ve got so much work set aside for the weekends that I actually, upon realising that I’m out all next weekend, wonder how I’ll get it all done. Jeez, hey. Two weeks in, or two weeks and two days, and I’m already losing my weekends. It does feel reassuring to be given so much responsibility in terms of planning at this early stage. It means they’ll be no surprises later on. Start as you mean to go. To that end, I’ve made sure I ask my mentor for marking at lunchtimes, so instead of sitting in the staffroom listening to people eating grapes with their mouths open, I sit in the classroom and mark twenty books in an hour. That’s my current rate; one book every three minutes. Is that good or not? Who knows. These kids are writing three sentences, so it’s probably not a great rate. The stuff they right is amazing though. We were looking at the Anglo Saxons the other day and I had to correct a sentence which stated that the King of England text the Duke of Normandy. Check your understanding, young man. What other gems have I come across? Somebody wrote that “there was a bird above me in the tree. I was aroused”. I think they meant “my curiosity was aroused”. Another girl copied, to the letter, a small text box that had been left on show on a website detailing the Bayeux Tapestry. The text box described an obscure panel on the tapestry, whose occupants were acting out a sexual scandal that was infamous at the time. The girl copied it all out, perfectly, without a clue what she was writing, so now her book contains this detailed, medieval sex scandal report.

I took charge of my first XC club as well. Five kids showed up. One did not want to run, one couldn’t run, one did back flips all along the field and the other two were gems. I’ve led many a cross country session in my time but never have I had 60% of the kids not interested in actually running. I seriously wonder whether any of them will turn up next week. The two that were good might not have felt it a very worthwhile XC session; unable to actually do laps or running drills, I had to just conduct playground games like Stuck in the Mud and Bulldog. I sat them all down at the end and asked what they’d like to do next week, what activities they wanted, what should I do so that they could really enjoy and get the most out of these sessions. The back-flipper asked if we could eat sweets. I said I’d look into it.

Our training provider is loading mandatory paperwork on top of mandatory paperwork. There are so many forms and trackers to fill out and upload on a weekly basis. I’M NOT EVEN TALKING ABOUT THOSE FIVE PORTFOLIOS. I’m talking about the online portal, where the providers need to see regular updates about our progress. The portfolios are for the end of the year. So many forms and trackers, so many. I can’t keep my head on top of them all and this agitates me greatly, being such an OCD, organised person. I’m hoping to just do what I think I should do and, in the event that I’m forgetting anything, hope that our school based trainer will let me know. We have very good in-school training staff at our placement, and they are constantly talking to the provider about what’s necessary and what’s not. Apparently, it’s all necessary. You need to have eight different documents proving that you can do one thing. The training provider that I’m with has a very good record with producing Outstanding teachers. I can’t work out if this is because they make you copy out the same thing on fourteen different forms and fill in fifteen different trackers and boggle your mind with a hundred different types of evidence sheets, or in spite of it.

Aside from not really thinking I’m organised AT ALL with all this paperwork (which agitates me GREATLY, see above), the only other thing that went wrong this week is that I taught a spelling lesson on prefixes and suffixes and didn’t use a single correct prefix or suffix on my root words. Lol. My teaching mentor quietly pointed it out and I was mortified to the depth of my very soul for about six seconds, before burying the memory deep, deep down in my psyche. I imagine it’ll erupt in years to come and I’ll have a breakdown about it. 

Oh man, I signed off on this, published it and everything and then remembered an absolute gem that one student said to me. We were setting up a Normans verus Anglo Saxons P.E. game and he came up to me and said "Do I have to be a Norman or a Saxon?" "Yes, you do." "Can't I be a Jew instead?" I looked at him, trying to work out if he was winding me up, "A Jew?" "Yes, teacher." "No, you can't be a Jew".

