I've spent a fair amount of my adult life job hunting. I'm had a good few job interviews. Without a doubt my favourites were English teacher job interviews in Rome - the schools tended to be directed by expats so most of the interview was spent chatting. "Where are you from?" "What brings you to Rome?" etc. At my old school, the director, who was a fabulous boss and is still a friend, asked me if I wanted to be called by my full name, Mary Jane, and when I said no, was relieved. "Oh, thank goodness, because you know, I didn't want to say but that's the nickname I've always used for...down there." The lady parts!! I laughed, wondering if it was some kind of psychometric interview test. No, as it turned out, it was just hilarious. I got the job and worked there happily for 2 years.
Finding a teaching job in the UK was not quite so much fun. When our PGCE tutors explained how the application and interview process worked, I couldn't quite believe it. You have to fill in a long, boring application form. You have to tailor your personal statement/cover letter to show explicitly how you meet all the job specification criteria...and there can be ALOT of them, and they can be as soul-destroying as "knows how to use assessment data to drive up performance in the school". And then you go to the interview, and it's NOT just an interview. You have to teach a trial lesson. To a class of pupils you don't know. On a subject not of your own choice. While being observed by any members of the interview panel/senior management team who feel like it. ARRRRGHHHHH!!! I said right then and there that that was it, I didn't want a job after all.
Existential crises and adolescent petulance were eventually dominated by financial pressure and I caved in and started the long hours in front of my laptop, writing job applications (sometimes with tears literally streaming down my face, as my boyfriend can testify). The repetitiveness, the boredom: every school has its own form, often formatted really BADLY, and if you have 7 years of work history to cram in you end up spending alot of time copying and pasting. I've said it once, and I'll say it again: don't bother with interesting life experience, guys, it just makes form-filling take so much longer. (The personnel officer at my new school agrees with me - she called the other day to say my Criminal Records Bureau check form is "too long - why are there all these addresses?" I was like "well, I was going to leave some out but then I realised it would be falsifying an official document". It's not just a list: it's my life!)
Anyway, eventually a few of those forms came good and I had a total of 3 job interviews before being offered one. So here, for posterity, for the record and, hopefully, for comedy value, I will give an overall precis of my experiences.
Teaching Job Interviews, an idiot's guide: the routine
1) get dressed. This is hard - schools are mostly (until Gove interferes further - the kids already have to dress as if they're presenting to the board every single day) somewhat less smart than a corporate environment. Guys at teaching job interviews go for suits and ties, but as a girl you don't necessarily need a suit jacket. I've seen other girls in things like coloured tights and nail varnish, but I tried to go a bit blander than that. You have to balance dressing to impress with knowing you'll have to give a lesson to unknown teenagers in that outfit - so necklines and hemlines absolutely must be modest and attention-deflecting: Personally I like to give teenage boys as little masturbation-fodder as possible...that's what the internet's for, right?!
2) turn up on time. Since schools start so ridiculously early (generally 8.30am - I'm sure 9 was more normal when I was a child) you will probably have to leave your house shortly after 7. One of the times on the PGCE course where I most felt like I was losing it was in front of the computer one morning at 6.45, trying to choose articles to use at the following day's job interview so I could prepare the lesson during that day's job interview, which experience had taught me would involve alot of waiting around (consecutive interviews = rubbish, especially because teaching interviews do take a WHOLE day), being unable to make a thoughtful decision because it was too early in the morning and my stress levels were too high, and dissolving into tears. Bad times.
3) scope out the competition. I bumped into tons of other students from my university on every occasion, which could be awkward and competitive but I prefer to focus on socialising and friend-making. Chances are, you'll spend a fair amount of time hanging around in a waiting room with these people. It'll be less painful if you get on. I met several incredibly cool people and had some (borderline hysterical) laughs in interview waiting rooms.
4) tour of the school...I had one tour from the head of english which was terrible - we were all trying to ask intelligent questions and impress her. A tour from kids is less pressure, but of course you get specially prepped kids who will answer all your questions by telling you how much they love the school and how there's no bullying there. On one tour I was on, one of the other candidates escaped in the music block and serenaded us with some amazing piano playing - I don't think it impressed the deputy showing us around, but personally I would have given him a job on the spot.
