Lovely Lucy died today
Had first crit,
3x S (satisfactory)
1x U ( not achieved yet) i.e. unsatisfactory
Very fair - U on classroom management. ( quite frankly so miserable about dying dog would have had to be killing each other to raise me from stupor enough to invoke school's disciplinary procedure.) If I wanted to use system would have to find form . I have no idea where it is and teachers working in the school for last 3 years get a row from admin because they have submitted wrong part of form . Have to fill in for every individual's details including tutorial group ( how do I find this out? )and second name .I have taught them 3 times and only 3 of them have sat in the same place twice) I'm very proud I can remember their first names especially if they do not present a behavioural or learning difficulty. How many of the tear off sheets go to the office? What do I do with the the remainder?
Worried about about Cait .....Possibly Gifted& talented if this is the case mustbe bored out of her mind esp when I don't really know how to differentiate between her and I. A. and C working at level b/c reading & writing( Have asked for help from learning support- recommended using Comic Sans font on resources I am creating ,agreed green paper might help. C). Accessibility sheet in staff base says use true font like Arial 12 no mention of comic sans. I need much more than colour and font if I am going to differentiate succesfully.If was real teacher would ask ...
I,B,C,D,S ( Yr 1 & 3)to come for extra lunchtime lessons and involve learning support if they would agree. Don't have any 2s at this point .How many would this involve? Would I ever have lunch again? Positives = weight loss. Negatives = I might be rubbish with any class in the afternoon . Used to work many more hours but brain involved only 50% of time.
On positive side S (satisfactory)for lesson planning, professional knowledge and understanding, skills and abilities
However...
Am nearly 41. Used to be top dog at what I did. Now use spell check on lesson plans and don't notice when puts apostrophe on possessive determiners resulting in "hugelyimportant" having to correct it's in today's lesson plan.
27 year olds are so much better than me at this.They hold up their hand and the class fall silent.I didn't even have to hold my hand up week one and now I'm almost pleading for attention from kids only a year older than the boy wonder.
What went wrong? How do I fix it?
Am being paid nothing to be average. What If I'm always average at this?
Used to be paid well and was successful. In fact used to be well paid even when I was cr*p.Didn't like self much as a result. When was successful used to make extra money.Got to drive an AstonMartin DB5 ( and other sports cars - I can't even remember their names) round Silverstone,I stayed at Skibo castle where Madonna got married. I slept in fresh linen sheets every night for 5 nights in the Interalpen Hotel Austria, 700 count cotton in Gleneagles and the Old Course Hotel St.Andrews and in the top hotel in Barbados ( cant even remember name but great air conditioning), the Savoy in London (dirty), the Juan Carlos in Marbella (eurotrash) . The Lowry in Manchester (interesting art, bad carpets, turquoise fake leather chaise-longues in room)Somewhere posh in Prague ( luggage lost in Brussels) ditto Nice,Cannes, Fuertaventura, the Yak and Yeti Khatmandu ( gold taps pour muddy brown water after a 23 hour journey in a plane with a bright orange interior,Rogan Josh for breakfast and the most astonishingly beautiful air-hostesses you have ever seen.)Your luggage stays in Frankfort before going to Brussels for no apparent reason. You see a tiger and Everest and wash an elephant.You wear the same clothes every day for 5 days. Every where you go women and very thin children are building roads out of bricks while men watch and drink coke. There are adverts for cigarettes featuring children smoking with a strap line that your interpreter says translates as "smoke Malborough now, it's cool" He's a Benson and Hedges man himself .
You come home with aeomebic dysentery and campylobactar. You arrive in Heathrow at 06.45. Your boss who also has dysentery tells you she will be at her desk at 07.45 you have to get to Glasgow so she'll expect your business plan and last years ROI to be in by by 12.00 that day.
When was doing badly v.s target was there in black and white for the whole company to see every month. When did well target got raised.
Realised that luxury hotels charge companies a fortune for their staff to sleep in beds that are as almost as comfortable as their own.
Why am I talking about this? It was irrelevant until now. I thought it was embarrassing and worthless. I'm telling you this because I feel bad about myself. I'm trying to impress you. Is this why B,A and the others & brag about how much alcohol and hash they consume between Friday & Mondays ?
Cried after crit.
Not because of crit.
Crit very fair.
Cried because hadn't seen lovely Lucy last night or The Boy Wonder for 2 nights previous to crit because wonderful "justified and ancients "were taking care of his chickenpox while I got through mad week of "How can this possibly be my real life? -get me out of here" and was irresponsible parent of type I have learned to despise in last 10 weeks.
"Hugelyimportant " my tutor didn't think my lesson planning was awful. His comments have helped me decide to keep going. He was really encouraging. I believe that if I go back next week at least I'm not actually doing harm to these kids. The Localacademy regent who watched me yesterday was inspirational too. I will never forget that she said that a lesson can be more than a sum of its parts , it can be a work of art.
I said I was painting by numbers. She said it was great that I realised that.