First week of teaching

       Everything is all fine and in order, thanks for asking; I am keeping my folders organised and am beginning to amass evidence, in the form of reflection sheets, meeting notes, annotated booklets of information, lesson observations and lesson plans. This coming week we are starting our afterschool clubs; all teachers have to host an after school club- I think there’s about four after school every day. I chose to coach long distance running and I’m not sure how popular it will be. Obviously, typing it there, it doesn’t sound that popular, but I come from a school where the Cross Country Team was the only team worth joining, where you were cool if you were in the Cross Country Team, where your status transcended all year groups if you were in the Cross Country Team, where kids fought in the mud and the cold and the rain to qualify for the team, where we had to have qualification rounds to cut down on the amount of students in the team. The club at that school had 40 members. Forty, I write it in letters to emphasise that. Ten from each of the junior classes. It was a badge of honour. At this school, I’m thinking not so much but we’ll see. Other teachers are doing a range of very interesting clubs and I’m not sure doing laps of the field will hold much appeal. 

       The other teachers at the school are cool though; fun to be around. I’m starting to get that family environment atmosphere. I feel if you put a camera in our staff room you’d have enough footage for a successful, Bafta winning, TV show. Has anyone thought of that idea yet? I call it. Some of the things teachers say; it just boggles the mind that they can actually be lucid and comprehending human beings. And other people’s reactions are priceless too; so raw, such bare human awkwardness. For example, when one teacher keeps referring every conversation back to how brilliant they are and how they’ve singlehandedly turned every child in the school around: “After schools clubs? Well, you should just thank me that Eric now puts his trainers in his bag. Lunchtime routine? Before I had that class, they were all over the place. You have a really tidy class? That’s me. That’s all me. I drilled that into them last year”. Everyone else, the seemingly humble and attached members of society, just stare at their home-prepared sandwiches or quietly eat a single crisp, waiting for the conversation to die. Yo, shut up about yourself. Or perhaps when a trainee asks a senior member of staff how often it’s appropriate to interrupt the main teacher during the flow of the lesson because they don’t think they’re doing it enough. And said senior member of staff examines his coffee and tries to diplomatically say “never”, whilst everyone else studies the soles of their shoes. Or perhaps the teacher who has to tactfully tell a TA that the display in the ICT room isn’t quite done yet because at the moment it’s just comprised of the silhouette of a dismembered head, floating on a piece of string and would it be possible to have some time spent on it, and the TA’s face is a mask of barely concealed offence. It makes me laugh so much. It is like watching an episode of The Office.

I nearly forgot to talk about the actual teaching. How silly of me. The actual teaching seemed a doddle at the start, compared to all the paperwork and folders that is; stand up in front of some kids, speak a bit, done. Actually though, it’s not that easy, because when you’re teaching, you have to ensure you tick off each criteria box and fulfil all requirements. For example, I did a lesson, it was great, made sure the kids got involved, asked questions, picked on kids for answers, had a fun game for everyone, kids loved it, yeahhhh. However, whilst I did tick the ‘Outstanding’ and ‘Good’ standards for some aspects, I also got a tick in the ‘Improvement Required’ box because I hadn’t encouraged the kids enough during a sixteen second clip off You Tube, focussing on a singing mouse. So I got an Outstanding nod for getting the kids involved, but also an Improvement Required nod for not encouraging them enough. So now I’m just confused as to what I'm doing.

Problems I have come across so far in teaching:

1) What do I do with my hands? If I’m waiting at a bus stop, I fold my arms, but that’s not a good stance to take whilst teaching. Do I gesture randomly like I’m struggling to carry an invisible bowl full of water? Do I hold them behind my back and look like a prick? Or maybe, just have them hanging limply by my side, like useless ribbons tied to my shoulders?

2) In the quick fire magic maths segment, trying to answer the questions as quickly as the children. “Is the answer 56, teacher?” “Two seconds… hold on. Yes. Yes, no, wait, no. Close. But not 56. Actually, who else got 56? No one? Ok, good. No. It’s no 56.” This doesn’t actually apply only to maths, but whenever a child asks a question or gets stuck in a rut and the answer doesn’t immediately leap out at me and I’m left, searching my brain for a response.

3) Becoming too self aware whilst I’m at the front. What does my face look like? What does my voice sound like? How am I standing? What am I saying? What are the words coming out of my mouth? Is it helping the children learn or am I just aimlessly waffling? Am I being direct and precise enough with my instruction? Gggaaaaahh.

