The quiet return of the Inner Voice? – part 2

DISCLAIMER: every single anecdote included in this blog post is real; every word, every event, every discussion herein reported. It has happened. Just because you’ve not witnessed it personally, it doesn’t mean it’s poppycock.

FURTHER DISCLAIMER: this post will contain swearing cause that’s how I roll. Don’t be a #snowflake.

The first (and possibly only) rule of the PGCE club: Understand that the road to QTS is paved with the bestest intentions, some awesome hoomans, and some sizeable dickheads.

Prologue

How to become a teacher in a few quick, ninja steps:

Decide that the adage ‘don’t work with children or animals’ doesn’t apply to you (FYI, there are no animals in teaching, unless your school has a school dog);
Get a 1^st Class degree in English and Creative Writing, but then realise that it’s quite possible that no one will want to learn English from an eyetie;
Further compound point no 2 by watching a really funny sketch in which Lauren ‘Am I bovvered’ Cooper takes the piss out of David ‘Dr Who’ Tennant for being Scottish and wanting to teach English;

Remind yourself that you were rubbish at anything scientific in school, so proceed to gain a 1^sT Class degree in Biomedical Science;
Apply for a School Direct PGCE in secondary chemistry;
Rejoice in getting offered a place on a School Direct PGCE in secondary chemistry;
Start the course in September 2017, full of hope, but actively consider suicide by April 2018 (not a joke).

The void – before the Inner Voice returned

I won’t offend anyone by saying that the suspension of my course brought immense suffering (and yes, I know there are people out there that are far worse off than me) but please allow me to tell you that it hurt. I had invested time, money, and pretty much the best part of my soul into something that yielded nothing. When the news became official, I went home to my daughters and told them what had happened; you know what they said to me? ‘But mamma, you always say that if you work really, really hard at something, you get it!’. And I had worked hard, and the outcome didn’t make sense.

I spent the days between April and July 2018 moving through all those ‘stages of grief’ that would normally apply to far worse events. The thing is, in case you might not know, when someone gives you lemons, day in and day out, for about four months, the lemonade you’re forced to make ends up overflowing and taking over your fridge, your kitchen, your house. It’s that simple: when you tell someone that they are shit regularly, they will believe they are shit.

The truth is that I was unsure where to go next, because I felt that I had lost my purpose. There is a rather famous Italian song that goes a bit like this: you get hit and it hurts, but what hurts most is the bruise left behind, because every time you bump into it, the hit is fresh again. And I have many bruises.

The quiet return of the Inner Voice – part 2

By the time July came around, I was missing the classroom. No, I was missing the idea of being in a classroom. My fellow trainees were embracing the summer; they had jobs waiting (albeit, not all of them, some had quit or caused a right kerfuffle during training, so had been discharged), their forms were ready, they had classrooms to prepare. I had none of that. I wallowed in the unfairness of it all, of going from mainly ‘outstanding’ to ‘at risk’ on every single standard; I felt like I was a shit teacher.

It’s those words, you see. ‘At risk’: they cut through you like a hot blade through butter. I was a trainee ‘at risk’; nothing redeemed me, not even my subject knowledge. I was tarnished and broken: ‘the black dog’ had returned, relentless, and I had nowhere to go. All the bad moments, all the panic attacks, all the hours of sleep lost kept playing on a loop in my head, but every so often, something different would push through…

Here are all the good things I was given during my failed placement:

I was free to go visit any school I wanted

That’s it. That’s the only and best thing that’s ever happened to me in the chaos of it all. At some point, probably from mid-February onwards, I was visiting a school a week. All sorts of schools: some I had applied for jobs at, some I hadn’t; big schools and small schools; comps and grammar schools; in fact, schools all over the country. (The truth is, I used to go to interviews for the sole purpose of getting some feedback that wasn’t soul-destroying; and guess what? I did get it. Every. Single. Fucking. Time)

And it was among all those visits, that this had happened ** (yep, that phone call at the very beginning of this story): the offer of my very own NQT post! I had to pull over to the emergency lane cause I couldn’t see the road for tears.

Here’s how it went.

I had applied for a job at a very famous school, and I do mean famous (yep, one of those ones). I had done my lesson, I had been highly praised for my lesson (hell yeah!), I had bagged the job. I had bagged the job against the odds of a, being at one of the lowest points ever in my life and b, being up against people with far more experience than me (you sceptics playing the expensive UPS card versus the cheaper NQT, I hear you, but I’m still gonna have it my way). ¹

There was one piece of feedback that I had taken away with me from that interview, but that I had buried somewhere very, very deep: ‘Ele, if I hadn’t known already, I would have never thought you were a trainee; you are a teacher through and through’. That started to shine like a beacon through all the dark moments. I latched onto it like poor Jack Dawson trying to hold on to that blasted door after the Titanic had gone down: if only I could hold on to the door long enough, and kick Rose off it, perhaps I could be saved.

(Beginning of the) Epilogue

I’m rebuilding, but it’s not easy. My mentor and I sit down for a meeting every Wednesday at dinner time (yes, they actually eat later so they can talk to me, and they don’t mind). And then they ask: how do you think your lesson went, Ele? And that’s where I get stuck. Even now, after restarting my PGCE with another provider (I could have retaken by failed placement, but no thank you!), after having a really decent half term, after being told that I’m doing really well, I always expect ‘the hit’. The scars run deep; I don’t wanna be a

drama llama, but…well, you’ve read part 1 already. The world is harsh enough without people putting you down.

