Yesterday a recruitment consultant from Hays Education called me on my mobile (I'd clearly filled in a form at one of the job-hunting events they've been organising for teacher-trainees recently). Once he'd established who I was and done all the cheery-cheery stuff recruitment people get trained in, he hit me with "So, Mary, you're coming to the end of your PGCE now..."
"Am I???" was my first response, or as I replied to him "I wish that was true."
But it's now the Easter holidays (well, I have university all day tomorrow and friday and a tutorial about an essay on tuesday. But at this point, uni work SEEMS like holidays. Anyone stressing about essays and research, go and spend a few hours in front of a group of 30 15-year-olds who WILL NOT listen to you and are more interested in disrespecting you, more or less openly, while you try to figure out how to react. It'll give you a new-found love for studying) and ahead is only another half term of school plus a month of uni-based finishing off. So the worst is definitely behind me.
And, you may point out, it's NOW that I find the time to update my student teacher blog with its 4th post??! I know...ridiculous. But maybe my silence is most indicative of the true student teacher experience - one of utter, overwhelming, time-consuming, workload.
Before starting the course everyone told me, over and over again, what hard work it was and how difficult...to the point that I eventually got fed up and started protesting "I really don't understand how it can be THAT hard, I mean, what can they possibly ask you to do?"
At this point in the course, I can finally reveal the truth: they just ask you to write minutely detailed lesson plans with boxes to fill in about how you are going to differentiate the lesson for stronger/weaker/different children. One of those for every lesson that you teach, so 2 or 3 a day, combined with the actual lesson preparation, refreshing your memory of your subject, marking 31 near-identical essays and trying to write fair, positive, and encouraging comments on them AND constructive, realistic, comprehensible targets...is enough to ensure that as well as spending 8am - 4.30pm-ish at school everyday, you have another 3 or so hours to do every evening when you get back, and then fall into bed exhausted because your alarm will be sounding at 6.20am.
This does not require super-human strength by any means (I have a friend who works in the city who I know works twelve hour days in the office extremely regularly). But factor in the psychological stress of being a student teacher and you start to get a real picture of the difficulties. The constant demands that you evaluate your own practice and identify areas for improvement (adding to the insecurities of many students who, like me, are self-critical enough without help!); the pressure of being observed regularly by experienced teachers, always with an eye for what you could do differently/better; the self-doubt that gnaws away after even the most tranquil of lessons - am I doing this right? did the kids really learn anything from that? what does learning actually mean, anyway? does anyone ever really learn anything? what is knowledge? what will the function of the school be in post-apocalyptic society? etc - and worst of all, the utter hell of the bad lessons, when the kids will not shut up no matter what you do and when you have revelations like "I'M the teacher we all used to moan about and say he/she "just shouldn't" try to be in charge of a class because he/she clearly can't take the pressure".
I don't think I've ever done anything where I have felt so supremely incompetent for so much of the time. The temptation, while filling in the "what I need to improve for next time" box on the lesson-self-evaluation form for what feels like the 3,455,785 time, to fling down the pen and proclaim "Fine, I'm clearly not doing well at this, so I'm just going to go and get a job that I'll definitely be good at, like maybe filing," is very strong.
This far, I've resisted...:-)