4) Why are the others trainees delivering more lessons than me? I only do these three segments, why do they have an extra couple? Is it because I’m no good? Is it because they’re too good? Is it because I’m too good? Is it because they’re not good enough?

Student contact- first two days

Term started on a Thursday, so instead of going straight into lessons, the school thought it best if we used those first two days as an exercise to get to know the kids, get them to know us, work out their abilities and generally set out a stall for the rest of the year. I think that’s a really good idea, from the point of the teacher and the students. From the viewpoint of a trainee teacher, it was sort of boring because all I really did was sit around and observe. I obviously got involved a bit, talking to the kids and helping them with work, but because the work was so basic and independent, they didn’t really need help, so I just drifted around, feeling really cold. The school is cold. No one else seems to think so. My hands were purple because there was no blood flow going to my extremities, it was all being diverted to my vital organs to ensure I didn’t freeze to death. Everyone else was opening doors and windows to let fresh air in and I felt like I was drifting on a wardrobe door out in the North Atlantic. I’m going to have to start wearing vests and body warmers to ensure I don’t lie down in a corner and die. 

I also did a bit more work on a couple of displays and there’s one or two that I’m proud of now. I mean, the colour combinations do complement each other and the borders are straight. One display I did was all about popular culture, so I got to cut out pictures of people I like and show off my general knowledge about cultural icons. What, Google John Lennon's birthday? Don’t need to, miss, got all that information right here. I also led the class in a couple of activities and it went really well. This year will not be the first time that I’ve stood up in front of a class of young people and acted as a figure of authority but it will be the first time I’ve done it and had every action and every word so heavily scrutinized. That makes me really nervous. I accidentally swore under my breath when I ripped some backing paper off a display in someone else’s classroom the other day. None of the kids heard me, or if they did, swearing is so commonplace in their homes lives, they didn’t pick up on it, but imagine if I did that whilst being observed by the head, or Ofsted, or the training provider. Shit. I also hate the idea of meeting a member of staff or inspector in a regular setting, like the staff room or corridor, showing off my amazing skills of articulation, strength of personality and character, and then having to stand up in front of that same person and teach a class whilst they critically examine my teaching skills. What if they think I’m great, then see my teach and think I’m a loser? Or worse, what if they feel sorry for me because I’m so bad?

In my first two days, I have encountered two examples of behaviour that startled me and, in hindsight, I don’t think I handled well- three, actually, but one was outside of school. There was another instance of behaviour that I think I handled it quite well. I’ll start off with that one: I was on playground duty, wandering around, when two year 5 girls came up to me: “Lola called us idiots and said we can’t play in that corner of the playground but we need to practice our dance routine there”. Woah shit, my first issue to resolve. Lola was tall and thin, with really nice hair, clean clothes and a haughty expression. She reminded me of Regina out of Mean Girls, so I was instantly really scared. The girls who had complained flanked me self importantly as I walked over to confront her and that made me really nervous as well. The main thought in my mind, the point I wanted expressed, was that no one should be calling anyone else idiots. The second thought was that these girls had appealed to me in the hope that I, in my position of authority, would ensure justice prevailed, and I didn’t want to let them down. And the third, a bit further down the line, was that all year 5 girls were bitches and I didn’t want to get embroiled in a cat fight. I approached the corner and Lola turned and looked at me, then disregarded me with a shrug of her shoulder. I said “girls, there’s enough room for everyone to play in this corner. We don’t need to go around calling anyone idiots.” I then managed to make eye contact with Lola and said, “did you make class rules today, Lola?” “Yes, teacher.” “And was one of those rules to be friendly to each other and polite to everyone?” “Yes, teacher”. Lola then turned to the two girls who had fetched me and said, “Sorry, Fiona and Kay. We can all play here.” I said “well done, Lola” and then I gracefully and magnanimously left. Inside I was like “woah! Shit! I just totally handled that!” but I didn’t let it show. I was invited back a few minutes later to see the dance routine, in which Lola participated. Handled.

