I thought maybe after a break, I might be feeling more positive about my job. Over Easter I was thinking maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to do another year of teaching. Well, I’ve just done my first week back at school after the Easter holidays, and I no longer think that.
To Do:
This week the head of department and I have been trying to get in all our year 11 coursework. I hate coursework so much. I wish it didn’t exist. It’s not even really an opportunity for lower achieving students to access more marks because just like in an exam, the clever students do well and the less clever ones don’t. For the most part what happens is, they each produce a half-arsed piece of work because “it’s only worth 10%” and in the mind of a 15 year old that’s not enough to make any difference, despite us telling them numerous times that if our calculations and predictions are correct, they need top band in order to get their target grade.
So, we break our backs trying to chase them to hand their work in, give detentions, contact home, send them emails and literally hunt them down at school, until eventually we receive the work and are able to mark the pieces of crap that they‘ve produced. We give them a ton of feedback which I then have to nag them to apply. They then do another half-arsed job of applying the feedback, so we have to go back to them again and tell them that they’re still not hitting their target grade and perhaps they should learn to read because they appear to have ignored the exemplars we've uploaded, the help sheets we created and the extensive written notes they were given on their previous draft. We then have to nag them again to get them to apply the new feedback, and this process is repeated until every student has something that resembles a respectable piece of work, which we then have to mark again and grade. I then also have the same thing with year 13, who apparently haven’t learned from their GCSE experience.
Then, there’s the reports. So many damn reports. We have to grade each year 7 on their effort, their behaviour and their progress. If you’re a parent and you’re wondering why your child got a B2 in Drama when he or she has been working really hard doing extra practice outside of lessons and always displays exemplary behaviour, it’s because I teach 180 year 7s, and unless they’re a pain in the arse or a teachers pet I don’t know who they are and therefore they’re a B2. Unprofessional? Yes. A waste of everyone’s time? Yes. I hear you, it’s not good from me, and I wish I had the time to really put a lot of thought into it. But I have GCSE and A Level marking coming out of my ears, I’m currently dealing with a student who is self-harming and I have urgent paperwork I need to do regarding a trip that’s coming up. Then there’s the lesson planning, the changing all the seating plans and groups because it’s a new term and if I don’t do it they all go absolutely crazy, the certificates I need to make for assembly on Friday. I won’t go through my entire to do list because I’m already boring myself. Back to the point, sorry babes but I haven’t got time to look up who your kid is - if I don’t know then they’re probably a B2.
Surviving Year 8. Or not.
Lastly, I’d like to leave you with a little anecdote from a year 8 lesson, which I feel represents what teaching all of KS3 is like at the minute. We got in, and they all sat in a circle in register order, bar one child who purposefully sat next to his friends, despite knowing full well that I always check and I always give detentions if they’re in the wrong place. Great.
We started with a pairs task, and I clearly stated that they have to work with the person next to them in the circle, so immediately the whole class got up and went to find their mates. Again, annoying but I addressed it and we wasted time while they went back to where they were supposed to be. Then, one of the year 11s who took Drama 2 years ago and hated it, has got some sort of sadistic vendetta against me, and decided he’d wait until I’d just got them all silent before he slammed open my door as he walked down the corridor. I tried to catch him, but as I was calling him he literally strolled off, ignoring me completely with a smirk on his face, and I couldn’t chase him because I had a whole class of feral year 8s waiting for me to come back. Of course, they couldn’t cope with this, and I had to spend another 5 minutes getting them to listen again.
I put them into their new groups and they all loudly declared that they hate the people I’ve put them with and that they’re not working in these groups because it’s so unfair. This is literally five seconds after I told them to be kind and considerate of other people’s feelings, and that I won’t tolerate negativity towards other people in the class. Fab, they’re all still seriously lacking in social skills.
Then, I was working with a group on their role play when I was suddenly interrupted by an eruption of cheering, chanting and chaos. I turned around to see two students having an arm wrestle, and the rest of the class crowding round them, cheering on their chosen opponent. I angrily strode over there and the class suddenly dispersed back into their groups, and the arm wrestling opponents assured me that it was “part of the play” despite the fact they’re not even in the same freaking group. I gave them a detention for disrupting the class and for then lying to me, which they disputed.
The Grand Finale
I stopped the class a minimum of 5 more times to tell them to stop leaving their groups to have a chat with their mates and do some work. During the final rehearsal, a student threw his entire bottle of water over an innocent girl in his group. I added him to my list of detentions. I finally saw some work at the end of the lesson, and it was a piece of trash that they had conjured up within 10 seconds because they’d been too busy pratting about to do anything half decent, and I tell them all it’s not good enough before they leave having achieved virtually nothing. Oh and in case you’re wondering, no, none of them showed up for their detentions at lunch time.
I appreciate that some teachers will be reading this thinking “pffft! That’s nothing! You want to try working at an underprivileged school if you think that’s bad!” And I appreciate that, I do. I know I’m “lucky” if that’s the kind of “bad behaviour” I have to deal with. But I’m not interested! I don’t want to do it. There is absolutely no part of me that gets enjoyment out of teaching a lesson where students go out of their way to go against my instructions, collect detentions like they’re trophies, learn absolutely jack all and leave me feeling drained, disrespected and like a failure. If you find that rewarding then hats off to you, because I find it soul destroying. I can't do this anymore. This is not making me happy. I know I'm a great teacher (most of the time, I appreciate my account of this lesson isn't really reflecting that), but I need to put myself first. I need to think about doing something else.
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