Dear new teacher...
Hello, welcome!
Are you excited? Anxious? Even a tiny bit concerned that you won’t necessarily live up to the lofty dreams you have?
Have you spent many nights struggling to sleep, as you ponder what the day to day will feel like? Perhaps you imagine a small, quaint village school. Maybe you dream of a large academy. Does the school in your imagination look a lot like the one you attended?
Have you stepped foot in the classroom before? Perhaps you have taken the university educated route and have actually team-taught previously? Have you gone with alternative schemes, such as Ark Teacher Training, or Teach First?
Despite the optimistic twaddle from successive governments, there is a dearth of teachers. The government has bravely responded by cutting teacher recruitment targets. Good thing too, it only makes it more embarrassing when they fail to meet their targets. Again, and again and again.
Basically, you are entering a job where quality teaching is needed now more than ever.
I won’t pretend to read minds and guess what got you into joining the profession. Just welcome aboard. I have worked with teachers who joined for passion, money, the holidays and many more. Even I only joined because I was drunkenly encouraged to try Teach First, to which I (just as drunkenly) acquiesced.
Let’s look at the negatives first.
It is a hard job. Your first couple of years doubly so. If you have not taught before, then frankly nothing will prepare you for it.
You are simultaneously the floundering novice, as well as the lead adult and role model in the room. You will have to learn to find, create or adapt your own bank of resources (even if solid ones are accessible at your school – you ARE expected to adjust to your classes needs). You will have to do afterschool mentoring and training. Your evenings will probably be spent working, intruding into your private life as the bubbling filling seeps through the crust of the pie.
You will probably be crap at the job at first – everyone is to some degree really. Therefore, you will have to learn to seek out ways to improve, and rapidly show you are attempting to get better.
Children will test your patience and your behavioural control. Time will both speed up tenfold and slow to a crawl depending on the lesson or class. You will have to learn bladder control. And then relearn it after every holiday.
You must watch for signs of extremism and safeguarding breaches. You must encourage British values, and you must remain politically neutral. You will watch for and challenge bullying, both in and out of the classroom. For the students, you will be a link in the chainmail armour that keeps a child safe. Sometimes, you might even feel like you are the only link remaining.
Others will find your professional inadequacies and highlight them. Hopefully not to the world.
In short, the job is a brutal one.
But damn, it is also a lovely one!
You will shape lives. You will make memories and friends that will lighten the darkest of days. You will gradually mark your own steps to improvement, until the mountain of adversity no longer looks so steep from where you are.
Many children will appreciate your effort, even when the 1% does not. Many parents will thank you for your effort. Many staff members will watch out for you in a close-knit community.
Your glistening sweat through pressure-filled GCSE lessons will shift to a glow of happiness as your students will progress.
You might just win over that one really tough student or class. (That one really warms the heart).
You might get that student over the line from a fail to a pass. You might even help net that student a 9.
I suppose what I am saying is that the lows are very low. But the highs? Well there hasn’t been a drug invented that replicates that feeling of overwhelming happiness.
And also, every year the job will get a little bit easier. You become more experienced. The difficult will one day become second nature. Lessons get easier or faster to adapt or create. You will one day reclaim your evenings and weekends for yourself.
Welcome to the profession. It really is a good one to stick with.