Crikey O'Reilly Inspector!

'Crikey O'Reilly' because, my sources inform me that it has been almost 3 years since I last made a record of an inner rambling, or voiced any thoughts, with regards to my teaching career. These same sources also inform me that many people believe that O'Reilly must have been 'an Irishman with extravagantly large trousers'. Hmm.

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.

Truthfully...

So.

So much for keeping up my reflective journal of school-time, it's been more than a month since my last post... reason being it's been a pretty shit month. The post is called truthfully because truthfully...

I've been seriously considering giving up this PGCE. So seriously that I've applied for about 5 jobs which have nothing to do with teaching in any way shape or form. The reasons are plentiful, and I know they're valid because everyone else on the Maths PGCE has agreed with me;

1) The children are horrible. They have no qualms about saying "Miss this lesson is really boring" or "You're a shit teacher", and I'm sensing a 'blame culture' which has resulted in everything being the teacher's fault. If a pupil does badly in a test, even if the rest of the class did well, it's the teacher's fault. "I wasn't taught properly...". Pupils (particularly my Year 10's) refuse to work if the lesson isn't 'fun'. Which brings me nicely on to  my next reason.

2) There has to be a big song and dance in every lesson. Thinking about Maths in particular, if pupils have to work through questions from a textbook for a lesson, it's not a 'fun' lesson and they therefore aren't being taught properly.

Well I'm sorry. Sorry that there's no colourful puzzle to fill in, no exciting little activity for you to faff around with for 50 minutes while I desperately try and get you to do some mathematical thinking. But if you're going to sit a 2-hour Maths GCSE exam in June and get at least a C, you're going to have to develop some sort of discipline to sit and actually do some Mathematics. Because really, that's a vital skill you need for Maths; to be able to patiently work through problems, going along carefully and usually for long periods of time. How do you think Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem? Sitting around on his arse waiting for someone to show him how to do it? With a colourful presentation, and pretty little pictures and boxes to tick?

Cor. Haven't had a good rant like that in ages. Next point;

3) I, personally, am trying to run like the wind before I can even pull myself up on two feet. I've always been like this; I hated being shown how to do something, I always wanted to just get on and do the fucking thing. But I'm now realising with this that I've just made things much harder for myself, and I'm actually slowing down and asking for help. Which is always good.

4) I think I'll make this the last point, since I've talked about it already in my last blog. The total and utter hopelessness and futile attempts at lesson planning. I've been spending (as I've said before) about 2-3 hours on each lesson I teach. And that's 9 lessons a week (when it's not disrupted by some shit like Target Setting Day or International Dress Day) so mathematically that's 18-27 hours a week of planning. On top of the 36 hours spent at school/IoE. And it always turns out that what you've done is shit. You think it's great! Look, here's a great graph I spent ages creating from scratch. But no. It is shit.

Also I've only got one working eye, and a shitty laptop which corrupted all my hard work. Although one of those problems has been sorted now, through some kindly and most timely financial assistance. Unfortunately my eye's still squonk, and has been for about a month now. I've been commenting that it's hard enough to keep control of a class with two functional eyes, let alone one. Ideally I'd have three, but that won't be happening any time soon.

Anyway. Today's been the first day I've not felt like staying in bed crying, in over a month. So I feel I must record this day, and refer back to it when the real hard work starts after Christmas... I think it was mainly down to a Year 10 lesson I took today. You know, the class with Shania* in.

The class didn't start well. With my Title, Date and Lesson Objective ready to note down, Shania* and Melanie* entered the lesson having just had a fight, and about 3 seconds after entering the classroom Melanie stormed out, commenting "I'm not staying in a classroom with that fucking prick." I couldn't run after her and leave the class, but luckily another class teacher had spotted what had happened and rushed after Melanie to calm her down. That just left me with Shania and the rest of the class, at which point I thought 'Oh fuck' because I thought it would all kick off from that point.

But from observation, I know that Shania is actually extremely bright. She shouldn't be in set 7 Maths, but she's there only for her behavioural issues. When she actually managed to get stuff written down on paper, she finished her work before everybody else, got onto extension tasks, helped others (if somewhat brusquely; "WHY CAN'T YOU DO THIS SHIT MAN IT'S WELL EAAASSYYY") and contributed to class discussions. So I'm thinking I'm dealing with her in the right way - lots of other teachers seem to comment about her madness in their lessons most of the time, and she is always being put on report. As for the rest of the class, under my new-found stern manner, they were much better behaved and actually managed to pay attention when I asked. After about 3 minutes of stern instructions.

But crucially, this lesson has helped me actually see progress in my teaching skills, and some proof that actually not everything I'm doing is complete and utter bollocks. The pupils did inform me today that they hated Maths, but when the buzzer for lunch went off they said "Oh, is that the end already?!" which was something I really wanted to hear.

I think the only thing that's stopped me from going insane and emigrating to Wales (again) is the fact that, once I'm up in front of a class teaching, I absolutely love it. It's so good to see pupils go "OOOOH that's so obvious now!" and to watch them all follow my instructions and get on with some work under my direction. I am quite bossy after all... and when they're engaged in the lesson, you get a real buzz from it. I think it's just all the other stuff that's happened, around the teaching, that's got me down recently. I'm hoping from today it'll all be uphill from here!

