'Welcome to your now apparently once-monthly installment of the journalist-turned-teacher blog! Yes, for your increased suspense, this blog is being brought to you just once every four weeks! To prevent too much of a cold turkey situation from arising, this will continue for some time until being reduced to a mere six-monthly account. This too will carry on for a while until such time as the trainee teacher in question's journey through the quagmire of teaching bureaucracy has led her into the teeth of the greatest beast of all - the giant lever arch file. At this point, all writing will cease for she will have been squashed between its useless sheets of (by then) coffee-stained papers. After which, she will be no more - merely a speck of dust on a lesson planning pro forma. I'd like to take this opportunity on her behalf to say thanks for reading, in case we are faced with such a tragedy.'
OK, it's a little dramatic, but I thought I should start with a public service announcement of sorts to get you in the mood. I'm four weeks in to my first school placement or, to acquaint you with the new jargon that is pouring into my life, I have completed four of the 'F' weeks. That F stands for 'first', as in 'first school placement'. Keep up. The school I was supposed to get in North Liverpool fell through at the last minute (and by that I mean two days before I was due to start) so I was bundled off to another all boys Catholic school, this time in South Liverpool and along with another of my PGCE colleagues. I cannot seem to glean much information about The Other School, only that it was "rougher than this one" so I guess it worked out for the best. And, with this new school, I get a lift in to work everyday rather than having to make the hour-long train journey so, yes, I guess I've done pretty well out of the change. Geographical location aside, the admirable enthusiasm and resolve with which I embarked on this more practical phase of the PGCE has very quickly transmogrified into a sort of gloopy mixture of soured enthusiasm, stress, weariness and an ominous sense of urgency which has reawakened my imaginary dormant stomach ulcer. The latter seems to be very common on this course; it is the sense that, even after the mound of work you have already completed, there is still something pressing to be done - is it a form? A signature to be obtained? A person to be spoken to? Something to be photocopied..? What IS it?! All of this is, as you can imagine, a little unsettling.
We have been resident trainee teachers at our school for four weeks and are now more familiar with the geography of the place and are beginning to recognise faces and almost remember names (that goes for colleagues and pupils). I am still navigating the jungle of school colleague etiquette, having riskily not understood from the outset that there is no worse crime than to deign to make a cup of tea on virgin school ground; it seems that, as the new person, even if you go out and buy your own coffee, tea, milk and even mug, it is still a travesty to stand in the kitchenette area of the staffroom and take up valuable tea-making space when there are only fifteen minutes in which every teacher must load themselves up on caffeine. And if you do splash a splosh of a colleague's milk into your mug, the risk you are taking on is on a par with considering breaking into the Tower of London and stealing the crown jewels. That does not of course stop a veteran teacher from taking YOUR milk or drinking out of YOUR mug. That's just how it is. The staffroom doesn't go in for Communism. We're unmistakably 'new' and, until we've put in a good five year's worth of graft, have dug our heels into the job and worn down our keen-eyed appearance, we will continue to be 'new'. It is a strange sensation. In any other job I have had, it has taken a week for the new-person formalities to be flicked out of the way like an irritation and then it has been seen as beneficial to all for me to be thrown in among the lions to 'get on with it'. Teacher trainers appear to revel in prolonging this initiation for as long as you can bear. Your status as 'trainee' is stretched out over an entire year with no let-up; there will be observations - and many of them at regular intervals - just so that, during that time, you never ever come close to the sensation of settling into your new profession. And of course, to leap forward, the Newly Qualified Teacher year follows, which signals another year of observations and meeting more so-called 'Standards' (...the 33 professional standards are the currency of this training programme. They are the holy boxes that need to be ticked in order that you may be deemed worthy of 'teacher' status).
It is against this backdrop that I have been working through my first few weeks and my first few 'tasks' - activities set for us by the university in order to 'focus' our time. Rather than fall asleep at the back of the class along with the pupils, we were given a series of things to look out for as we observed lessons. Now, this put us into a further quandary re: school etiquette for we would daily put teachers on edge as we assumed our position at the back of the classroom and spent an hour taking notes on his/her teaching methods. We knew we were in no position to judge but we were obeying our course tutors and "they told us to take notes on this and ask you questions about that..." so that is what we did - to which the teachers would crack a mildly patronising smile, as if being inside a Real School was about to open our eyes to the folly of teacher training college. We quoted a barrage of classroom and teaching theories at our unfortunate new colleagues from lesson plans to schemes of work and on to the use of textbooks and the TL (Target Language. Keep up I said). In short, we had learned that we were to use less of the textbook and great lashings of the TL in our first six weeks at uni. However, most of what we had absorbed was quickly brushed off with that same knowing half-smile. We would learn that the reality was very different, they seemed to sneer.