5) trial lesson. Undoubtedly the most stressful part of the whole business - ok, so the interview part is no walk in the park, but at least YOU are in control of what you say. Working with 20+ kids is another thing altogether. I must say, though, that in general the schools do give you nice kids with no major behaviour problems, and having senior staff in the room observing you can only help with their behaviour. Other interview candidates have told me horror stories about kids swearing and throwing things even during an observation from the headteacher, but I guess that's indicative of the school atmosphere in general. My worst experience was when the school had picked just one group for ALL the trial lessons that day, rather than moving them around. I was the seventh of eight candidates to go in and teach the same children who'd been sitting in the classroom for more than 2 hours...poor things! the boredom and restlessness was tangible.
Schools tell you what your lesson needs to be on. Some are massively anal about it ("choose one assessment focus from the Assessing Pupils' Progress grid...") and some are relaxed ("A 20-minute Outstanding lesson on any aspect of English you want"). I found the latter actually more difficult, mostly because I thought I would be judged on my choice of material as well as my teaching...in the end I went for a poem.
Just remember the golden rule - your USB stick WILL NOT WORK! or even if it does, the video you wanted to play to be all fun and get the kids on-side will not work. And while trying to get it to play you'll probably press the "help" button that summons an ICT technician to the classroom, because that's how these things go...I wondered why all the kids were sniggering to themselves. In my second trial lesson I felt so rushed and harrassed that I opted to go old-school and not bother with the PowerPoint at all, and I felt like it was worth it just for the look of surprise on the other teacher and the kids' faces.
It's much easier when you can address kids by name so giving out name labels for them to fill in is a good way to start. The awful thing is you know you're being judged on your "ability to relate to teenagers", so you have to do lots of bending down to talk to individuals, which is fine with your own class but with children who don't even know you and who you are with for 20 minutes...seems really uncomfortable and forced. Just do it. Similarly, you feel pressure to smile and laugh alot even when things are not going your way or your stupid video will not play. You want the observers to see energy and enthusiasm...so again, just do it.
6) you stumble out and, if you're lucky, it's time for lunch. One school provided no lunch and said we were free to go out and buy overpriced sandwiches from coffee chains. The other two provided bog-standard sandwiches from the canteen, but at least they were free. None of the schools I interviewed at asked us to eat in the canteen with staff or pupils but I imagine a lot do - but trying to eat and interact with children at the same time would be HARD. And, you know, unhygienic, I think kids' school blazers are probably the single most bacteria-harbouring item in the modern wardrobe.
7) interview time! you're so relieved at having survived the trial lesson (and, if you managed to do your plenary you'll be ecstatic) that you're relatively relaxed. But try to remember you're still aiming to make a good impression. In my first (unsuccessful, needless to say) interview they asked me "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" and I responded with "I'd like to have friends on the staff." Apparently you're supposed to talk about your ambitions or something...whatevs, my sights were firmly set on having someone to bitch to about the management. It's good to ask questions about the school and, in fact, these interviews were the first when I felt like I genuinely had questions I wanted answered - about departmental structure, set texts, teacher choice - whereas usually it's a matter of frantically racking your brains so as not to seem apathetic. However many you ask, though, you'll always realise afterwards you've forgotten that crucial detail.
8) get out! Escape, breathe a sigh of relief, go home and fret. Teaching interviews are different from normal jobs - they generally decide then and there and tell the successful candidate that evening. To make matters worse, it's bad form not to accept instantly - you can ask for a bit of time, but more than a day or two is stretching it - and you're then not allowed to change your mind and back out of a job offer, because it would cost the school alot of money and you could be blacklisted by the local authority. (Well, nowadays there's alot of Academies around who are outside local authority control...but apparently really pissed off and vindictive headteachers have been known to call other schools with vacancies and badmouth you - nightmare).
Teaching interviews: they seem like an unsurmountable problem, but I managed to be offered a job, so, you know...maybe the standard's not actually that high. ;-)
Tuesday, 28 June 2011
Sunday, 26 June 2011
One more step along the world I go (or thank fuck that's over!!)
