Anyway. Let us peek into where I last left off my blogging diary; a fresh-faced, 22-year old completes her PGCE successfully, and starts a new job as an NQT (that's a Nooly Qualified Teacher for all you teaching noobs out there) at St James Senior Boys School in September 2013. Here it is again for your viewing pleasure...
It's quite nice isn't it.
And I am in fact, still there. More recent shenanigans will have to wait until later; I think the best place to start might be the actual NQT year itself.
So talk about baptism of fire! 6 weeks into the new term at the new job at the new school, with a new Headmaster, and we were faced with an Inspection. I mean, I'd only just learned the kid's names by that point, and where the toilets were. I'd known Y11 Ralph's* (name change again) name since Day 1... that kid who seemed to have lost his pencilcase to the Ashford-based criminally-inclined raccoon who was in the area yesterday. The same kid who lent his sister his calculator for her Maths exam... every day for four weeks straight. " Exactly how many Maths exams does your sister have Ralph?"
So, Inspection looms. A distinct memory I have of that period of time is getting into trouble with the quality of my marking. When you go from 12 lessons a week in your PGCE, to 24 lessons a week in your NQT year, certain areas of 'perfect' teaching seem to suffer (and I think it's different with everyone). Anyway, mine turned out to be my written assessment, and my poor Head of Department had to catch me after the Inspection announcement to, basically, bollock me about the quality of it. That was a lesson well learned - never scrimp on the marking, because you'll have to stay up all night before a 4-day inspection doing it properly.
Inspection week arrives, books are bitchin', lessons are planned (that's a whole other blog post I think) and everyone's on eggshells. Exhausted, while running on adrenaline, highly anxious, and close to tears much of the time, I didn't think I'd manage to make it through. But then this wonderful anecdote passes around the staffroom which made me forget my troubles for about 3 seconds.
A colleagues observation, and a certain rather cocky, sometimes disrespectful pupil is late to the lesson. While walking down the corridor to his classroom he sees at a distance one of the inspectors, seemingly bound for his lesson. By way of warning to his teacher, he dances his way into the classroom singing 'doo doo doo doo doo.... Inspector Gadget...' before realising that another inspector is already in the room, and the lesson has already begun. This set my mind at ease about my own lesson observation, obviously. Surely this could only be topped by a pupil coming in singing 'Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead'.
But survive, I did. Complete successful observation of Y11 on Thursday P6+7 (the graveyard slot), I did. And learn an awful lot, I bloody did. Because what I came to learn about teaching through most of that NQT year, was that unfortunately to be an excellent teacher takes experience. And obviously if you're a new teacher, you don't have that experience. The key is how quickly you're able to learn from an awful lesson you've delivered, how insightful you are into what actually went wrong, and what can be done to improve the next lesson you deliver on fractions where last time you forgot to recap how to multiply two single-digit numbers together because you thought that EVERY CHILD IN THE LAND knew their times tables.
I think meta-cognition and self-awareness should be taught in all schools, don't you? And times tables.
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