My First Two Years of Teaching

I just finished my second year of teaching and am now a fully qualified teacher. I thought I’d write about it.
I love teaching. I find it exciting and fun and it fills me with hope. Being around people who are discovering the world and aspiring for futures not-yet-written. Schools are inherently inspiring places.
And yet you probably know teachers who are having a terrible time. I am often greeted with surprise when I respond so effusively to questions about the profession. Aren’t classrooms crazy? Do you not have a social life? Are you constantly scared of your results and OFSTED?
All these things are real. I have seen lots to get annoyed and depressed about in teaching so far, but I am irresistibly optimistic and just super chilled out. So, yeah, teaching is amazing.
With that in mind I thought I’d walk through my experiences of my first two years, hoping that it might be interesting.
Starting out
There are lots of routes into teaching. So many, in fact, that I restarted this piece and set aside my huge tangent for a separate article on teacher training and recruitment. Stay tuned for that.
I trained through the ‘School Direct’ pathway where a school (or in this case sixth-form college) and a university partner up to provide a PGCE with QTS (Qualified Teacher Status). I won’t get into the minutiae now (read my future article for that), but it meant I completed post-graduate essays with Edge Hill University and had other content (behaviour management, planning etc.) provided by Cardinal Newman College.
This model is excellent as it keeps the university theory but puts the teaching of at-the-coalface practicalities and insights in the hands of teachers who are currently doing it. University-only courses, I am sure, can do this, but I found all the provision organised by John Pugh and his team at Newman to be insightful and well-thought-through. Well done, John.

First Placement
I spent the first half of my training year at a Preston, non-faith, mixed comprehensive. The humanities department, and school generally, was struggling but I had an excellent manager in the head of history and it was a very soft opening. I was on a 60% timetable entirely made up of Year 7, 8 and 9. They didn’t want to give any GCSE to a newbie. Fair.
There are very good reasons for it, but I found the slow lowering-in to teaching very frustrating. These kids will either eat you alive or they won’t. Also, students notice when you have a reduced timetable and one of the worst things for a new teacher is students being aware that you are a new teacher. Several teachers at my first school insisted on calling us ‘student teachers’. This is cancer for your authority. Those awful people can get in the fucking sea.
Sink or Swim
During the interview process, like any job, I had to justify why I wanted to teach. Why teaching, rather than the many other jobs that pay better and involves far less stress? And the answer I came to: ‘Because I’m good at it’. I’m a good storyteller, people seem to listen to me when I tell them things, and I understand where they might fall down and what misconceptions might arise. That was the theory and I wanted to test it. Give me some classes.
I got them, and some days it went well and some days it misfired and it turns out no-one is a perfect classroom teacher straight out of the box. Behaviour in classes was annoying but never a massive problem for me. I think one of the biggest reasons for early drop-outs in teaching is finding authority. Every adult human is capable of demanding authority of a room of teenagers. Everyone, man or woman, old or young. My current head of history is a tiny, comparatively young woman who commands authority in every classroom she walks into.
That said, being a six-foot tall male with an excellent bellow makes it much easier. When the pressure is on, and especially when you are inexperienced and unsure, having your physicality to fall back on is an easy get-out. It’s unfair but it also has some drawbacks. I recognise that I haven’t had to confront lazy practices which a young female teacher would be forced to confront.
Don’t get into those situations and, if you do, find a more intelligent way out. Took me a second year to figure that out.
Overall, that first placement confirmed what I thought already. Which was nice.
Maybe it was the two and bit years as a teaching assistant, my confident and authoritative temperament or my well-founded reputation as a blagger and bullshitter, but I found standing up and telling people to do stuff very natural.