The first bit of bad behaviour was whilst we were playing all school P.E. on the playground. A kid from another class wasn’t staying at his station; he’d taken his ball and was playing amongst the kids who were practicing skipping. I didn’t know who this kid was and was wondering whether I should tactically ignore his flagrant disregard for the different stations. Before I could decide, a very helpful pupil shouted out to me “he’s trying to skip and he’s not meant to be here!” So I felt I had to act: I couldn’t let the other students see me allow this boy to wander away from where he should be; it’d set a precedent, and then all the kids would be going to whatever station they felt like. I approached the boy and asked him to go back to the ball throwing station. He just ran off in the opposite direction. Bang, like that. I had absolutely zero authority. He stopped a few feet away and I approached him and asked him his name, so I could relate to him or whatever, and he just ran off again. It was in the general direction of the ball station and I didn’t want to chase him, so I just let him go but still, I didn’t really know how to handle that one and I don’t think I came across as a figure of authority; I think that boy now thinks he can get away with stuff with me.

The second instance of behaviour that I couldn’t deal with was during class P.E. We were playing a game and a boy was upset that he was out on the first go; he sat on the benches and just sobbed and sobbed. Even when other kids got out and sat around him, he still sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. I felt sorry for this kid because, at the start of the activity, everyone had had to get into pairs and he’d wanted to be in a three with his best mates, but I’d been firm and told him to pair up with another kid (he was annoyed about this and flung his arms about, scowling and kicking the floor but I tactically ignored this secondary behaviour, and focused on ensuring he did as I requested, which he did). So there he was, not paired up with his mates and then out on the first go. I’d have been upset. I didn’t know how to handle it though. I couldn’t just let him stay in. And if I’d chosen someone else to be out on the first go, when it was blatantly him that was out, that would have been unfair. So there he was, just crying to himself, sitting in a really weird position between the wall and the play equipment, until the real teacher came over and shouted at him for not sitting properly. I felt baddddddd. How are you meant to react in that situation?

The third instance of bad behaviour was when I was walking home and I passed Regina from Mean Girls. This was the real Regina though, not Lola, who was clearly just a wannabe. This girl was in year six and I’d first encountered her during that all school P.E. lesson. She was being a bitch then, in that really spiteful eleven year old girl way: not letting the dirty kids play with the equipment, hording it, talking loudly, attention seeking, etc. I asked her what her name was and she was like “Bob, Bob, Bob, my name’s Bob”, then ran off. You can’t do anything about that. You can’t reprimand her for it, she clearly just didn’t acknowledge my authority. So, there I was, walking home like a loser, and this girl is standing at her garden fence with a couple of teenagers who could have been her brother and sister. The brother muttered something under his breath as I drew near and little Regina shouted “you idiot! That’s a teacher at school!” I felt I had to acknowledger her here, to try and establish my authority, so I just turned to her as I strode passed and, without stopping, said “Hey, how you doing”, then continued on my way. Regina started giggling and then the female teenager shouted “Oh, not cool!” and all three of them roared like hyenas and I was left feeling like an utter freak. What should I have done there? Just ignored them altogether? Then I’d have looked weak, you know. If Bruce Wayne was walking down the street and people were muttering about him, you wouldn’t expect him to just walk on with his head held high and ignore it. You’d expect him to stand up and define himself. Oh no, shit, you would, you’d totally expect Bruce Wayne to stride passed, as though such mortals were beneath him. By acknowledging such corporeal behaviour, he immediately places himself level with it. Shit. I let Bruce down. Man. At least this blog is a good way for me to work through these things, like a psychotherapy session.