I didn't realise lesson planning was so hard.

I think this will just be a short one - the point I'm making is self-evident in the title really.

So at Norbury Manor, there are 16 student teachers. Yes, 16. We've pretty much invaded the staff room, with our enormous cafetiére and shared coffee mornings (I now know why teachers smell of coffee - without it teachers die), and also our stories about our first teaching experiences. But, we two in the Maths department (Caroline and I) have been feeling slightly left out, in that most of the ST's in other subjects have taken over their given classes already. I was thinking it might be to do with the nature of Maths, that you can't really chop and change too much with the topics you're teaching - you can't teach 'Equations' before you've taught 'Algebra' for example. But I've been there for three weeks now and I'm getting a little bit bored of just observing.

So I mentioned it in my mentor meeting, that I'd quite like to get stuck in and start teaching. Personally I quite like being chucked in at the deep end and told to get on with it, something about the pressure of it. Might also explain why I preferred exams to coursework. So we've been given a nice little folder with the pupils' scheme of work in, and told to start preparing some lessons to give before half term, with the aim of taking full responsibility for classes after half term (one week to go!)

So I read the advice from the IoE regarding lesson planning. It says that, initially, planning for an hour lesson will take us 2-3 hours. This was my expression at first;

But it actually does.

You have to think about, and plan for, many different scenarios apart from the actual teaching of the subject itself. What pupils might struggle with. If any pupils in the class will need extra support. How long certain tasks will take. Extra provision for those really nerdy kids that finish really quickly. Also continuous assessment is a big thing at the moment.

Next to every task or activity you set, you have to explain how you are going to assess the pupils' learning, and whether they have learnt anything from you in the measly 50 minutes you have with them. Mini whiteboards are bloody great.

So this is a Year 7 class 2 times a week, a Year 8 class 3 times a week, and my wonderful Year 10 bottom set 4 times a week. That's 9 classes a week, and I just know that proper teachers are thinking 'That's nothing...' But they've got bare skills (yes, I'm down with the kids) in lesson planning, some saying they plan lessons in their heads. Except when Ofsted pay a visit. 

So in conclusion, I started my lesson plans for Year 8 'Pie Charts' and Year 7 'Angles' at 7.45pm tonight. I started writing this blog post at 11.23pm. And they're not finished yet. 

"So has everybody understood?" "...Yeah." "So what's the answer?" "... I don't know."

Every Wednesday at the IoE, we're given the chance to attend lectures from illustrious guest-speakers on areas of teaching which are relevant to all teachers, regardless of which subject you choose to teach. So far we've covered Teachers' Legal Obligations, Classroom Discipline, Voice Care, Special Educational Needs (SEN) and English as an Additional Language (EAL), the last two of which we have been told firmly are not related in any way. It's not surprising children with EAL struggle to learn and develop at the same rate as their English companions - have you ever been given part of a History lesson in rapid French and been expected to understand what was going on? 

We have. Even though I have a little grasp of French, I was so busy trying to translate what I'd just heard that I missed the next part of the lesson. That was a great way to help us empathise with EAL pupils, who are regularly considered slow learners and not very bright, and we received some very valuable information about how to help such pupils. 

So that was last week. Today we were given some incredibly helpful tips on assessing pupils' progress, from a man who you might recognise from BBC2's 'The Classroom Experiment', and is Deputy Director and Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at the IoE... *phew that was a mouthful*. Here is a picture.

Dr. Dylan William. He was actually pretty terrifying. Especially stalking the lecture hall rows with a big red microphone getting people to answer questions. Fortunately I had some kind of sixth sense today, which told me to sit in the middle of the row.

But there was plenty to think about, safe with twenty trainee teachers to the left and right of me. The importance of good questioning was touched on, where you plan your questions beforehand to ensure you get pupils thinking and also, curious! There was a really good example, more science/geography than maths but I loved it anyway.

Ask your pupils "why is it colder at the top of a mountain, when it's closer to the sun?" and watch them rack their brains coming up with an answer!

Even better, there followed a great maths question.

"Can you have a triangle with two 90 degree angles?"

This elicited some very intriguing answers.

1) "The triangle would have to be infinitely tall. Because parallel lines meet at infinity..."

Clearly this teacher had put some very strange ideas into this pupil's head. At this point you'd probably try and explain that parallel lines never meet. Not in 3 dimensions anyway... 

2) "Well, angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees. So there's 90 + 90 already. Can you have an angle of 0 degrees?"

This went on to a discussion about a 0 degree angle, and plain straight lines and so on.

The final answer... quite simply, I hope I get a pupil as bright as this.

3) "Yes you can. What if you start at the North Pole, and put the other two points somewhere on the Equator?"

... To have a pupil naturally refer to non-Euclidean geometry, without prior knowledge of the subject, I believe is quite something. This is why I can't wait to get into the classroom; pupils will always surprise you with completely unique ways of thinking! I now just need to get the skills to help pupils from all walks of life, with different brains, different ways of thinking, develop their understanding. Without just doing it my way.