“Hey Alex, you’re teaching now, right?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You should probably give ‘Tough Young Teachers’ a watch, and see if you can relate.”
I realise that I am approximately four episodes late to the party, but I’m now up-to-date with the latest BBC programme on students who couldn’t care less about school, and it is living up to every expectation. For those out of the loop, ‘Tough Young Teachers’ follows a group of graduates, fresh out of university as they attempt to avoid a further year in education (the PGCE course which most wannabe teachers have to go through) by agreeing to work in some of the worst schools in the UK.
Is this what it means to be ‘thrown in at the deep end’?
Well, not quite.
Being thrown into the deep end, if you needed clarification, is travelling to France for a Year Abroad under the guise of ‘Teaching Assistant’, only to be handed the keys to your classroom and the kids for a lesson you weren’t prepared for on the first day. It’s watching another English teacher shout at the students for a good twenty minutes, and hoping that you won’t have to resort to such violence.
Being thrown into the deep end is being asked to prepare a class of troisième (year 10 students) for their upcoming English speaking exams and facing a sea of silent francophones who are so utterly despondent when it comes to learning a second language that you often feel it might be more worthwhile if you spent the lesson teaching them how to juggle.
Being thrown into the deep end is having to explain to your fellow teachers why Salima* keeps being sent out of the English lesson and how rolling cigarettes is not an acceptable classroom activity, even if she is hiding under the table. It’s not knowing how to respond when Salima then threatens any student who dares to accompany her back to the other classroom, and having to accompany her yourself.
Being thrown into the deep end is expecting something along the lines of a syllabus that I could maybe focus my lesson preparation on, and being told that there is no syllabus for the foreign ‘teaching assistant’ as his/her purpose is to act as a ‘cultural influence’, whatever the hell that means. It’s being told that you don’t have a ‘boss’ at the one time you might actually need one.
Being thrown into the deep end is having to explain to a bunch of thirteen-year-olds why, despite the fact you only see them once a week, “I left my homeworks chez moi” is no longer an acceptable reason for not attempting the work set. It’s having to explain to one of your favourite students why they are just not allowed to do their maths homework in my English lesson, without letting them know how much it hurts that they do.
Being thrown into the deep end is working as a newly qualified teacher, Monday to Friday, when you don’t actually have any relevant qualifications to your name. It’s sitting at your desk after a particularly disruptive lesson and wondering how some of your old teachers managed to deal with lessons like this every day for over forty years. It’s finally being able to forgive your old French teacher Stefano (who was Italian, and not great at English) for any mistakes he may have made. He was just struggling to swim.
Being thrown into the deep end is having to put on the façade that everything is perfectly fine in the world of Miss Slingsby. You need to convince your friends that you’re having a flawless time in France, convince your university lecturers that you’re learning French, convince your colleagues that you are in complete control of your lessons, and convince your students that you do actually know what you’re talking about.
Tough Young Teachers are tough. There’s no denying it. Tough Young Teachers living outside of the English-speaking world are tougher. I work in one of the lowest achieving high schools in my newly-adopted French city; Salima doesn’t have time for the English School System, and Valentin* couldn’t care less about the British Royal Family. Yet here I am, with all of my zero qualifications, attempting to install the slightest morsel of love for languages within these teenagers.
It’s not easy, the most support I have received from anyone was the joke of a two-hour ‘training session’ back in October, and I have indeed resorted back to my old stress-inflicted-Nutella-eating, but we’re afloat. I haven’t screamed at the kids yet, which is a bonus, instead preferring a casual ‘put-your-hands-on-your-heads’ approach, I was told that I’d make a great teacher because I’m so calm (ha), and I get to experience the highs and lows of a teaching career without having to sign my soul away at the end of the contract.
Teach First’s new teacher-training scheme is a great idea, and when I finally realise that teaching is the only reliable job to come out of a languages degree, then I will almost certainly be signing myself up. But it’s not the only one of its kind. British Council have been sending the naïve among us off to countries across the world for years. It’s hard, but this experience is a million times more rewarding than sitting in a lecture hall for a few hours a week.
Tough Young Teachers? Welcome to the real world, kids.
*All names of students have been changed, obviously.
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