I undergo a debate with myself everyone morning about whether to walk or drive in. On the one hand, school is only 1.7 miles away and it seems like a total waste of petrol. On the other, don’t be such a miser, that’s 30 minutes walking, which is an hour a day I could otherwise be doing something productive and effective for my students, and I have to go right through the estate where my students might spit on me and their parents might mug me. I was once at a school though where a teacher drove 700m to get into school and I ripped her to shreds for that. There must be a line between what is acceptable to walk and what isn’t but I can’t get it into my head that 1.7 miles is too far. I’ll see how it goes. If Regina keeps laughing at me, I might have to drive… but then, that means she’s won.
I’m also unsure how late to stay on Fridays. At the other school, teachers used to stay passed five on Fridays all the time, but at this school, everyone felt sorry for me for thinking I had to stay any later than 3:30 at the end of the week. Poor newbie teacher, it’s the weekend, go enjoy yourself, we’re all going home now, yeah, lol, stay if you want, but we’re off, it’s Friday, Friday, we leave early. Ok, I get it. But I don’t want to end up working weekends or cramming Monday morning, when I can just stay an extra hour on a Friday. It worked well at that other school; but then, at the other school, a guy’s wife threatened to leave him if he didn’t cut down on all the hours he was doing. I also guess it’s better to walk home through the estate before the sun sets and my cheap, battered, school prescribed laptop gets me into trouble with Regina’s brother. 

Inset days within MY school

First things first: I don’t know what INSET stands for. It was basically two days of in staff training/ bonding and preparing the classrooms. There were more staff in the school than I had previously thought- like fifty, including all the cooks and cleaners and admin guys. I love the cooks and cleaners and admin guys; they make the family environment of a school all the more tangible. They make it the microcosm that it is. If it was all teachers and kids, I think it’d feel more like a military institution than a family homestead.

We did a lot of training with the teachers at the secondary school down the road as well, which, whilst interesting to see the guys who’ll be teaching the teenagers of the town, was a bit boring because the training was more generic and broad. It was like Powerpoints on safeguarding children and fire safety- a hilarious video that one, as far as fighting fires go. They’d updated it for the 21^st Century but it was still full of bad acting and random fires burning in isolated bins in the middle of empty rooms.

I found all these Powerpoints and seminars a distraction from getting the classrooms ready. The training with the secondary school teachers were so boring in fact, I actually fell asleep with my head in my hands. It was a practiced technique from university; I positioned my head so I was looking down at the handout, hands cupping my eyes and forehead like I was deep in concentration, yet fast asleep. I suppose I should feel disappointed that none of these hardened teachers recognised my slack behaviour. Or maybe they did, they just couldn’t be bothered to call me up on it. There was a series of free buffets for all this training though, so, swings and roundabouts. Actually, swings, swings, swings, swings. Do you know how horrible it is to sit in a staff room where the only sound is six other mouths using six sets of teeth to chew their way through dry bread, Hobnobs and extra crunchy apples? Jeez! The sound of other people eating appears MAGNIFIED in school staff. It’s like I’m sitting inside their ear canals. It’s like they’re grinding shards of glass into the bones of my jaws. I don’t relish all the lunch hours I’m going to spend in that staff room at ALL.   

The main exercise in those few days was, as I said, getting the classrooms up, and this meant displays. We tore down those awful ones we’d made in the Generation Game the week before and set up actual half way decent ones. Then we set up the other boards in our room, as well as the ones in the library, the corridors and the hallways. God, so many displays. I thought teaching was all about paperwork, I had no idea it was actually about drawing, cutting, sticking and stapling. Am I meant to be good at this stuff? I’m not. And because I’m a bit of a perfectionist, no line ever looked straight, no edge ever looked well trimmed, no staple or blue tac ever appeared subtle enough. After working at such activities from 7:30 to 5:30 though, you just have to draw the line somewhere and hope that no one will notice if a border is a few degrees off dead straight, or the colour combinations of a double mount don’t completely complement each other. Last word, I found the ten hour work days easily manageable, even with eating and exercising and sleeping. Nothing of report there.

School led training

Before term starts, I have three trainee days at the school where I will be based and then two INSET days with the rest of the teaching staff there. This post will cover those three training days which are just for the new starters: i.e. trainees on the Schools Direct course.  These include myself, a couple of other primary school trainees, as well as the trainees at the secondary school just down the road. We were all lumped together on the training days, secondary and primary alike, to do things like school orientation activities, starter games for the kids, data discussions and study seminars.