On Thursday I finished my PGCE studies, making me (almost) a qualified teacher (we're still waiting for our final essays to be marked, but fingers-crossed that'll go ok). The last few weeks of the course - done with school experience and back in university - passed in a contented blur: studying English teaching when you are the learner and not in charge of a class of bolshy teenagers is brilliant. I discovered an amazing new poem: Anything can happen, by Seamus Heaney, which, because finding poetry available for free online is a passion of mine, is here on pages 9-10 of this PDF if anyone is interested: (http://www.lannan.org/docs/seamus-heaney-031001-trans-read.pdf); I went to the BBC to make a hilarious short film involving brutally edited voxpops and stop-motion animation - that was FUN; I made up a play about the joys of reading with some really enthusiastic year 7s at London Nautical school; and worryingly, I signed myself up to go back to do a "Masters of Teaching" (I know, sounds lame) because, even though I've spent the whole year talking about how I just want some free time, I realised I wanted to keep reading about pedagogy and attending seminars with the lovely friends I've made.
As I've previously remarked, I like to see the barrenness of posts in this blog as the ultimate expression of student teacher life (ie frenetic and time-starved) rather than as symptomatic of my own laziness or disengagement with the internet, although maybe the truth is a bit of both: I clearly could have blogged more if I'd been motivated.
Over the last years I've blogged alot about living in different countries, so by contrast writing about living back in the UK seems a bit commonplace and devoid of novelty, although, as my friends will testify, in real life I never miss an opportunity to point out how things are done differently in Italy, whether the point is to criticise London, Berlusconi, the coalition, or just to show off or buy myself some time. (I remember interrupting a session with my first school mentor to explain that "In Italian, the word for homework is the same word you use for tests. You just say "tests at home" rather than "tests in class"." Neither I, nor he, could figure out what I was getting at, but at least it bought us some time away from assessment-for-learning or whatever else we were talking about).
However, writing this has reminded me of a post I really want to write about the awfulness of teaching job interviews, so expect that to come as I figure out what this blog is supposed to be/supposed to be about. In the meantime, I leave you with one of my favourite cultural signifiers...the poster I spotted in my boyfriend's kitchen on my first visit and which gave me the reassuring feeling that my mother, however thousands of miles away she was, would approve...
As I've previously remarked, I like to see the barrenness of posts in this blog as the ultimate expression of student teacher life (ie frenetic and time-starved) rather than as symptomatic of my own laziness or disengagement with the internet, although maybe the truth is a bit of both: I clearly could have blogged more if I'd been motivated.
Over the last years I've blogged alot about living in different countries, so by contrast writing about living back in the UK seems a bit commonplace and devoid of novelty, although, as my friends will testify, in real life I never miss an opportunity to point out how things are done differently in Italy, whether the point is to criticise London, Berlusconi, the coalition, or just to show off or buy myself some time. (I remember interrupting a session with my first school mentor to explain that "In Italian, the word for homework is the same word you use for tests. You just say "tests at home" rather than "tests in class"." Neither I, nor he, could figure out what I was getting at, but at least it bought us some time away from assessment-for-learning or whatever else we were talking about).
However, writing this has reminded me of a post I really want to write about the awfulness of teaching job interviews, so expect that to come as I figure out what this blog is supposed to be/supposed to be about. In the meantime, I leave you with one of my favourite cultural signifiers...the poster I spotted in my boyfriend's kitchen on my first visit and which gave me the reassuring feeling that my mother, however thousands of miles away she was, would approve...
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
Demystifying the exigencies of the PGCE...
Yesterday a recruitment consultant from Hays Education called me on my mobile (I'd clearly filled in a form at one of the job-hunting events they've been organising for teacher-trainees recently). Once he'd established who I was and done all the cheery-cheery stuff recruitment people get trained in, he hit me with "So, Mary, you're coming to the end of your PGCE now..."
"Am I???" was my first response, or as I replied to him "I wish that was true."
But it's now the Easter holidays (well, I have university all day tomorrow and friday and a tutorial about an essay on tuesday. But at this point, uni work SEEMS like holidays. Anyone stressing about essays and research, go and spend a few hours in front of a group of 30 15-year-olds who WILL NOT listen to you and are more interested in disrespecting you, more or less openly, while you try to figure out how to react. It'll give you a new-found love for studying) and ahead is only another half term of school plus a month of uni-based finishing off. So the worst is definitely behind me.
