As you might know, I am over halfway through my teaching qualification! By June, I will be a fully qualified teacher of English and History! :3
I’m so excited for two main reasons!
I've hidden those reasons, because that's totally not the point of this thread! If you're interested, though, you're welcome to expand this!
First of all, teaching is a much more stable job than writing and I can get a good pension/maternity and all that jazz for later on in life. We will always need English and History teachers, after all, so there is a lot of security about the job! Plus, if I do a degree in any other subject, I am automatically entitled to teach it – as long as I finish my PGCE course and pass in June!
Secondly, it will also massively help my tutoring stuff because people are much more likely to trust me if I can produce a teaching qualification to back up my methods. I can justify charging a price that will keep me and the forums afloat, too! Plus I get lots of experience of what students struggle with throughout this course! Even if I decide that I don’t want to go into teaching full time, it will still be a massive help to me!
Let’s be honest: lost of people on here are students at school.
When I was at school, I had plenty of questions that I wished I could ask my teachers: from what goes on in the staff room to whether or not teachers have favourites.
Now that I’m a cheeky insider, I am very happy to answer all your questions!
Please feel free to ask them below and I will answer them to the best of my ability!
Edit to add: I am a teacher of secondary school here in the UK. That kinda covers American middle school and high school? Fom ages 11-18. Basically, most of my work is with students around the same age as people on the Forums
You’re actively told not to yell at students because it just shows them that you’ve lost control and they’ve won. I’ve never yelled, but I can imagine that sometimes the little turds make you wanna
I do remember the teacher I did work experience with used to yell at the primary kids, I genuinely hated that because they’d cry and stuff and some were neurodivergent so like, maybe don’t scream at them?
Then in high school I only have experience as a student, it was usually the older teachers who did the yelling and berrating.
Then in college the teacher told me to leave the room while she yelled at the class because otherwise I just sit there like
That’s horrible! What a way to overstimulate a neurodivergent person. Plus, lots of students don’t fully understand why they are getting yelled at – neurodivergent or not! It’s so pointless and damaging!
This is probably just a semantic difference, but I’m an advocate for consequences rather than punishments. For example, if students are talking and disrupting my lesson, they have to stay after school to complete the lesson. I record the amount of time they waste and make them stay back that long. It’s not about punishing them, but rather making them realise that we’re doing this lesson whether they like it or not: either on my time or their time! So, they might as well do it in class.
I like it when consequences are directly related to the thing they did. For example, writing an apology note to someone rather than writing lines. Or writing an essay on how they can change their behaviour. It’s much more like real life.
Yeahhhh I could tell these kids didn’t really, especially since they carried on doing what they were doing after.
That sounds good, like, if they don’t like it they shouldn’t disrupt the lesson etc
My issue with it in high school was that they’d do that to me even if I hadn’t done something wrong, like my maths teacher keeping me back at lunch because I didn’t understand the topic. I understand he was trying to help but I prefer it when the teacher allows you to plan ahead a little more.
That’s really dumb! In my opinion, if you know a student struggles with a subject but you didn’t account for that in your lesson planning, that’s your fault, not theirs
Yeah the teacher I had for year 11 was better, he gave me things I could actually do and switched me to the foundation paper, I got a special seat in my GCSE exam
How do you manage boundaries? Cuz I know with older kids (heh, me) you have to manage like them being young adults yet also still treated like kids… I have some teachers that treat us like kids still, and others that treat us like adults.
What are you currently planning for English? What goes behind your planning basically?
What books do you wanna teach if you’re teaching books?
Advice for someone starting their college journey into teaching? (heh, me).
Lol sorry about my weird questions, some are not really things I’ve always wanted to ask a teacher but more specifically to like my curiosities in general.
I’m also very excited for you because this is something that I’ve wanted for my whole life and seeing someone I admire do it is very very cool.
And do you plan on teaching long-term?
Oh and another question (I’m sorry if this is too many) but this is one that I think would be rude to ask one of my actual teachers lol. I’m really curious why some teachers turn out really good and others bad. Idk it’s probably obvious, but do you decide what you teach and how you’re gonna do it? And if so how do you decide that? What’s the difference between going through that in college versus teaching in an actual school? I’m just really curious because I’m worried that I’m gonna turn into a teacher that teaches really simple stuff and not the complex stuff I actually want to teach. You don’t have to like answer every single aspect of this question, it has multiple questions cuz I thought the first one was simple/didn’t really encompass what I was trying to say.
To be honest, I like to treat older students like adults. I am a strong believer that setting high expectations is the way to make sure students act how you want them to. If you treat people like kids, expect them to act like kids. If you treat them like adults, you can always take that away and be explicit with it if they act like kids.
I focus on the Knowledge-Rich Curriculum by David Didau. Basically, you assume that every student in your school is going to take English as a degree and work backwards from there. What should they know by the time they’re 18 to be ready for uni? Ok, how can we get them there over the 7 years that they’re with us?
It works really well and involves teaching biblical stories, colonialism, capitalism, socialism, communism, religion, the timeline of literature, diverse authors and how they responded to what came before them, etc. I’ve got students as young as 11 studying Chaucer, but we pick easy parts for them and it’s much more about them having an overview of literature so that they can understand where the books they study slot into that.
Definitely make sure you make yourself a list of terms used in your subject now while they’re still fresh in your mind! For example, some of the people on my course are having to re-remember what a “quatrain” and “blank verse” are. Don’t let that be you! Make yourself a list now!
Also, don’t stress. Any good teaching course will teach you behaviour management, so don’t worry too much about that!
If you want the best chances, tutor at least once a week now if you can! It will prepare you so much and make you seem even more employable!
It’s absolutely no problem! I’d answer your questions all day long! And you’re so sweet! I know you could absolutely do it, too!
I think I want to tutor long term! I want to provide students with what they don’t usually get in school, and I don’t think I’ll have the freedom to do that in a school setting! Hopefully I can set up a full-time tutoring company!
It really depends on the school! Some of them force you to do exactly what they think works even if it really doesn’t. Others let you make suggestions and change the curriculum to suit what works for you! If I get control over what I teach, I use the Knowledge-Rich Curriculum to help me decide!
It’s all about planning, to be honest! As long as you plan your lessons and make sure that you have some tricky questions already on record, you’ll be fine! Definitely check out Bloom’s Taxonomy, too. He helps you to know the difference between “easy” questions and deeper questions in a simple pyramid!
Also, some teachers suck in the UK because they’re in it for the money and the pensions. Literally, I was in uni on Monday and this guy KEPT asking questions about pay to a head teacher (principal) who came to guest speak.
We have a system where the closer you are to Central London, the more you make because Central costs wayyy too much. We’re in the Outer London area, so teachers here would earn the second highest amount. The guy’s like “How do I change the fact that the schools I’d be applying to would offer Outer London instead of Inner London?” He asked it in about 6 different ways and the guy just kept saying “there’s nothing we can do about it”.
In America, I’m guessing it’s the exact opposite. Like, they get demotivated because the pay is so low. I mean, if you have a degree and you choose to teach, there are usually a few reasons why:
You love teaching and you’re willing to take a hit in money because that’s what you want to do.
You love the idea of having looooong holidays
You couldn’t find any other job, so decided that was good enough xD
I think that some public school teachers get paid more! But yeah… RIP me out education system so so screwed. Like rn due to Covid a lot of teachers are quitting and we also have a sub shortage…
I dunno about how it is in America, but here we had loads of people demonising teachers during the lockdown for “not doing enough” and some crap. It was A LOT