Bemused and unsettled, we carried on in our mission to answer the reams of pointless questions about the behaviour we were observing, the vocabulary teaching we had noted and how the teacher made 'transitions' from one part of the lesson to the next ("Well he, erm, tells them..what they're going to do next..?" No, that can't be right, too simple - back to the drawing board.) Once over this awkward hurdle, we set about imposing ourselves on the classes we had been observing. That was enlightening. Up until that point, I had been the cool, helpful teacher who had loitered at the back of the classroom, on hand to indulge the naughty kids in a question and answer session seemingly on the topic of the work but really cooked up by them so that they could stop working for a few minutes. Suddenly placed at the front of the classroom, I was Schoolboy Enemy Number One. One of my tasks was to conduct a listening exercise in Spanish with a class of fidgety 13-year-olds. I may have thought nothing much of this prior to the PGCE, but now a fully fledged member of the PGCE Paranoia Society, I viewed this task with the kind of terror only really acceptable in the lead up to a bungee jump. Maybe I was deluded before. Maybe that's it. Either way, I quivered as I pressed the button on the CD player, desperately hoping that they would understand my carefully over-planned instructions. They didn't. "What are those pictures on the board - do we use them?" "It's too fast" "I can't do this" "What do we have to do again?" Oh god, oh god, oh god. The back of my neck sweated out my whole body's anxiety as I glanced at the teacher who was pretending to work but quite clearly silently assessing what was going on. Disaster management. I stared at the furrowed brows and twisted open mouths fixated on me. The idea of getting 25 kids to understand something at the same time was suddenly up there in the impossibility rankings, along with me ever doing a bungee jump or becoming a world-class physicist. I skipped back to the beginning of the CD, paused it and embarked on my fourth and final explanation, deciding to pause the extract after every sentence and, more or less, complete the task with the pupils. With this method, and forty minutes later, I had just about managed to drag 25 schoolboys through the gruelling task. We all came out the other side - if a bit battered and bruised of soul. I was exhausted. It wasn't the kind of exhaustion I had experienced at the end of a long day in the newsroom - although, I am sad to admit, the memory of this is fading a little - it was much more of a physical and emotional exhaustion. A day staring at a computer screen juggling a series of words, sentences, stories, phone calls and often hilariously cynical comments from colleagues was a mentally tiring day but basically a day spent sitting down and sitting alone. Just me and the computer. Commands came at me from outside, but I was alone, a loner. Like everyone else there. I was hidden behind a computer and behind a name in a paper. Being thrust in front of a class of kids with the responsibility of putting knowledge into their heads is the opposite of hiding. It's an exposed position, a revealing position. As a journalist you can conceal your personality, your foibles and faults, your insecurities behind words directed at other people. I'm not making a grand statement about all journalists in the world but it is interesting to see how focusing on other people's problems every day can very easily take the emphasis and the sting out of your own. As a teacher, your tool is your personality. The classroom blows away any self-deprecation. School-kids don't get your irony, cynicism or bitterness - and if they do, they don't appreciate it. They can, I fear, see through their teachers. And there are more of them so multiply that clairvoyance by 25. Teaching forces you to react and interact with other human beings - you can't just comment upon them passively. It's a weird thing to get used to.
Of course, you can't let them get the better of you and I have since succeeded in taming my adopted form class by handing out two detentions in one morning and getting on to the better side of a Year 7 class by employing the odd stern pout or raised eyebrow. I am also experimenting with asserting my authority outside of the classroom and have already jumped the canteen queue (a good way to assert authority at this initial stage but not something to see through the year for fear of coming across as downright obnoxious) and have just about mastered the art of chastising rowdy pupils on the staircase as they move between lessons with an "Um, excuse me lads!" - said with gravitas and coupled with a knitted brow. Seems to be working OK. Just a shame I can't translate this behaviour into the staffroom to ward off coffee mug-stealing colleagues. That is one place where newsroom expletives could really come into their own. Still working on taming my cynicism there.