And, you may point out, it's NOW that I find the time to update my student teacher blog with its 4th post??! I know...ridiculous. But maybe my silence is most indicative of the true student teacher experience - one of utter, overwhelming, time-consuming, workload.
Before starting the course everyone told me, over and over again, what hard work it was and how difficult...to the point that I eventually got fed up and started protesting "I really don't understand how it can be THAT hard, I mean, what can they possibly ask you to do?"
At this point in the course, I can finally reveal the truth: they just ask you to write minutely detailed lesson plans with boxes to fill in about how you are going to differentiate the lesson for stronger/weaker/different children. One of those for every lesson that you teach, so 2 or 3 a day, combined with the actual lesson preparation, refreshing your memory of your subject, marking 31 near-identical essays and trying to write fair, positive, and encouraging comments on them AND constructive, realistic, comprehensible targets...is enough to ensure that as well as spending 8am - 4.30pm-ish at school everyday, you have another 3 or so hours to do every evening when you get back, and then fall into bed exhausted because your alarm will be sounding at 6.20am.
This does not require super-human strength by any means (I have a friend who works in the city who I know works twelve hour days in the office extremely regularly). But factor in the psychological stress of being a student teacher and you start to get a real picture of the difficulties. The constant demands that you evaluate your own practice and identify areas for improvement (adding to the insecurities of many students who, like me, are self-critical enough without help!); the pressure of being observed regularly by experienced teachers, always with an eye for what you could do differently/better; the self-doubt that gnaws away after even the most tranquil of lessons - am I doing this right? did the kids really learn anything from that? what does learning actually mean, anyway? does anyone ever really learn anything? what is knowledge? what will the function of the school be in post-apocalyptic society? etc - and worst of all, the utter hell of the bad lessons, when the kids will not shut up no matter what you do and when you have revelations like "I'M the teacher we all used to moan about and say he/she "just shouldn't" try to be in charge of a class because he/she clearly can't take the pressure".
I don't think I've ever done anything where I have felt so supremely incompetent for so much of the time. The temptation, while filling in the "what I need to improve for next time" box on the lesson-self-evaluation form for what feels like the 3,455,785 time, to fling down the pen and proclaim "Fine, I'm clearly not doing well at this, so I'm just going to go and get a job that I'll definitely be good at, like maybe filing," is very strong.
This far, I've resisted...:-)
"Am I???" was my first response, or as I replied to him "I wish that was true."
But it's now the Easter holidays (well, I have university all day tomorrow and friday and a tutorial about an essay on tuesday. But at this point, uni work SEEMS like holidays. Anyone stressing about essays and research, go and spend a few hours in front of a group of 30 15-year-olds who WILL NOT listen to you and are more interested in disrespecting you, more or less openly, while you try to figure out how to react. It'll give you a new-found love for studying) and ahead is only another half term of school plus a month of uni-based finishing off. So the worst is definitely behind me.
And, you may point out, it's NOW that I find the time to update my student teacher blog with its 4th post??! I know...ridiculous. But maybe my silence is most indicative of the true student teacher experience - one of utter, overwhelming, time-consuming, workload.
Before starting the course everyone told me, over and over again, what hard work it was and how difficult...to the point that I eventually got fed up and started protesting "I really don't understand how it can be THAT hard, I mean, what can they possibly ask you to do?"
At this point in the course, I can finally reveal the truth: they just ask you to write minutely detailed lesson plans with boxes to fill in about how you are going to differentiate the lesson for stronger/weaker/different children. One of those for every lesson that you teach, so 2 or 3 a day, combined with the actual lesson preparation, refreshing your memory of your subject, marking 31 near-identical essays and trying to write fair, positive, and encouraging comments on them AND constructive, realistic, comprehensible targets...is enough to ensure that as well as spending 8am - 4.30pm-ish at school everyday, you have another 3 or so hours to do every evening when you get back, and then fall into bed exhausted because your alarm will be sounding at 6.20am.
