When a friend and recent graduate of the PGCE course remarked a few weeks ago that I would find it difficult to keep this blog up due to the threatening storm of workload headed my way, I wasn't thrilled but it seemed a fair comment to make. It didn't bother me though because I had no intention of adhering to the advice. More relevant to me, perhaps, would have been a heads-up (how I hate that phrase and yet how useful it is) as to the amount of time it would take me to wrap my head around the entire PGCE experience and its baggage. As it happens, it has taken the first two and a bit weeks (which I have now successfully survived) to just about comprehend the vocabulary, politics and general etiquette of teacher training. Which is why I am only just in a position to convey anything. Any attempt to do this during the last two weeks would have resulted in half a page of the following copied and pasted word - bleurgh.
The fog set in from the second day really. The first was filled with the pomp and circumstance that fills every first day - or at least all the 'first days' I have ever experienced at university or work; an opening/welcoming/introductory (delete as appropriate) meeting, which is almost always a lecture, in which the heads of your course of workplace shoe-horn in their final advertisement for the course thinking that you'll bugger off if you're not impressed with what they're offering, never to see that all-important second day. If I'm honest, I was underprepared for all that the first day brought. I was thrown by the newness, enthusiasm and, to be quite frank, youthfulness of the whole affair. All around me 21- and 22-year-old undergraduate leavers cooed their long-held desires to teach those they probably shared a bucket and spade with in the sand-pit, announced their fears to one another, their excitement about going out and drinking those fears away in nights of pre-pedagogic hedonism 'because this is the last year we can do it' - and they bonded. They glued themselves to each other, finding lectures and seminars together, eating lunch together and planning shopping trips together. I joined the tribe but felt distinctly outside of it. What I had imagined would be a year of professional training, a sort of 9-5 with homework, was metamorphosing from the first day into a 24/7 PGCE university experience. For which, at the age of almost 27, I was very much not prepared. My anxiety was also exacerbated by the fact that I have opted to live in halls this year. You know, for 'independence' and all that. However, what struck me from my first week was that I had actually entered into something much more binding and communal than the simple 'room away from the parental home' that I had dreamed of all these months past.
My obvious discomfort with my new social situation manifested itself in very unfortunate fashion on this first day during the scheduled 'ice-breaking' hour. Having been used to going it alone when it came to breaking the ice - using my own special blend of awkwardness and self-deprecation - I was thrown by this social assistance. Sitting in a circle after a round of clapping, tapping, clicking and saying our name, we were required to come up with an adjective that began with the same sound as our name. 'Sh' is a tricky one. Or at least that's my defence for having only managed to generate the word 'shameless' from my bank of adjectives. And so it was that the 2009 intake for the Modern Foreign Languages PGCE were introduced to Shameless Charlotte.
The first week passed in a flurry of acronyms. Acronyms for everything: CLIL, BSF, Kal, PLTS (pronounced plats), ECM, KS3, MFL, GCSE, RIP, WTF? I was loaded up with government documents with grand, fuzzy-sounding titles like 'Languages For All', which we were required to study in preparation for seminar discussion. After having been trained in the journalism world in the ways of scoffing cynicism with an end to tearing such waffle to shreds, it was an effort to take it all seriously. To be honest, my head was exploding. Each night I came back with a thicker fog in front of my view on to the teaching world. What had seemed a simple career path allowing me to work with a subject I love and enjoy a nice holiday now and again was revealing itself to be a policy minefield full of alien lingo and horrendous pitfalls. Most frightening of all was the day of lectures and seminars on child protection in which we were catapulted into an unhealthy debate on how to deal with a pupil who is upset for whatever reason; to put a comforting hand on a shoulder or not? To question the reason for their distress or not? To look directly at him/her..or not? Distressing, to say the least.
The experience so far has been slightly overwhelming I have to admit; I am building a tower of paperwork, already have four lever arch files that I fear will be full before Christmas, and have filled in more forms than I can stomach. I am also seriously considering buying a laminator (apparently vital for the all-important Spanish flash-cards). It feels like an exercise in filing. However, perhaps most overwhelming of all has been the realisation that this profession is a great deal more complicated than I first thought. Or at least has been made to appear that way. With so much legislation, policy-making, strategy-building and Ofsted-ing, it is no wonder many teachers go round the bend. This course, so far at least, feels like a holding pen - a sort of quarantine - for aspiring teachers; DO NOT ENTER THIS WORLD BEFORE YOU HAVE BEEN HOSED DOWN WITH A GOOD DOSE OF PARANOIA. Is the sign on the door. To my mind anyway. I began by thinking that I would throw merely a cursory glance over some of the literature prescribed to us before the course and nearly three weeks in I find myself sitting in the library (I've found myself a nice spot looking out on to a courtyard) trawling pedantically through textbooks blandly entitled 'Learning to teach in the secondary school' for fear of missing some vital piece of advice that will help me to sidestep pedagogic pitfalls. And I have to say that some of it is in fact very interesting. Although just over two weeks into my course I am by no means a convert to acronyms, strategies, frameworks and the potential legal slip-ups of the teaching profession, I am getting into the swing of things and my initial panic has abated. I'm breathing more slowly, calming down and learning to digest it all. I am trying my very best to switch off my cynicism when it comes to the theory bit. It IS important. I'd much rather be prepared. There's a definite sense of being on display and in a position of responsibility as a teacher and it's not to be taken lightly. But the transition has been hard. During the first week I had at least three 'oh god what the hell am I doing?' moments. But I have got to know those 21- and 22-year old students I was so scared of in the beginning and see that we have a lot in common - namely our reasons and motivations for being here. The ex-City types are populating the Maths and Science courses, leaving the Modern Foreign Languages course (or MFL as it is affectionately called) to be filled with people who have a genuine love of languages and travel and are really very interesting people. I've been on the statutory 'night out initiation', which passed drunkenly and successfully and allowed me to involve myself in the group bonding experience through the medium of dance. I've also settled (just about) into living in the rabbit warren that is 'halls' and have fashioned what I believed to be a perfectly respectable 'professional's apartment' out of my long, thin room with the standard-issue green carpet and magnolia walls. Apart from the discovery of a dead pigeon outside my window, the experience has so far been a pleasant one.
We begin our period of observation in our first placement school next week which, although providing yet another challenge (I'm going to be in a mixed Catholic school in North Liverpool) will hopefully give the information that has been pumped into us much more meaning and relevance. I'm looking forward to breaking out of the teacher factory and getting to experience what this job is really like.
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