A tangent about OFSTED
I also had an OFSTED inspection in this first term. I felt no pressure at all as I was not being scrutinised. I worked hard to show the school as best I could but it wasn’t really my fight.
What was interesting was the process and the effect on the school. The report came back as ‘Requires improvement’, which is basically a fail. We expected it, but being in a staff that works so hard and is slapped with a big ‘Fail’ sign feels rubbish and no amount of the headmaster reading ‘Invictus’ to the staff is going to change that (that really happened).
As a slight spoiler for below, I endured a second OFSTED in two years with my new school and we received an ‘Outstanding’ report. What I’m about to say comes from this perspective.
Improving schools is spectacularly difficult. Adjusting one dial here, spinning a knob there is not really how education works. The best conception I can come up with for understanding ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools is a sense of the ‘culture’ of the school. It is an unhelpfully vague and nebulous idea but the biggest difference between by two OFSTEDs I have seen is the culture of the school.
Both schools had a change of management before I joined, two and four years before respectively. The old regimes, from what I gather, were not greatly missed and everyone was very positive about the new leaders. However, cultures do not shift so easily. Short of a Night of the Long Knives, schools cannot change quickly at all. Removing teachers, and, more importantly, removing ideas is harder in education than in pretty much any other field. When looking at schools, as a parent or fellow teacher, try to find that culture.
Second placement
After half the year at a mixed comprehensive teaching year 7, 8 and 9, I moved up to A Level, teaching three different areas of History, two of which had never been run before.
Looking at it now, that period was probably quite stressful, I had to learn, to a pretty high level, a sprawling course on the differing themes, times and geographies of the British Empire; a completely alien Early Modern course on many battles and intrigues of the War of the Roses; and ancient history course that required presumed fluency in classical and archaeological sources for the Augustinian Golden Age.
You may think that History Teaching is just that, and that I shouldn’t complain as this is what I’m paid for, but it was fucking insane.
The history subject audit, compared to every other subject area is fucking insane. There are limits, there are walls you come up against in other subjects. There is a point where you feel some sense of mastery over at least the core of what you are teaching. There are ideas and themes and subjects that you return to. There are things that you don’t need to worry about in other subjects. That is university level. That is extra. We can teach this convenient lie that sort of teaches this thing.
History is just everything. All of human fucking existence. Each tiny place and people and time has depth and subtlety and teeny tiny details that you just need to know about.
The thing is, on top of being good at story-telling and helping people understand stuff, I also love learning things. I absolutely love reading about history and adding it to my great mind-tapestry of how things are. History is how you got here and every single thing that you do, from your haircuts, to your sex life, to the words that determine how you think are all historically-grounded. Nothing is self-evident. Everything could be different. And every scrap of history informs us a little bit more about one little aspect of us.
So I’m not complaining about having to learn three A Level specs, just that it is hard and if you are thinking about teaching history keep it in mind. You need to love learning shit.
Teaching older students in a separate sixth form environment is really cool. It is one of the best little niches a teacher can find themselves. It is not some utopia where everyone wants to be there and becomes motivated, curious learners but it is a notable step away from high school, and the rapport with your students and the kinds of lessons you teach all reflect this older, more equal relationship. It definitely is is not equal, but sixth form teaching requires some recognition that these students are nearing adulthood and cannot be disciplined and motivated in the same way you would a year 8.
It is a blessed little goldilocks zone in the educational landscape and all the staff I worked with recognised that. It’s a very lucky place and one that I could easily imagine myself in.
One very brief political point I will make on the subject of separate sixth form colleges (perhaps to be explored in another piece) is that they are kept outside of the fold of mainstream educational policy and funding. It is a harsh life as a college and Newman is doing amazingly with very limited resources. Next time you hear about money in education have a look if 16–19 education is mentioned. Clue: it probably isn’t.

End of Year 1
So I finished my PGCE on the same day as the EU referendum and had a very weird bittersweet evening where we all got pissed at the Wetherspoons and my fellow history teacher was almost punched while canvassing the pub for how they voted. Turns out Wetherspoon voters in Preston had some not very nice things to say about immigrants.
Very uncharacteristically for me, I actually had a plan and ended my training year with a job lined up in the big smoke, where the streets are paved with gold. Big ol’ London Town.
My year of butter pies, gruff northern humour and people who pronounce the letter ‘u’ correctly were over.
Start of year 2
I started at my new school on Canada Day 2016 having been offered the opportunity to start the job in the summer rather than in September. My interview lesson went fantastically; I made the students cry. I did a lesson on Emmett Till which is just achingly sad and important for Civil Rights and it really worked. So I got to see the end of a school year and wouldn’t be completely unprepared in September. I got to observe teachers and students and help with some planning and curriculum changes. Mostly, I got to take in the feel of the new school as it was tying up for the year and saying goodbye to staff that were moving on.
Looking back, this month was really helpful. I avoided the mad rush and worry that would come with starting in September and meant I had some names and places when things started properly. For any new teachers, I highly suggest that you try to get this option. It made all the difference.
It also meant I had a bloody lovely summer living just off Hampstead Heath where I was getting paid for three weeks ‘work’.

