You Just Can’t Cheat Experience

When I went into teaching I thought I’d chosen a job for life.  I felt so at home in schools and I had the sense I was doing something that mattered. 

As a teacher, everything you do, every choice you make, impacts on young people’s lives. You’re a role model at all times, whether or not you want to be. You’re always conveying something; from your tone of voice, your interests, how you walk in the corridor. As a Teacher, being someone a young person can identify or connect with is as much a responsibility of the job as the lesson planning.

I absolutely love working with kids. I have a higher tolerance for whatever behaviour they may throw out as I see that they’re just learning how to be in the world. When you’re young you have a sense of the possible and that often means young people are far better company than adults.

Life in a school can be intense, driven by the necessity of what you’re doing. I loved the intensity but I didn’t necessarily thrive on it, there’s a balance to be struck.

I quite quickly became a department head, it was pressured but I got used to it. What that progression did though, is distract me from getting good – really good – at being a class teacher. You just can’t cheat experience. If you get good at the bread and butter stuff first then everything is easier. If you don’t, things are harder. 

You just can’t know it until you know it.  

My last year of full time teaching was a hard emotional experience, one which was packaged alongside the difficult lesson that hard work; it doesn’t always pay off. That can be true for both staff and students. I found myself disillusioned, disheartened and unhappy.

My dad had given me some really good advice when I was around 19. Whatever I was doing then was making me really unhappy and he made me savour the feeling of relief when that came to an end. He told me not to forget that feeling: of getting back to being myself. 

So I sought to be myself again. But I found there are times when it doesn’t matter that you have the language, you just can’t say “I’m not coping”. I’m lucky to have a squad of people around me who dare to say “this is not You, where are You?”

Back then it gave me the permission I needed to go easy on myself and make different, difficult, choices. And it was another time when I came to know that it’s better to be going towards something, than to be running away from something.

So, I found another direction to head towards. I opted out of teaching and I still find myself making a difference, just not in the way I expected.