Survival
I've been teaching an almost normal teacher timetable since January and I've now made it to the Easter holidays. This is what they call Teaching Practice (inventive name, I know). There's only three weeks of Teaching Practice left after Easter, and then we go into theory stuff, without much teaching. So basically, I'm pretty much done.
They call the teacher training course the hardest year of your life. What makes it difficult is the feeling that you have to rip yourself apart, rearrange the pieces and attempt a daily process of reinvention. Plus, for me, I've rarely faced so many things at once that terrified me.
There is an absolute terror in having a lesson go wrong and having a room full of thirty teenagers watching your work fall apart. It's all public speaking to an often apathetic or antagonistic audience. Then there's open warfare at certain points. In the past year, I've tried to avoid conflict or confrontation. But in teaching, you not only have to assert your viewpoint, you have to face down individual students and try to make them afraid of you. I run the daily necessity of becoming a part of what I hate.
You take apart everything about the way you act - the language you use, the tone of your voice, your body language - to try and become something else. And then there's the organisation. You have to remember the names and needs of hundreds of different kids, remember the promises made to each individual one, the targets and sanctions and conversations - remember the details of special needs and preferred learning methods. You have to mark work in a way that motivates and create resources in a way that empowers. On top of that, there's all the University work, essays on reams and reams of theory. Then there's job applications for next year and worrying about finding someone to employ you.
There's all your own selfdoubts, all the fear to face, and at times you just feel like you're drowning under it all.
And the very worst of it is that I love every moment of it. I don't want to finish three weeks after Easter. I want to teach. I want to get it right, find the right mix of methods that will make everything click. Because I get so much out of working with the kids and teaching these lessons.
Which means I could very well be stuck with all this for rather a long time...
They call the teacher training course the hardest year of your life. What makes it difficult is the feeling that you have to rip yourself apart, rearrange the pieces and attempt a daily process of reinvention. Plus, for me, I've rarely faced so many things at once that terrified me.
There is an absolute terror in having a lesson go wrong and having a room full of thirty teenagers watching your work fall apart. It's all public speaking to an often apathetic or antagonistic audience. Then there's open warfare at certain points. In the past year, I've tried to avoid conflict or confrontation. But in teaching, you not only have to assert your viewpoint, you have to face down individual students and try to make them afraid of you. I run the daily necessity of becoming a part of what I hate.
You take apart everything about the way you act - the language you use, the tone of your voice, your body language - to try and become something else. And then there's the organisation. You have to remember the names and needs of hundreds of different kids, remember the promises made to each individual one, the targets and sanctions and conversations - remember the details of special needs and preferred learning methods. You have to mark work in a way that motivates and create resources in a way that empowers. On top of that, there's all the University work, essays on reams and reams of theory. Then there's job applications for next year and worrying about finding someone to employ you.
There's all your own selfdoubts, all the fear to face, and at times you just feel like you're drowning under it all.
And the very worst of it is that I love every moment of it. I don't want to finish three weeks after Easter. I want to teach. I want to get it right, find the right mix of methods that will make everything click. Because I get so much out of working with the kids and teaching these lessons.
Which means I could very well be stuck with all this for rather a long time...