Year 2 proper
All through my first year I didn’t feel like a real teacher. The classes and planning and marking felt real, but I didn’t have a horse in the race. I wasn’t coming back to this institution or these students. The moment I started at my new school it felt very different.
This was all me. I wasn’t going to get whisked off in six months. They would only learn what I provided for them. If I’m bad, they’re bad.
You are emperor over a tiny empire.
I had tiny little year 7s who were underprepared and overdependent, and year 13s who had another teacher last year and were pretty unsure of me. I had students who wanted to shout at me, some who didn’t take me seriously and a couple who were pretty giggly around me.
(It’s probably worth mentioning that I work at an all-girls school and I’m going to leave it at that. A huge tangent that way leads.)
And I love this ownership even more than the story-telling and the learning about stuff. The relationship and change that you build in a room of people. By the end of the year your classroom is a sculpture entirely of your own making. It is a painting or a perfume or a recipe that you have crafted. Everything that is good and everything that is bad comes from you. It is a fair and unflinching trade. I can look over what I have made this year and can see exactly what went right and wrong.
To indulge my metaphor a little longer, each class brings different materials, different stones to carve or pastels to paint. Some bring granite or flint, and others bright and varied oils. My job is to figure out what I can make with them and how am I going to do it. I call teaching fair because I can look at my classes and as long as I scrutinise myself honestly I can see exactly when my hand has slipped and where I used the wrong technique. I can also see when I chose exactly the right colours used them together perfectly.
It was the sense of ownership that took me most by surprise this year. I knew I’d love learning and showing what I had learnt to others. The investment in the character of the class; the intellectual curiosity; the breakthroughs that mean little to you but the world to them; the pastoral care and shepherding.
There are teachers who excel at the intellectual side, others the pastoral, but teachers have to be all-rounders to some extent. The new teachers I have seen leave the profession usually leave because they didn’t realise the full demand of teaching. Not the workload demands or the amount of standing and talking. The demands on your emotions and your discipline and compassion and anger.
It only demands your soul. If you are not on board for that you will either fail or be constantly unhappy.
I had a moment right at the end of the year that crystallised how much of myself teaching demands.
A year 8 student was leaving to go to a special school. She had struggled in the class for full two years and had a teaching assistant the whole time. It’s the right move.
Her classmates had put on a party and brought presents and were really sad she was leaving. The group were so close and whatever normal friendships and cliques divided the group had melted away and it was just lovely.
Afterwards, I was discussing this with several other teachers and asking whether or not this would have happened in a mixed school. There probably would have been a party, we agreed, but the feel in the room, the lack of restraint in the love for one another probably wouldn’t be there. The group felt like sisters and even though puberty and boys were most certainly part of their lives, it wasn’t going to spoil that very pure moment affection and fondness.
It was in that moment, as we discussed the sisterly affection of the year 8s that I felt a pang of something entirely alien to me.
It’s a much maligned and slightly weird term but I’ve struggled to find anything that summarises it better.
I think I felt ‘paternal’ to this group.
As a 27 year-old hip young professional in London, and a bit of a heartless bastard generally, this was strange and worrying to me.
The need, the duty almost, to nurture these young people who don’t know how much of a bitch the world can be, was a new one for me.
Standing and talking a lot — Easy.
Entering data into excel — Boring but fine.
Reading about German economic policy for 4 hours to plan a 50 minute lesson — Great.
Emotional investment in making sure your students are resilient enough to face the unending tragedy of the world — I’m not about this.

Conclusion
So the workload is fine. I’ve been blessed with a string of fantastic managers who have been clear and reasonable. Young people are the future and their hope is inescapable.
But also the responsibility to raise these little adults one-lesson-on-the-Opium-Wars-at-a-time is pretty terrifying.
Also, the holidays are great.
Addendum:
I wrote this before A Level results day, and have now received my first set of A Level results.
I have never worried about getting good or bad results. I have felt that if I did a good job then they will get good results. I’m not one to cry injustice and if the results were bad then I would have to recognise something in me.
Thankfully, they were great and my cohort averaged +4.4 on the national average.
It’s nice to have some results to vindicate my approach. I want some more now.
I can’t wait to get back in September. I’m looking forward to doing it all so much better than last year. How many jobs can you say that about.
