Warning - contains sentiments of a negative nature

I visited the British Museum last week - I felt rather like L.S.Lowry here, and was reminded of King Lear's famous line: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport". I love that I've caught a tiny moment in all of these people's unique lives - people I don't know and will never meet.  I particularly like the person standing alone at the front - why are they so still? What are they thinking about? (Originally I was made aware of this line from Hardy's Tess. Hardy loved the idea of fate being against us.  I love King Lear.  Apart from the eyeball bit).

Hello again!  I thought that in this post I would share my experience of how I finally knew that teaching wasn’t for me, and what I did to start planning for my change of career.  This isn’t going to be a happy post - it’s not about my general attitude to teaching, or what I loved about being in the classroom, just the reasons why I decided to leave; I’ve tried to be brutally honest about those feelings - hence the health warning above.

When I went back to school last autumn, I sensed that I didn’t feel quite as enthusiastic about my job as I had done formerly.  Each day I would go in feeling slightly tense about the day ahead, thinking of the tasks that had to be completed that week and the possible pitfalls I should avoid to eliminate challenging behaviour.  I had some lovely students across the years, and I was lucky enough to be given some very high ability classes, but I also had a handful of groups / students who just refused to play by the rules, disrupting the learning of the whole class.  For those classes, I really didn’t look forward to that one hour each day that I would be spending with them and sometimes I felt like a medieval knight running the gauntlet, fully prepared to do battle with anything that would pop up and disturb my smooth progress through the lesson.  Some people say that when you start to feel anxious about going to work, or your ‘joi de vivre’ becomes suppressed the night before you go in, then possibly that job’s not right for you anymore - and that’s how I was beginning to feel.

There were two things though that really stopped me from enjoying my job.  Firstly, I was overwhelmed by the volume of marking that I had to do.  English is a word-heavy subject, and when you have to teach two separate GCSEs - both Literature and Language - it doubles the amount of marking that you have.  Additionally, the school I was at had a policy of half-termly assessments for each class that you taught, and for these assessments you would have to do ‘deep dive’ marking which meant that for each student in your class you would have to mark their work for spelling, punctuation and grammar, give them an individual target, and then mark the rest of the work according to whatever was the marking criteria, again giving them a unique suggestion for improvement.  Both of these targets would then have to be completed in class by the student, and then you would go back and mark them to check that they had been done correctly. This can be a useful system for students, (although not always) however, if you do it properly, it just takes so long to do.  I was getting to the stage where every weekend I would bring home a class set of books or assessments and sit there on a Friday evening and Saturday just working my way through them.  Then, when the year 10 and 11 mock exams came up (two-three times a year) I was looking at marking every night and every weekend solid in order to get them done within the two-week deadline.  During mock exams I basically didn’t have a weekend off and it was extremely exhausting.  

In many ways marking can be really beneficial for teachers - you really get to know your students when you mark their work and you start to build a picture of their strengths and weaknesses.  It also informs you about how their learning is progressing and what you are doing as a teacher that is helping them to develop key skills. Sometimes it can be amusing too - if you have a bright class they can write some really interesting, original ideas and quite entertaining stories. For me though, I felt as if it was taking over my life.

Assessments and marking became an oppressive, looming cloud on the horizon - something that I knew would be stealing up on me with all the regularity of a chore that needed to be done, like housework - essential, but time-consuming and not always enjoyable. As a parent I do see the value of marking, but I felt that there had to be a better way of administering it for English teachers so that it didn't take up all of our time. Unfortunately the Senior Leadership Team at my school didn’t see it in quite the same way, and they could become very punitive if you didn’t administer it according to their rules - even to the extent of pedantically ‘telling you off’ if you didn’t do the marking in the correct colour of pen!

The second thing that really made me feel a bit disheartened about being a teacher was the general lack of praise and appreciation for the teaching profession.  Most teachers do actually care that their students do well, and most of them try their very best to create lively, engaging and well-considered lessons and resources.  Unfortunately, I felt that none of my hard work was appreciated.  There was a constant pressure on us as teachers to gain higher and higher marks all the time - what I call the ‘Persil effect’ (whereby every washing powder advert I grew up with in the 80s always promised that the latest version of the powder was much better than the previous one).  I felt that the target grades that students were given were often unrealistic; they would come into year 7 having been given a grade at Primary school, and yet when I tested them my professional judgement led me to believe that in the majority of cases these targets were above what they were actually capable of.  This meant that we were constantly trying to play ‘catch-up’ throughout the year, and always had to justify why our students were not getting the target marks that the school expected of them.  This put pressure on me as a teacher (and my colleagues) and on paper, made it look as if I wasn’t developing the students’ abilities.  This left me feeling negative - I felt that all I ever got was criticism; I never felt that I was a good teacher.  On top of this, the public perception of teachers and the education system are always being critically scrutinised in the media.  Sometimes I felt as if every morning when I turned on radio 4 on my way to work there would be yet another story about how either teachers, schools or the education system was failing its pupils. 

And the last thing that really bothered me was the change in the GCSE grading system from A - G grades to 9 - 1 grades.  My feelings on this topic would demand its own post so for the sake of succinctness: I felt inadequately prepared to enlighten my students about how to cope with the new GCSE system.  The exam board’s messages about what they wanted the students to do was inconsistent and consequently I felt that I was letting them down.  I didn’t feel confident in predicting what the year 11s would get yet I was constantly being asked to predict really high grades for them when I knew that the demands of the new GCSEs were much higher than previous specifications.  Again, I felt under pressure from the SLT to give my students unrealistic targets but at the same time the new exam specification meant that these students who, before may have been getting A* - B grades, would now be looking at lower grades.  It just wasn't fair for the students.

By about Christmas of last year I knew that my job wasn’t making me happy and I’d started to adopt a ‘devil may care’ attitude to authority - there were even some days when I didn’t force my students to write their responses in purple pen! When I look back on it now, I think I may have been experiencing some sort of stress-related condition.  I wasn’t depressed,  but I started to create a lot of ‘anti-establishment’ satirical posters that I would put up in the staffroom or the English office - this was my way of venting some of the frustration that I felt.  Perhaps this was cowardly, perhaps I should have joined a focus group or tried to get more influence on the school policy by moving up the career ladder, but I just felt jaded by the whole thing and I’d lost faith in the SLT at my school; I was also in danger of letting my rebellious attitude creep into my teaching - something I determined not to do. The only thing that kept me going in every day with a smile on my face and a constant drive to deliver good lessons was my students.  I decided that I would work out the year, get my lovely year 11s through their GCSEs, and then leave in the summer.

Next time: how I started to prepare to leave teaching.

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"Och, you know what Malcolmn, I feel really depressed now.  I'm not sure if I'll come back to this blog"

"Aye, I ken, but don't worry Dougal - I think she's got it off her chest and I'm sure that future posts will be much more positive."

The Lewis chessmen - my favourite things in the BM.  Actually before I go I must tell you a funny story about what happened to me when I went to the BM last week.  I never go anywhere without my Swiss army penknife - be prepared and all that.  At the moment, as the country is on heightened security alert, they are doing proper scans at the museums, complete with metal detectors. I knew I had my penknife in my bag but while thoughts of hiding it in my bra momentarily flashed through my brain!  I realised that would be really stupid, so I declared it.  They put it in a sandwich bag with a raffle ticket and then asked me to print my name on the receipt.  You should have seen the look on her face when I put down my surname - which is the most common Moslem surname there is - they thought they'd foiled a genuine terrorist!

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