This does not require super-human strength by any means (I have a friend who works in the city who I know works twelve hour days in the office extremely regularly). But factor in the psychological stress of being a student teacher and you start to get a real picture of the difficulties. The constant demands that you evaluate your own practice and identify areas for improvement (adding to the insecurities of many students who, like me, are self-critical enough without help!); the pressure of being observed regularly by experienced teachers, always with an eye for what you could do differently/better; the self-doubt that gnaws away after even the most tranquil of lessons - am I doing this right? did the kids really learn anything from that? what does learning actually mean, anyway? does anyone ever really learn anything? what is knowledge? what will the function of the school be in post-apocalyptic society? etc - and worst of all, the utter hell of the bad lessons, when the kids will not shut up no matter what you do and when you have revelations like "I'M the teacher we all used to moan about and say he/she "just shouldn't" try to be in charge of a class because he/she clearly can't take the pressure".
I don't think I've ever done anything where I have felt so supremely incompetent for so much of the time. The temptation, while filling in the "what I need to improve for next time" box on the lesson-self-evaluation form for what feels like the 3,455,785 time, to fling down the pen and proclaim "Fine, I'm clearly not doing well at this, so I'm just going to go and get a job that I'll definitely be good at, like maybe filing," is very strong.
This far, I've resisted...:-)
Saturday, 9 October 2010
On internet privacy
At university, one of the pervasive themes in talks from teacher trainers, union representatives and other students has been the disasters that can be caused by computers. The horror stories range from the student teacher who somehow "inexplicably" got soft-porn pictures mixed up with the slides in his powerpoint presentation which he then showed to a class of year 10s - he was sacked from the placement, despite allegedly being innocent (personally I'm skeptical that some kind of malicious and intelligent computer virus could have got into his computer, downloaded picures of boobs, and inserted them into his presentation without him noticing...but hey) to the teachers who had a not-private-enough Facebook bitching session about a pupil they didn't like, which was discovered by the pupil who then took them to the cleaners for cyber-bullying.
Facebook/Myspace/social networking didn't exist when I was at school, and when I think about it I'm really bloody glad about that. I didn't always have the best of times at secondary school, and if the teenage-girl-bitching had been taken to the realms of the internet it would have been much worse. It was bad enough putting up with it from 9-3.30...But now I'm an adult, anyway, so the question is: are teenagers REALLY that concerned about looking up their teachers online, or is this all just teacher-training egocentrism, paranoia and navel-gazing??
So a common topic of conversation among us student teachers has been how to ensure our internet privacy from web-savvy students: "Have you tried googling your name??" has been a pervasive question. I personally have the excellent protection of an exceptionally common firstname-surname combination: thanks Mum - I'll never whinge about your unimaginative naming techniques again. There's a horse-rider, a street and a voice-coach in the first page of results and absolutely nothing to do with ME. Still, I've heard too many horror-stories to let my guard down immediately. This very blog could potentially get me into a lot of trouble. As a result, I took my surname off it recently, but I don't know how much good that would do as I have a whole other blog that goes by my full name - intentionally, as that's where I put my published writing work (such as it is, don't get overexcited). But when the broadsheets come looking for me to offer me that column, I want them to know where to find me...
Facebook privacy has dominated so many conversations that it's starting to feel like the whole thing is more trouble than it's worth, so I'm considering just deleting my profile.
Reasons to delete: less hassle messing around with privacy settings/stressing about tags in photos/hiding my face, celeb-wise, whenever a camera appears at a party!
Reasons I like FB: when I was living abroad, it made me feel alot closer and more up-to-date with my friends back home: I knew what was going on, when big things had happened to them, I saw photos of what they were up to. Now I'm here but in a long distance relationship, it enables me to make gestures like the photo-story I made for my boyfriend on our anniversary. I get invited to parties and festivals and events that I might otherwise miss out on. Some friends/acquaintances I don't really talk to regularly but I like knowing what their up to from FB.
OK, I've now effectively argued myself out of the deleting idea, so I guess I'll be sitting in my room fiddling with privacy settings for the rest of the day. If anyone reading this has any insights about internet privacy etc, please comment! (under your real name or a pseudonym, as you prefer...;-)
Facebook/Myspace/social networking didn't exist when I was at school, and when I think about it I'm really bloody glad about that. I didn't always have the best of times at secondary school, and if the teenage-girl-bitching had been taken to the realms of the internet it would have been much worse. It was bad enough putting up with it from 9-3.30...But now I'm an adult, anyway, so the question is: are teenagers REALLY that concerned about looking up their teachers online, or is this all just teacher-training egocentrism, paranoia and navel-gazing??