I didn’t mind these training days. They were more in depth and hands on than the training provider days but I guess that was because the group was smaller and it was all people we were going to be fused with throughout the rest of the year. There was a lot of paperwork again though. Jeez, Louise, the paperwork. I thought the training provider paperwork was a lot to take in but my placement school gave me twice as much again on just the first day: school specific lesson plans, term plans, year plans, curriculum overviews, curriculum overviews condensed into key points, long term objectives by year group and rolling learning objectives for the entire year. Clearly, personal organisation is the key. I knew someone who stopped their teaching training year halfway through because they couldn’t keep up with the paperwork. They were excellent at standing up and delivering a lesson to thirty 8 year olds, but they couldn’t get their heads around all the planning and structuring. And we haven’t even touched on the marking yet- you have to mark each English, Maths and Topic book, with appropriate and child targeted comment, before the next lesson, which could be the following day. That’s at least fifty books worth of marking a night. Sometimes, I think (like police work in Hot Fuzz), paperwork is obscuring the actual art and act of teaching. But then, maybe, you need all those objectives and summaries in order to teach effectively. I suppose anyone can stand up and talk to a bunch of kids but all the paperwork and planning ensures that you’re actually up there teaching them something and then they’re actually going away having learnt something. Two quotes from the days that stand in my mind are these, coming from twenty plus year teachers. The first was “I love my job but if I was a graduate now, I’d never train to be a teacher. Never in a million years”. I asked why and the response was linked to the amount of work required of new teachers. Apparently, in the nineties, it was a doddle. The second quote was “teaching is either the best job in the world or the worst job. And if it’s the best, it is really the best. And if it is the worst, it is really the worst”. That was a worrying sound bite because there’s people out there whose jobs are to clean port-a-loos and other such shit shovelling careers. Either the speaker of the sound bite doesn’t have a grasp of the extent of worst jobs in the world or teaching can get really, really bad.

They didn’t hold back on destroying any allusions about teaching, which is probably a good thing. I’m going into this with no elevated expectations about skipping through fields with hordes of rosy cheeked kids meekly following me and doing as I say. We’ve been told to kiss our social lives goodbye, we’ve been told we’ll be working weekends, we’ve been told we’ll be putting in twelve hour days, we’ve been told we’ll be inspected and observed and monitored like someone in intensive care, to the point where the presence of another adult in our lessons will be commonplace and we might as well tailor our teaching to their needs, rather than the kids. I always thought I was quite an attentive listener and a conscious member of any congregation and the only reason I messed about in school was because I didn’t care and I was trying to show off for the cool kids. But I found it really hard to sit and pay attention during the times our senior staff members were telling us all this stuff and I found my mind drifting off and wondering what Obi Wan Kenobi looked like whilst he was having sex, rather than concentrating on how we have to implement our master curriculum summaries of key points for our year group in the first half term.

I got my wish in the afternoon, when we were put into pairs and set a challenge. We had three hours to create two displays in two different classrooms, using only the resources we could find within those classrooms. No computers, no photocopiers, no printers. And the displays had to be interactive, with a learning intention and, obviously, child proof- so now flimsy bits of paper and wayward hangings. The displays we created were also going to be left up and used/ seen/ played with by the kids when they start next week, so we couldn’t even do a half arsed job if we didn’t lay our hands on suitable resources or ideas.  Quite the challenge and, after staring at the times table mat all morning wondering about Star Wars related pornography, a welcome one.

My partner and I set upon the challenge with gusto. We drew posters by hand, stapled up drapes, cut out shapes, coloured in cardboard doors and arranged tables and chairs. I thought it was a very worthwhile exercise because, if, as a teacher, you’re constantly putting up displays throughout the year, you need to be able to make decent ones, with limited resources in a limited amount of time. It was a nice baptism by fire. We left at the end of the day, happy with our work, content that we had done our best with what we had been offered.