She also told me that she's doing Headship training and had failed her first essay in 30 years. If she can learn new tricks so can I. It's only 20 years since I failed an essay and it was on the filioque and the schism between the Byzantine and Roman church and all the sources were in Greek ,Latin or medieval French. I rewrote it and got my first First. (I must need reassurance to even consider telling you this- it was never that important to me before now)
learning point - push them. They think they have done their absolute best- there is always more.
I've noticed that most of the teachers I admire are very self-critical. Every day the Hod criticises himself, every time i've seen Belladonacurls or the completegentleman teach they point out what they should have done better.
They keep coming in.
They don't get signed off sick with stress
They deal with disruption themselves without referring it to the HOD until it gets to level 4 or 5. Therefore not disturbing his lesson.
If you are out there and you teach, tell me ...
How do you balance self- critical with self destruction?
Can't sleep. When I close my eyes see lovely Lucy dead and cold.
I'm going to keep on learning.This is hard.I think a lot of the difficulty comes from my belief that teaching is important. For me selling medicine, even really good medicine isn't.
Blogging is wierd. Therapeutic... you type in your innermost thoughts. So much easier than writing, much less personal than the movement of soft lead over paper. Funny that it's easier than a diary , those keys separate it from you in a way that can't be achieved by handwriting. Freudian analysists will be made obsolete by this technology. We can write in our neuroses then look them up on wikipedia and save a fortune.If we burn cheap tobacco on a saucer and drape a shirt smelling of stale male sweat over our chair and record someone saying "our time is up That will be £75 , we accept visa "we will have a placebo controlled trial. I bet bloggers do better by a p value of 0.5% even with a Wilkoxian twin tailed test.
May stop blogging.
Am turning into tragic looser with wierd coincedences creating dramatic storyline. Also unnerved by kindness and occasional harshness of strangers. Blog this week was not constructive re teaching though must admit is great excuse right now not to do bedtime routine creating opportunity to get upset by Lucy's absence.
posted by willieloman at 1:38 am
4 Comments:
Please remain teaching, you're so passionate about it. Self critisism can be a good thing it pushes you to excel.
Sorry to hear about Lovely Lucy, things like that reinforce the transient nature of life, every second counts......use your time well....try to make a difference and other cliches. Cut yourself some slack, you did well in your crit.
One other thing, I know now isn't the right time but will you please consider at some point.........writing a novel :o)
Anastacia Beaverhousen
It is inevitable in any endeavour that there will be a stage where you think it is all being too hard and that you are rubbish. DON'T BELIEVE IT!
For example, I just managed to send that comment before I finished it!!
You spent how long thinking about going into teaching and researching it before applying? Why did you do the voluntary work you did with the young people all those years ago?
Why were you the biggest pain when I asked you to help me with my homework?
...Because you've always wanted to work with young people and get them as enthusiastic about learning as you are, as into books and literature as you are. You've always had a leaning towards teaching.
You've had a horrible week with rotten things happen and you have a right to be feeling sorry for yourself. Your crit isn't one of those horrible things. You did well -give yourself a break! You need to stop, take a few deep breaths, have a cup of tea and get things into perspective. So you can't silence a class by raising your arm. Ever thought that maybe they shut up because they're overcome by BO?! Seriously, remember one of your earlier learning points - don't copy another teacher's style of teaching. It'll be obvious that it's not natural to you. Be yourself... You're scary enough silence a class!! ;)
Re: the comic sans serif. I use this with several members of staff: comic works well because it looks like handwriting. The 'a' etc looks like a handwritten 'a' and so is easier to read, apparently. Pale green or yellow paper helps stop the letters jump about the page. You can also get opaque plastic sheets which the person can place over white paper to help. To be honest, using coloured paper makes resources look more appealing anyway...
Now - go and hug The Only Visible Means of Support and The Boy Wonder. Here endeth the lecture.
Hello, the artist formally (and erroneously) known as the gorgeous geek here but now going under the moniker 'the geek shall inherit the earth'.
Having read your last post I felt that I should reply.
Firstly, please allow me to say how sorry I was to hear about Lucy. She was a lovely dog and will be sorely missed - I always looked forward to seeing her when visiting and I found it strangely comforting that she seemed just as bemused by the willieloman household as myself.
Secondly, please don't give up on the teaching. I have to admit that I only understood a small percentage of the fine detail your post (in teaching terms I can take it, but I can't dish it out) but it sounds to me like you are doing well. In fact it seems like you are doing _incredibly_ well given everything else that was going on last week. Remember that a 'crit' is just that - a criticism that's designed to tell you how to move forward, it's not designed to knock you back.
You've seemed so happy and enthusiastic since you started your course and you really seem to love what you're doing. That's worth a hell of a lot in my book (which is, admittedly, a rather small one with little in the way of plot and a badly written denoument).
In many way it's worth remembering that your choice of WillieLoman as an identity was a poor one. From what I remember of my GCSE English (and I don't remember much because my teacher was a young graduate who could control the class with a single arm but couldn't inspire us) part of the tragedy of Willie Loman is that he lacks the self-awareness to realise his predicament and do something about it.
You've realised that you were doing a job you hated and you've had the bravery and resourcefulness to pursue your vocation. I can't tell you how proud this has made tallulahfred and myself and how much it makes us look forward to the future. Please don't think of giving up.
all my love
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