So a common topic of conversation among us student teachers has been how to ensure our internet privacy from web-savvy students: "Have you tried googling your name??" has been a pervasive question. I personally have the excellent protection of an exceptionally common firstname-surname combination: thanks Mum - I'll never whinge about your unimaginative naming techniques again. There's a horse-rider, a street and a voice-coach in the first page of results and absolutely nothing to do with ME. Still, I've heard too many horror-stories to let my guard down immediately. This very blog could potentially get me into a lot of trouble. As a result, I took my surname off it recently, but I don't know how much good that would do as I have a whole other blog that goes by my full name - intentionally, as that's where I put my published writing work (such as it is, don't get overexcited). But when the broadsheets come looking for me to offer me that column, I want them to know where to find me...
Facebook privacy has dominated so many conversations that it's starting to feel like the whole thing is more trouble than it's worth, so I'm considering just deleting my profile.
Reasons to delete: less hassle messing around with privacy settings/stressing about tags in photos/hiding my face, celeb-wise, whenever a camera appears at a party!
Reasons I like FB: when I was living abroad, it made me feel alot closer and more up-to-date with my friends back home: I knew what was going on, when big things had happened to them, I saw photos of what they were up to. Now I'm here but in a long distance relationship, it enables me to make gestures like the photo-story I made for my boyfriend on our anniversary. I get invited to parties and festivals and events that I might otherwise miss out on. Some friends/acquaintances I don't really talk to regularly but I like knowing what their up to from FB.
OK, I've now effectively argued myself out of the deleting idea, so I guess I'll be sitting in my room fiddling with privacy settings for the rest of the day. If anyone reading this has any insights about internet privacy etc, please comment! (under your real name or a pseudonym, as you prefer...;-)
Monday, 27 September 2010
No drama
Despite promises of a manic workload, so far this induction period of our PGCE course has been relatively tranquil. Witness the fact that today I'm at home for a day of private study.
Given that I knew I would be having an extended weekend, I felt more enthusiastic about signing my Saturday away for a London Drama training day - a day of workshops from different drama teaching experts about becoming an effective drama teacher. We had to pay (£10) and everything. I signed myself up online before I had second thoughts.
My readers might be thinking "but hang on, you are not, in fact, training to be a drama teacher, but an english teacher." You're right...but we were invited to this event just the same - obviously there's a certain amount of overlap with English and drama - and it's something that makes lessons more fun. Plus I'd written in my self-evaluation at the beginning of the course that I wanted to learn more about using drama techniques in the classroom. So...it seemed like a good idea at the time.
On arrival, my first thought was..."oh, shit, I've made a big mistake." I didn't see anybody I knew from my course (the event was open to PGCE students from all the unis in the London and south east region) and everyone just seemed so...drama-ey. The crowd was noticeably different from how a crowd of English students would have been. Thespy, as we used to say at university. All the girls were dressed trendily and sitting in ballet-warm-up-type poses. All the boys were wearing funky hats. Speaking voices were LOUD: all the elocution coaching paying off. Hand gestures were expansive and theatrical.
The first workshop involved us pairing up and improvising dialogues, constantly changing partners as the scenario we were working with was made more complicated. "Help!" I inwardly panicked, "What if I'm not capable of being all creative like these well-trained drama types?" It didn't help that the first person I talked to was from the Central School of Speech and Drama. When I asked what she did and why she was doing the PGCE, she replied "well, I'm an actress." Since she was signed up for teacher training, I considered pointing out that the acting career clearly hadn't been working out so well for her, but managed to restrain myself. And, as the session got going, I also found that I was just about managing to keep up with the others, improvising a prison-fight dialogue with the best of them. Although I was temporarily flummoxed when, after changing pairs, my new partner cut me off when I went to introduce myself, snapping "Stay in character!"
