It took just two weeks of teaching for my commitment to evaporate, which left seven months of cope. Ten years later, I’m a private tutor, and in my experience teaching in a mainstream school and private tutoring have very little in common as activities. Almost nothing, in fact.
What did it feel like? Like being on a hot train or a bad holiday; or at CCF camp or a boring concert. It felt like being hungover, when you shut down in your body and think ‘This too shall pass.’ And it felt like pretending, which one teacher on my second placement let me know that she knew. Not being there (again).
I was doing a PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate of Education) in secondary-school English at the Institute of Education (IOE) in London. From my tutor, John, who ran the course, I learnt two important things: to ask ‘Who are the learners and what do they know?’ (I’m disparaging about this in the journal below, but now think it a very good question); and to treat my students’ essays as meaningful texts worthy of my attention. But it didn’t start well. Friday, 18 September 2015:
I feel like I’m around well-meaning people, but not like-minded ones. But maybe I’ve never felt myself to be around like-minded people. In any case, at the moment I am not envisaging a career in the state sector. It seems a foreign country: they do things differently there. But my feelings on the subject will no doubt go up and down like an ECG all year.
This was an accurate prediction, apart from the ‘up’ bit. Thursday, 24 September:
In the afternoon we were in groups planning lessons on our chosen book. I was in the Skellig group. I love Skellig but did not enjoy the session because I hate teamwork, just as I always have. If a tutor gives me some work to do, I will focus on it unceasingly until it is done. If I’m part of a group which is given work by a tutor, I will assume that the work doesn’t matter, that it isn’t really anything to do with me, and that ultimate responsibility rests (if it rests anywhere) with someone else.
The following week we visited a boys’ school in south London:
I was one of about ten to say a few words to lower-sixth English about doing English beyond GCSE. A couple of things my fellow student teachers said which annoyed me: when you go to university you ‘should’ have a job, including during term time; in English ‘there are no right or wrong answers’. Also, a disturbing number attempted to put the boys at ease by recounting how they didn’t like English at GCSE, didn’t always do well at exams, flunked a year of uni, how studying English isn’t all about the boring old classics, etc.
If you want to know why A-level English and boys are ‘struggling’ – for the most part separately – there you have it.
Apart from the first three weeks at college, the year was structured around two school placements, with much anticipation about where we would be sent. I was delighted when I found out that for my first I’d got a Church of England school in Chelsea, but that was totally naive. What follows, unaltered, is my journal from the two placements – the IOE way is to reflect on your practice, and I took that to an extreme.
During my free periods I’d go on long walks, especially at the second school, which was more suburban. Except when there was a lesson for which I alone was absolutely responsible, I would escape by compulsion. As Dickens once wrote in a letter, ‘If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.’
Reflection requires looking at oneself as if from the outside. If I look at photos of myself from this time I look drawn – I probably had what I now know was a thyroxine deficiency. And when I picture my PGCE self, he is not in the classroom but in a park or cemetery, striding and spectral.
School one, term one
Wednesday, 7 October 2015
