If you can, teach

Picture the scene. It is Friday afternoon; you are standing in your classroom or lab, in front of 25 fifteen-year olds who have not chosen to study your subject. It is the start of a double period, in a course that you think is half-baked. The examination you are herding them all towards at the end of the year is lightweight, ill-conceived and shoddily marked. Do you really want to be there?

Everyone thinks they know about teachers and teaching, because everyone has been to school. But there has to be more to your decision to enter this peculiar world, which could well be - or rather will one day be - as grim as the portrait above, than your mixed and inescapably subjective memories of your own experience of your school. Long ago, I had my own motivation: it seemed to me that teachers at my school enjoyed their job; and I calculated that a teaching qualification would secure me a job overseas. Thirty-six years of teaching later, I offer the following, retrospective, advice.

There are some initial choices to be made, regarding schools. For example: primary or secondary; large or small; independent or state (and if independent, boarding or day); coeducation or single sex; academically ‘top of the league’ (tables) or more modestly placed; in the UK or abroad? A less obvious, sometimes neglected but very important, strategic issue – perhaps colouring the choice of your first post – is whether you want to ‘be a teacher’ or to ‘have a career in schools’. The distinction is not black-and-white. But it is one thing to be single-mindedly devoted to teaching (by the way, you don’t have to think of it as a ‘vocation’, a term that can be cruelly used against you to justify low pay) and relishing the opportunity to teach through a professional lifetime. It is another, rather different thing, to move on from – and, to a greater or lesser extent, out of – the classroom into administration, management, and leadership. In short, and at its simplest, would you want to be a headteacher?

An observation here. Some say that teachers (of the former category) begin energetically, imaginatively and enthusiastically … only to grow tired, bored and cynical. I have met enough teachers in, say, their fifties to doubt this conventional wisdom. I would argue that there are men and women of this age and experience who in fact still relish their job - beneath, perhaps, some protestations to the contrary: it is not ‘cool’ for teachers, like pupils, to appear too positive…. Some of course are real cynics, apparently tired and bored of their jobs. But chances are that when they started out, they were probably as bored and certainly as cynical as they are now. An aspiring head I once met described schools as ‘places where pupils and teachers come to learn’. He was right. But the bores and cynics have not wanted to learn and keep learning, so they have not moved on – nor, sadly and more to the point, have they moved out. Don’t be one of those!

Depending on that choice – ‘teaching’ or ‘a career in schools’ – you are more (or less) likely to remain at one school for a long time. One benefit of doing so is huge, in that you have the opportunity to see your pupils develop, and get to know them well, over the years. ‘A career’, on the other hand, probably requires you to move (‘upwards’) from one school to another, and more than once. And what about financial rewards – pay – in either case? Well, the salary for a classroom teacher who is just starting out has tended to be quite attractive – it has needed to be – yet not to move very much, beyond inflation, thereafter. Heads of Department or Year are paid more; and the salaries of Headteachers and Deputies are certainly enough to live on. But you will never be paid salaries to compare with your friends who go into, say, banking or the law. A partner in a city law firm may well earn 15 times what you earn at any stage in your respective careers. You will have to decide what is ‘enough’ for you….

There are Good and Bad reasons for wanting to teach. Among the Bad are: because you want the holidays (no compensation if you cannot face that Friday afternoon double); because you want to ‘change society’ (you won’t); or because you want a job ‘and anyone can teach’ (they can’t). Good reasons – or perhaps some of the preconditions for long-term satisfaction and/or success in the field - include (and must include) both liking young people, of whatever age; and loving your subject. The two are of course connected: you must want to convince all those pupils of yours, even the most sceptical or reluctant, that your subject offers something of value to them. This project provides you with a means of having a lasting impression on individuals. Most of us are fortunate enough to be able to recall at least one teacher who made such a positive impression on us – ‘made a difference’ – as well as, sadly, those who may have put us off some rich field of enquiry for life. Beyond the academic interaction, there is – increasingly - the whole pastoral agenda in teaching, whatever the school: the fostering of a caring community and the caring for each boy or girl as an individual during their critical and demanding years of growing up. A negative ‘spin’ on this might be that teachers, in a society that is changing rapidly and not always for the better, have in some schools become additional social workers (or child-minders … or, in extreme cases, police). That said, it is only appropriate, in an age concerned (not to say obsessed) with Health and Safety and Child Protection, that for the career-minded teacher these days promotion is as likely to be along the ‘pastoral’ route as along the ‘academic’.

