Archive for 2014

The finish line approaches...

1.6.14 § 1 commentarius

Three weeks left!

Immortal gods above, but how sweet those words sound. The downside is that three weeks in secondary education is a very long time. Before half term I had a conversation with a colleague in which we were both trying to remember how long ago something had happened: we agreed that this impossibly remote event happened “back on Tuesday”. Reader, this discussion took place on Wednesday.

Before starting, I knew that the PGCE year would be tough (on thestudentroom.co.uk the thread for PGCE students is entitled “never felt so tired or stressed”- an exemplar of meiosis), but not quite this tough. They say that teaching is a marathon, not a sprint, and by god right now I feel like one of those desperately trailing along at the back of the London Marathon, wrapped in a tin-foil blanket, limping and waving feebly at the assembled spectators. Not a little of this is due to my second placement school, my time at which has been ‘challenging’, as the professional jargon has it[1]: on which more when I’ve properly had time to process what happened.

My first placement school, by contrast, was delightful. I suspect that had the order of the two placements been reversed, I would not feel quite so abused as I do now; but on the other hand, I probably would have dropped out of the course mid-October.

Nevertheless, I have only three weeks of placement left and (gods-willing) at the end of it, I will have amassed enough evidence to recommend me for Qualified Teacher Status and be all set to start my new job in September. Said job being in my first placement school: I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about the fact that come September I will be teaching Latin in a provincial boys’ grammar school.

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1) ‘Challenging’, said with the correct inflection, is one of the most useful words that I’ve acquired. For example, when applied to a pupil it can mean anything from “a bit talkative” to “full-blown, I cannot believe that this child has been released into society, furniture-chewing psychopathy.”