After working with 2 others to script a mini-dialogue that had us rolling on the floor in hysterics (my literature knowledge helped me impress them with some flawless Shakespearean-style verse), I increased in confidence. The workshop introduced alot of really enjoyable and practical exercises to do with groups of children - things to encourage them with writing, good warm ups, ways of pairing people up, and techniques for exploring characters. By the end of the day I felt like even I, a theatre novice with only one stage-managing experience to my CV since primary school, could get involved in the activities. Which, of course, is the idea - the kids we're teaching are unlikely all to be budding Stanislavskis, unless of course I get placed at the Brit school.
I firmly stand by the reason I kept giving when the drama students asked why, as a future English teacher, I was attending the course: "English lessons where you do drama activities are generally the most fun."
Given that I knew I would be having an extended weekend, I felt more enthusiastic about signing my Saturday away for a London Drama training day - a day of workshops from different drama teaching experts about becoming an effective drama teacher. We had to pay (£10) and everything. I signed myself up online before I had second thoughts.
My readers might be thinking "but hang on, you are not, in fact, training to be a drama teacher, but an english teacher." You're right...but we were invited to this event just the same - obviously there's a certain amount of overlap with English and drama - and it's something that makes lessons more fun. Plus I'd written in my self-evaluation at the beginning of the course that I wanted to learn more about using drama techniques in the classroom. So...it seemed like a good idea at the time.
On arrival, my first thought was..."oh, shit, I've made a big mistake." I didn't see anybody I knew from my course (the event was open to PGCE students from all the unis in the London and south east region) and everyone just seemed so...drama-ey. The crowd was noticeably different from how a crowd of English students would have been. Thespy, as we used to say at university. All the girls were dressed trendily and sitting in ballet-warm-up-type poses. All the boys were wearing funky hats. Speaking voices were LOUD: all the elocution coaching paying off. Hand gestures were expansive and theatrical.
The first workshop involved us pairing up and improvising dialogues, constantly changing partners as the scenario we were working with was made more complicated. "Help!" I inwardly panicked, "What if I'm not capable of being all creative like these well-trained drama types?" It didn't help that the first person I talked to was from the Central School of Speech and Drama. When I asked what she did and why she was doing the PGCE, she replied "well, I'm an actress." Since she was signed up for teacher training, I considered pointing out that the acting career clearly hadn't been working out so well for her, but managed to restrain myself. And, as the session got going, I also found that I was just about managing to keep up with the others, improvising a prison-fight dialogue with the best of them. Although I was temporarily flummoxed when, after changing pairs, my new partner cut me off when I went to introduce myself, snapping "Stay in character!"
After working with 2 others to script a mini-dialogue that had us rolling on the floor in hysterics (my literature knowledge helped me impress them with some flawless Shakespearean-style verse), I increased in confidence. The workshop introduced alot of really enjoyable and practical exercises to do with groups of children - things to encourage them with writing, good warm ups, ways of pairing people up, and techniques for exploring characters. By the end of the day I felt like even I, a theatre novice with only one stage-managing experience to my CV since primary school, could get involved in the activities. Which, of course, is the idea - the kids we're teaching are unlikely all to be budding Stanislavskis, unless of course I get placed at the Brit school.
I firmly stand by the reason I kept giving when the drama students asked why, as a future English teacher, I was attending the course: "English lessons where you do drama activities are generally the most fun."
Sunday, 19 September 2010
Hello London
This is the fourth blog I've started up here, as a quick glance at my profile will confirm. The first documented my year of travelling round the world; the second was to keep track of writing I've had published online as the result of various jobs and internships; and the third charted my experiences as an English teacher in Rome. Now I've finally bitten the bullet, moved back home to London and started a post-graduate course in teacher training...AKA growing up and becoming a "proper" teacher, with a pension, sick-pay etc etc.
My new tutors have promised that this course will be the hardest any of us have ever worked. I've heard alot of horror stories about the rigours of teacher training. To make matters worse, I've left my heart in Italy in the form of my wonderful Italian boyfriend, and am feeling at best ambivalent about being back in the UK, living with my parents and studying again.
So as I embark on a long-distance relationship and an attempt to bring my love for Shakespeare to the teenagers of inner-London, I'll document some of my struggles.
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