You may have been wondering where I’ve been for the past few weeks, or you may not have depending on how interested you are in me and my life! Well just in case you are, I’ve actually been on a teaching placement in a secondary school… scary, I know! It wasn’t compulsory, but I thought it would be a brilliant opportunity to take as I’ve always had teaching in my mind as a career, but never actually had the experience of being in a secondary school classroom. I’ve had loads of experience with primary school aged children, but that’s really not for me, I can’t deal with children’s sticky hands wanting to hold mine! Ew!
Being in a secondary school was definitely kind of what I expected, but also a massive shock to my system. I went from a student lifestyle of milling around at university everyday, to having a 9-5 job where I was out most of the day. The biggest shock for me is that I can’t believe that’s what life is! Everyone laughs at me for thinking this, but I can’t believe when we get older all we have to look forward to is getting up, going to work, coming home, preparing for work the next day, then doing it all over again. How depressing.
Anyway, onto the actual teaching. Do I think I’m going to be a teacher after it all then? I have absolutely no idea. Parts of it I did really enjoy, interacting with the children and teaching them about science when they were actually interested, but it’s such a hard job and I genuinely feel sorry for teachers. They have ridiculous amounts of extra work to do outside of school time, and no other job would expect you to do that much extra without paying you for it. There is so much pressure on them to get everything done, and the amount of marking is crazy! Some of the teachers I spoke to actually told me not to be a teacher as they don’t like/it’s not worth it/it’s boring, and told me to try and get a job in industry. I found this shocking at first that people teaching the children in our country could say this, but to be honest I can see why. Something as simple as adding up test results for their classes and putting them into a spreadsheet can take forever, and of course that’s going to be boring. Then you’ve got the children who aren’t interested in a word you have to say, one year 10 boy told me he didn’t need science because he could just go work in a factory with his dad or ‘sign on the dole’. I was flabbergasted to say the least! There are just so many extra things that teaching requires you to do that if you want to teach, you’ve got to have a real passion to do it so you don’t dread going to work everyday.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, some of the year 7 and year 8 children were absolutely lovely, and if I could just teach those I would be happy! I even met a mini-me, a little year 7 girl who was on the school council, was a school librarian, wanted to be a zoologist and done horse riding. I swear that was me ten years ago! Oh, and I got to do a heart dissection which was so interesting. I’ve seen it before but I never get bored, and I think I was more interested than the pupils, ha!
I could sit here and ramble all day about how I think teaching needs to change, but I’m not going to. I’m not sure if I will end up being a teacher, but if when I graduate nothing else comes along I think I would enjoy doing something with education as it’s something I feel very strongly about. I’ve became a bit of an ambassador for STEM subjects too (science, technology, engineering, maths), so maybe I could do something with that? Who knows. Maybe I’ll even just win the lottery and spend my time volunteering and riding horses…. fingers crossed ;)
This was a bit of a long winded post all just to say I’m back into blogging :) Round of applause to people who run major successful blogs alongside full time jobs, by the time I got home at 6 I was too pooped to do anything except sleep! I’ve had a couple of days this week to relax and watch numerous episodes of Gossip Girl, but I’m feeling motivated again now and I can’t wait to talk more beauty with all you lovely people.
