One more step along the world I go (or thank fuck that's over!!)

On Thursday I finished my PGCE studies, making me (almost) a qualified teacher (we're still waiting for our final essays to be marked, but fingers-crossed that'll go ok). The last few weeks of the course - done with school experience and back in university - passed in a contented blur: studying English teaching when you are the learner and not in charge of a class of bolshy teenagers is brilliant. I discovered an amazing new poem: Anything can happen, by Seamus Heaney, which, because finding poetry available for free online is a passion of mine, is here on pages 9-10 of this PDF if anyone is interested: (http://www.lannan.org/docs/seamus-heaney-031001-trans-read.pdf); I went to the BBC to make a hilarious short film involving brutally edited voxpops and stop-motion animation - that was FUN; I made up a play about the joys of reading with some really enthusiastic year 7s at London Nautical school; and worryingly, I signed myself up to go back to do a "Masters of Teaching" (I know, sounds lame) because, even though I've spent the whole year talking about how I just want some free time, I realised I wanted to keep reading about pedagogy and attending seminars with the lovely friends I've made.

As I've previously remarked, I like to see the barrenness of posts in this blog as the ultimate expression of student teacher life (ie frenetic and time-starved) rather than as symptomatic of my own laziness or disengagement with the internet, although maybe the truth is a bit of both: I clearly could have blogged more if I'd been motivated.

Over the last years I've blogged alot about living in different countries, so by contrast writing about living back in the UK seems a bit commonplace and devoid of novelty, although, as my friends will testify, in real life I never miss an opportunity to point out how things are done differently in Italy, whether the point is to criticise London, Berlusconi, the coalition, or just to show off or buy myself some time. (I remember interrupting a session with my first school mentor to explain that "In Italian, the word for homework is the same word you use for tests. You just say "tests at home" rather than "tests in class"." Neither I, nor he, could figure out what I was getting at, but at least it bought us some time away from assessment-for-learning or whatever else we were talking about).

However, writing this has reminded me of a post I really want to write about the awfulness of teaching job interviews, so expect that to come as I figure out what this blog is supposed to be/supposed to be about. In the meantime, I leave you with one of my favourite cultural signifiers...the poster I spotted in my boyfriend's kitchen on my first visit and which gave me the reassuring feeling that my mother, however thousands of miles away she was, would approve...