To be continued…

¹ That school that offered me my first job has a legend at their helm. And yes, he’s male. I wouldn’t normally disclose gender, but he deserves it. When I finally managed to meet him, he was all I had imagined and more. His eyes twinkle when he speaks to you, he smiles a lot, and he’s just awesome all round. Personally, other than being a bit star struck, all I wanted to do was jump the desk and hug him; and he might have hugged back, cause you can bet your bottom dollar that’s the kind of guy he is. Highlight of my day was me forgetting my water bottle on the meeting room desk and him chasing after me saying I had forgotten my vodka. Sir, if you’re reading this, turning down your job offer was the second hardest thing I had to do during my failed PGCE; I heart you!

The Inner Voice – part 1

The Inner Voice – part 1

**On the 7^th March 2018, at around 16:10, I was driving back home from the south to the north of England, when I got a phone call.

‘Ele’, said the voice at the other end of the line, ‘it’s Jane, from the MAT’. Two minutes later, I pulled over in the emergency lane, hugged the steering wheel, and sobbed.

Rewind

September 2017 began pretty much with me sat in a university laboratory, together with nineteen trainee science teachers (one small chunk of a cohort of about 120); my speciality was chemistry (it’s not, not really, I’m a biology fiend, but hey ho). Within the first of three weeks in university, we were told that the course had the following expectations of us:

That we should be ‘outstanding’ practitioners by the end of the academic year
That we should attend every university session and stay for as long as required
That we should comply with all requests

Incidentally, within that very same first week, a former student had come to visit one of the science tutors, and I happened to be outside the tutor’s office. So, the former student and I had got talking about how they had dropped out of their PGCE the previous March, were now busy with a Masters degree, had reclaimed their life back, and were happier than ever.

That got me a bit worried, I’ll admit, but resilience is quite the mystery and we can’t just all be the same, right?

In any case, by the end of week three, there were Dewey, Rousseau, Freire, Vygotsky, the Goldilocks Principle, Bloom’s Taxonomy, Maslow, the learning pyramid, learning styles, starters, plenaries, differentiation, G&T, EAL, SEND, wider professional responsibilities, the teacher persona, teacher voice, teacher identity, discovery learning…

Further rewind

One thing about me that might help make sense of other things in this blog post:

I am on the spectrum (diagnosed as an adult, there was no such thing as autism in the early 80s, not in the Homeland anyway: it was called being a weirdo). This makes me a bit peculiar in some ways; for example:

– I need to know people’s full names; I don’t mind calling them by their preferred name, but I need to know their full name. When people don’t want to tell me their full name it gets a bit awkward;

– I don’t like noise; noise can get very loud very quickly, even small noise (I’m in the wrong job, right?) so I use headphones even when I don’t need them;

– I like routines, particularly where time is concerned; like, I need to start walking the dogs just before 10 am or I get panicky;

– I’m not very good with adults; I mean, I can handle myself, I’ve done that for a few decades now, and I can do all the polite things, but it’s quite exhausting. I need to be alone a lot.

Moving forward

Who gives a shit, right? I hear you, bear with.

During my secondary PGCE I did two placements: my first was in a SEND school, my review said I was outstanding or good, with one requires improvement in talking to parents. Believe it or not, I never had to make one of those phone calls home, and I always gave my children prizes for great work or great behaviour. Before leaving them at Christmas, I gave all of them cosy socks, and we hugged and cried together; one of the children, a year 9 boy, wore the socks every single day after. My heart swells at the thought!

My second placement was in the mainstream secondary comp right next door (for a while, us trainees from the same programme would call it ‘meanstream’). Small, barely 700 children on roll, judged ‘Good’ (don’t believe the hype) after years of ‘Requires improvement’ (believe the hype).

My mentor said that they would treat me as if that was my first placement because SEND schools are not ‘real teaching’. Erm, ok. I disagreed (true, some schools for SEMH children can follow a so-called ‘creative curriculum’, but not the one where I’d been; that had GCSEs and everything!) but something at the back of my head told me that I wasn’t allowed to disagree. Instead, I taught. Well, I tried to. It didn’t work out. This is some of the feedback I’ve received from my mentor across the weeks under their care:

Too much teacher talk
The lesson lacked pace and invited poor behaviour because of slower pace
You are giving the pupils too much information, you need to allow them to work it out for themselves

This was pretty much all the feedback I would receive, on a loop. On the plus side, I was once told that I had good subject knowledge (something biology related, I think).

I would cry my way into school, I would cry my way out of school; one day I cried my way during the best part of a year 9 lesson. My mentor never had time for me, or they didn’t wish to make time, perhaps; in all fairness, I’ve always felt they were far too busy to be a mentor: with a full timetable plus Head of Year, they were often overwhelmed with paperwork. I would get my feedback about a week later, and by that time it would be a bit redundant.

When April came around, after I had pleaded with university to help and no help had come, some sort of remediation was put in place, but it was too late. I hated teaching, I hated working with children, I wanted none of it. When I put in a complaint with university for pretty much leaving me to my own devices, I was told the following: sometimes, watching a trainee is like watching a car crash happen; you feel compelled to watch even though there’s nothing you can do to help. To this, my astonished voice had replied that, sure, I get it; but would you not call an ambulance, at the very least? I was met with silence.

One of the things that my mentor never did was get to know me. They really did not seem interested in any of that. When I used to cry they would say ‘it only gets worse once you have your classes’ or ‘you’re overthinking things’; I guess they thought those were meant to be helpful comments, but they weren’t really, not one bit. My hard work, my hard earned confidence, was reduced to rubble.

It was May 2018, and I was done. My Inner Voice, what I had left of it, was lost.