What else is good – stimulating, rewarding – about teaching? For one thing, being part of a common room, a team – albeit a team of people, like you, of strong individuality – with shared interests and a common purpose. Over and above conversation and companionship, colleagues offer in instantly available mutual support service, just after that most awful lesson, with that horrendous pupil, or after that conversation with the ultimate Parent from Hell. And every day is, inevitably, different. You cannot predict pupil responses: do you welcome, and can you cope with, the unexpected? As an advert for the police force used to put it, overall (and apart from maybe marking, and certainly invigilation…): ‘Dull, it isn’t’.

And nothing else really compares with the buzz of being in that classroom or lab: just you, and your charges - anticipating what you are going to do, with them. If you believe in and practise dialogue and interaction, as you must, there is no limit to the potential of this scenario: a penny drops; a prejudice is challenged and shed; a fact or explanation excites: a problem is solved; a window is opened. And then, beyond the classroom, there is the whole extra-curricular side of a good school to be explored: community service to be organised, sports teams to be managed, and so on, and so on.

But you have to have your eyes wide open when you enter this world. What Tony Blair advocated as ‘Education, Education, Education’ seems to have become ‘Examination, Examination, Examination’: modular GCSEs mean that it is now the rule rather than the exception that pupils face public examinations for each of their last four years in secondary school – with real or at least potential damage to ‘education’, as a result. Even so, when you are successful, in any respect or enterprise, don’t expect Thanks: this is not yet a ‘thanking culture’ – and that includes most pupils and most parents. So when some expression of appreciation does come you way it is all the more to be treasured.

It is probably harder to teach school age pupils now than ever before. If there ever was an Age of Deference; it has gone. You do not even have a ‘honeymoon’ period these days: from the outset, lesson one, and constantly thereafter you have to earn and then continue to deserve your pupils’ respect, class after class, establishing your authority with each group, even each individual, in turn. Meanwhile, there have never been more distractions, from what you are seeking to achieve with them, for young people. Out of school, they are being ‘taught’, for example, not to value talent but celebrity (Big Brother); not to work hard for success, but to expect instant reward and gratification (Deal or No Deal) – and the list goes on. Everything is instant and individual (the mobile phone culture), rather than longer term and communal. This is what you have to confront. The internet has, of course, huge potential for young learners – but you will struggle to educate your pupils in its proper use and to counter the ‘don’t do it, download it’ approach to research assignments. Reading, and reflecting upon, books certainly cannot be taken for granted. And at worst, not only pupils but also their parents will expect you, the teacher, to do all the work for them and get the results that they want, though do not deserve.

So, what (else) does the aspiring teaching need? Well, in no particular order, things like this: a sense of humour; detachment, along with involvement; patience; calmness under pressure; resilience; attention to detail – especially in planning courses and individual lessons; empathy and imagination (how will this lesson work; how will it occupy, even engage, even interest, even inspire … more than it did last time?) and the presence and personal skills to enable you to manage groups, while never losing sight of individuals. To be good, you need to be special.

If you are still there, and still interested, have a look on the website of the Teacher Development Agency for Schools which will explain all the different ways of getting started There is the option, for example, of getting qualified, not via a full year’s course beforehand, but ‘on the job’. And talking of qualifications, be assured that this remains a world in which an Oxbridge degree continues to count for something. As for those in the independent sector who say that for teaching you don’t need to be trained, don’t listen to them; you do! And once the formal initial training is over, remember: schools are ‘places where pupils and teachers come to learn’….

Charles Mitchell recently retired after thirty-six years as a secondary school teacher.