Next morning, we had to go around and critique all the other displays by all the other pairs and, what do you know, but they’d all taken their work home with them and embellished and built on their resources and ideas from there, coming in the next day with all these marvellous, amazing, interactive and professional displays. What cheaters! My partner and I were told in no uncertain way that they were simply being good teachers and that if you snooze, you lose. I was outraged. There were we, adhering to the rules of the challenge, abiding by the constraints to test our prowess, and we’d turned out as the losers. I hate it when people give you rules and things and then you find out later that you didn’t have to follow them, that you could have been “creative”, used your “initiative”, “thought outside the box”. No, actually, you gave me rules and I followed them. If you want me to think on my feet and go against the grain, you should have said that. Or is the whole idea of going against the grain that you shouldn’t have to be told? Do you need to be able to break boundaries and blaze a trail to be a good teacher? I don’t think I’m very good at doing that. In fact, I wrote it down on my Weakness Chart, alongside being too pedantic and analytical. I just like making precise plans and sticking to them, being given rules and working within them. I hate that advert on T.V. with Usain Bolt and Balotelli, going on about impatience and disobedience will be praised. Why? That advert makes it seem like you have a weak character if you are compliant and polite and you’re not naughty or defiant. Sometimes, it takes strength of character to just do the right thing, to be able to just follow an instruction. God, I am such a loserrr.

As it was, even though their displays were all nicely printed, with accurate photos and neatly designed diagrams, all our displays were routinely torn apart by the senior members of staff- not literally torn apart but in terms of being critiqued. They just pointed out everything that was wrong with each display and there was something wrong with every display, no matter how much time and how fantastic they looked. I’ve condensed their key points for displays below:

-          Refrain from using typed text where possible- kids need to be able to see handwriting all around their classroom so that their own handwriting improves.

-          Don’t use capitals when handwriting stuff because kids don’t need to be taught how to write in capitals.

-          Make sure all handwriting is joined and uniform, so kids know what correct handwriting looks like.

-          Displays need to be interactive but you have to have in your mind how interactive: i.e. how many kids will it occupy for how long?

-          Displays need to be enticing and inviting, COLOURFUL.   

-          But avoid putting things up just because they look nice and are pretty.

-          Every item on a display needs to have a learning outcome, a reason to be there.

-          Displays need to be moved around and altered a lot so bear that in mind when you’re nailing up bricks.

-          Make use of laminated paper, which can be written on with one week/ lesson’s learning intention and then wiped clean ready for the next week/ lesson.

There’s lots and lots of writing in this post so I’m ending it now, bye.

Teacher Training Day 3

There are five teacher training days organised by the Schools Direct training provider between June and the end of July. I can only attend the first three because I’m otherwise engaged during the week of training days number four and five. So this’ll be last post about the training days. Onwards:

The focus of training day THREE was twofold: the first was to go over safeguarding, and the second was to focus on the element of whacky-ness in our lessons.

The safeguarding bit took up all morning; we had a safeguarding specialist in to go over with us what the different types of abuse were, signs, symptoms, procedures, titles of key safeguarding staff and so forth. I’d done a bit of safeguarding before in my current role as general wanderer around a primary school and the others in the room had experience in their various roles as teaching assistants, cub scout leaders, nurses and so forth, so I don’t think anyone was hearing any new stuff. I think they needed to ensure they got it covered with us so they were guaranteed everyone was 100% aware and knew what to do in the event of anything happening, which is perfectly acceptable and so I have nothing derogatory to say upon this part of the day. Except that people in the room were salivating for their chance to tell everyone the horror stories they’d had firsthand experience of. Still, it was a sobering lesson. We had to draw pictures of kids and write down what we thought the signs of the different sorts of abuse were and everything can be an indicator of abuse, everything. Poor academic slide, good academic lift, attention seeking, withdrawn behaviour, hating people, liking people. It was a good lesson in the sense that you have to really vigilant to catch this shit and, anything you do spot, no matter how minor, should be recorded in some sort of safeguarding manual. Take note.

So, the second fold of my twofold summary is the whackyness of the lessons. We had a couple of trainers from the last year come to take us through their outstanding lesson plans, both of which were built around the idea of unusual and unique structures. They emphasised the need to take risks as a trainee teacher. Anything that you think is too experimental, too chancy, too open to the kids going mental, you should do. It inspires and encourages the kids towards learning, it draws them to you and helps manage behaviour. Most of all, it enables them to remember the lessons learned more effectively. Happy days.  The trainers were like, take the kids outside, build things in the classroom, use videos, play music, do maths with food, do science with coke (ca cola) and so forth; don’t have the kids in rows copying out of text books, don’t have them reading out of books, mix it up, literally.

