Who am I?
Uncertainty is the feeling of the moment for many of us, I myself am no stranger to this feeling. Follow me on my journey…
A few weeks ago, I was asked “Who are you?”, I responded first of all with my name. They then clarified their meaning and said “No, no, who are you as a person?” at that point I answered “I am a teacher”. My answer to this stuck with me, and bothered me slightly because I would like to believe I am more than a job. However, on the last Friday of the summer school term, I left my job as a teacher. There were tears and smiles, mostly by me! At the time, I had planned for this piece to be published shortly after I left, however I now sit here, four more weeks after starting it, and it has undergone many changes, re-writes and even just scrapping it and starting it again. For those of you keeping track, I have just got back from GCSE results day, and finished listening to Scott Mills and Chris Stark finish their last show on radio 1 — there may have been even more tears. So, to the question at hand!
For a while I have battled with my love of teaching and the realities of teaching itself. These have possibly manifested in my own battles with who am I as a person as well. Now unfortunately for the Les Mis fans out there the answer to that is not Jean Valjean, nor to my deep dissatisfaction I cannot answer the question with “I am Ironman”. So here I am trying to answer that same question in an article.
For four years now I was able to answer the title question with “I am a teacher”. Which at the time seemed a good answer, thinking about it now it seems rather basic. When I worked as a sales assistant, I didn’t answer it in this way, nor do I think that an accountant answers that type of question with their job title, and if we are answering it like that, I think it shows that we maybe lack something as a society. But I am sure many of you reading this, if you were to ask this question to yourselves would also struggle with how to answer it.
Teaching is one of the most wonderfully rewarding jobs a person can have. Simultaneously it is one of the most draining jobs you can do. From 8:30 until 3:00 you are on show in front of 30 or so students, you arrived at least an hour before them to make sure you were ready for the day, then when the students leave you have meetings, lessons to plan, clubs to run and data to input. For me at least, the students were always my number one priority, after all that’s why I went into teaching, which meant that all the other things get pushed further and further back. If a student was upset worrying about exams, life or any other problem, whatever data I had to input wasn’t my priority anymore. And maybe, the reason why I reached the stage of realising I was going to burn out so soon was because of this, but for me I couldn’t do it any other way.
Ever since we have been in school we are always told to “work hard, and you will get your rewards”, but I am less and less certain that still exists. The rewards I got for my own hard work were burnout, and struggles with my own mental health, something I know many other people who were brought up with this mindset also suffer with.
The other thing we are also asked to decide aged twelve or thirteen is to choose our options that will dictate where we go for the rest of our lives. I am now sat here typing as a twenty-seven-year-old, still unsure what the rest of my life will look like. Maybe these notions led to success in previous generations, but I can’t help but feel that for my generation it simply does not ring true.
As a generation I feel like many of us feel lost, with no real answers as to where to go. Some people journey to far off places to “find themselves”, others are struggling along back home. I do not have the answers, I wish I did. However, if the majority of a generation feel that way, then something may be fundamentally wrong with how things are going.
Every few years, the retirement age seems to increase, meaning that at the current rate people who are currently in their mid-twenties will be retiring when they around one hundred, not an attractive prospect for those told to work hard and they will be rewarded. We have also been saddled with a student loan debt that is impossible to repay, that has been sold off to private companies who can seemingly change the interest rates whenever they want to, rising from 4.5% to a “capped” 7.3%.
So essentially anyone who had the audacity to be from a less well-off family and attend university, will have an unofficial “graduate tax” until the day they die (because they won’t be able to afford to retire). All of this is then on top of a spiralling cost of living crisis.
However, this only goes part of the way to explain who I am, because truthfully at times I don’t know. I know what I want to do with my life, and that is do something rewarding and fulfilling, that allows me to also enjoy my life outside of work. In teaching I found only half of that. I am on a path to trying to discover who I am outside of work, and hopefully being able to answer that question without answering a job title.
Maybe it could all change if I go on to have children, you see many people with their twitter bio reading “father, husband, journalist” for example, but it’s still just a list of things you are, not who you actually are as a person. I am sure in everybody’s life we have all come across some excellent fathers, husbands and maybe even an excellent journalist, but equally we have all come across some terrible fathers, husbands and journalists. So yet again we are an impasse.
At the time of writing this article, my answer to this question could be “I am an anxious but happy ex-teacher looking for the answers of what to do with my life”, I shall update my twitter bio immediately! I think to answer the question of “Who am I?” in a few short words, for most people should be impossible. We simply cannot reduce ourselves as people to a job title, or short snappy responses. We cannot know people just based on how they answer this question, and anyone who thinks they can know somebody just from this is quite possibly mistaken.
If you started this article hoping to find out who I am, then I apologise for leaving you unfulfilled, however if you have stuck with my ramblings for this long, thank you! The actual purpose of this article is to introduce myself away from being a teacher. So, as of now, I think I am no longer “Mr Charles”, and while some people may leave teaching and feel some level of resentment, I do not. I am leaving feeling immensely grateful. Grateful for what it has given me, grateful for the support and friendships I have made along the way, and most importantly grateful for the truly unbelievable young people I had the privilege to work with.
So, on the day that the students I have taught for years go their separate ways after seeing all their hard work rewarded with their GCSE’s, I am also now leaving the classroom. Over the years I have talked myself out of doing a lot of things, but for once I am trying to follow the advice I have given to my students for four years. Believe in yourself.
Let’s see where this goes…
Have you ever felt or experienced something similar? I would love to hear about it!
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