Out of the box and irreverent lessons also help build your teacher personality; it’ll help the kids see you as someone fun but clever, assertive but accessible, not like the teachers of yore. That’s what they kept going on about: don’t try and be teachers of the 80’s and 90’s. Move on, they’re dead, sometimes literally. A new age of teaching styles is sweeping the land and it’s based on taking risks in the classrooms. I don’t know what type of teacher I’m going to be; in that training room, there’s people who are obviously going to be the really cool teachers, then there’s ones who are already kooky and will fly with all this whacky lesson stuff, there’s people who can silence you with a cold stare. I don’t know what category I fit into. I suppose I won’t know until I’m in the classroom.

SCHOOLS DIRECT 15

Teacher Training Day 2

Introduction:

I was labouring under a misapprehension the other day when I said there’s one all seeing, all knowing, omnipotent portfolio of work that dogs teachers’ training like black riders on Frodo’s trail at the start of the Fellowship of The Ring. There are actually four. When I heard that, I died a little bit inside because that’s going to take some colour coding, filing, structuring, management, blah, blah, blah, and I haven’t even thought about the kids I’m teaching yet. The trainers eased my mind just as it started to ferment though when they said that the portfolios, technically, are just the icing on the cake of our Initial Teacher Training year. All the evidence needed to prove we adhere to the Teaching Standards should be present in our actual teaching. Well, what do you know, the world does make sense. The examiners just insist on our maintaining of these portfolios for evidence. I think it’s like maths in year 6 SATS; don’t just write the answer, show the working.

Middle:

To emphasise that point, they showed all the Schools Direct trainees a compilation of clips from various films about the art of teaching, which demonstrated good and bad classroom techniques. It made me laugh that Cameron Diaz’s performance in Bad Teacher was listed under the ‘good example’ category, based on the scene where she takes her kids into the gym and throws dodgeballs at them during a question and answer session; apparently it shows awareness of the kinaesthetic learners. Jack Black in School of Rock was also up there. I can’t remember exactly why now because, during the clip, I kept thinking of his teaching in the context of the storyline (if you haven’t seen it, Jack Black is an unemployed, unambitious layabout who impersonates a private school teacher in order to get money). One film that did look good in terms of teaching styles and teacher presence in the classroom, a film which I haven’t seen, was Dead Poet’s Society, starring Robin Williams and a young Ethan Hawke. Robin Williams mixes the lessons up in his usual, irreverent style but that’s ok to enjoy because it’s an award winning film and not something like Flubber.

Other Middle

Other things emphasised in Day Two of the initial initial teacher training was that OFSTED and the Department of Education LOVE phonics at the moment. Boy, do they love phonics right now, and I say that in a really cheesy American accent. If you’re looking at becoming a teacher, or already in training, do lots of background reading on that. I didn’t even know what it was when they mentioned it; I figures it was something to do with telephony but it’s NOT- it’s to do with how young readers spell out sounds and it aids their reading and literacy development. Every class is meant to have a period dedicated to phonics, so, phonic it up. Make sure you get your head around that before coming into the classroom, or you will look like an ignorant loser. They also took us through seating plans and showed examples of how teachers structure their classrooms, taking into account high achievers and strugglers. They reiterated again and again that when we’re having a lesson observed next year, we should provide the observers/ examiners with annotated seating plans of out class, to show we know what we’re talking about.

End

The trainers also spoke highly of some Australian professor called Bill Rogers, who is a teaching expert in behaviour management. He's done loads of clips and interviews on You Tube and this one stood out for me. There's loads of other ones but that clip starts with a straight question and gives a comprehensive answer. Apart from that, the trainers recommended another book called, Inside the Black Box by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (ONE L). It’s really short reading, like a little pamphlet. I can’t remember the moment the trainers recommended it to us, I just wrote the name of it down. I purchased it and read it but didn’t really get why it was suggested; it just said a lot of things that were obvious and was written in about 1990 so it’s OUTDATED. But still, wiser people than me said it was useful and thus, I pass on their message.