Teaching has always been something that I have enjoyed and been good at ever since I was very young, yet it has never been my ‘dream career’. The truth is that I’ve never really known what I wanted to do with my life as I felt drawn to multiple things at once and couldn’t imagine just picking one. As I grew up, I thought about many different careers: dancer, professional flautist, forensic scientist, Sign Language interpreter, journalist… you name it! It wasn’t until I was in Sixth Form that I decided I wanted to be a Dance teacher, but I couldn’t find many opportunities for this unless you started your own business or were a PE teacher at Secondary School level, and neither of those things appealed to me. After my A Levels, I settled for studying English Literature at university, convincing myself that I would go into English teaching in Secondary Schools because I just loved the education and school environment. Whilst the latter is true, I didn’t particularly enjoy my degree (more in terms of literary criticism and the organisation of lecture hours rather than the actual subject) and I decided that I wouldn’t be able to bear teaching about the same books over and over again, particularly if I hated said books. I’ve never been good at working on something that I don’t enjoy… So, I decided at the end of my second year of university that I would go into Journalism instead, since I love writing, and I dreamed of being a travel journalist or a television documentary journalist.
After months of searching for the perfect Masters degree abroad in Journalism (because I definitely didn’t want to stay in the UK!), I still hadn’t come across exactly what I wanted. Finding myself at a bit of a loss at what to do next, I signed up to be an English language assistant in France as I’d had French language assistants at Sixth Form and liked the idea of it. This would give me the opportunity to live abroad for a year, teach for a year and see if I really enjoyed being a teacher, and have fun after my long degree. I didn’t have high hopes for either my placement or job, since I wasn’t sure I would enjoy teaching about English grammar as I didn’t have the slightest clue about any of that, but it’s safe to say that the rest is history as I completely fell in love with the idea of teaching English in France. After being accepted onto a Masters degree, and now with my own classes of real pupils, it seems like everything ended happily ever after. Except I was not prepared for the realities of teaching.
Despite having taught many a dance class and having done some other teacher training courses plus work experience in schools, I was not prepared to face the challenges that having my own classes would bring me. With difficult pupils, classes of thirty, horrible time slots including the last period on a Friday, and overbearing colleagues, I definitely had a lot on my hands. Yet, the biggest challenge of them all, as I would later find out, was actually being faced with myself. Yes, the one thing that no-one likes or wants to do. I had to face up to my own weaknesses and to try and work on them day in day out along with all of the above. I don’t think I was prepared for how much I would feel like a failure, like I was being judged, like my pupils deserved a more experienced teacher, or like this career just wasn’t for me because I simply couldn’t do it.
After weeks of coming home feeling completely demoralised, hours of crying each evening, and days of headaches from all of the energy my classes were draining from me, I wanted to quit. There and then I regretted every decision I had made that had led me to becoming a teacher. With the equivalent of a PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education), my options for a career change were very limited unless I requalified and here I was, stuck in a foreign country that despite feeling like home wasn’t really, completely lost and unsure of what to do. I felt angry and let down by the idealised vision that university had given us of teaching, even though I had been an English language assistant for two years during very tough times and in an underprivileged school. I felt let down by the government who underfunds, understaffs, and underpays schools and everyone who works there, and so the classroom environments are less than acceptable. I felt scared knowing that this would be my job for life- unlike in the UK, teachers in France are civil servants and so it is the government who places you in a school somewhere in the country and who guarantees you a job, meaning that you can’t choose where you work nor when you leave. I felt stupid for having dreamt of this for so long only to realise that I couldn’t actually handle the reality of it, despite all of my previous experiences. I had the impression that my personality simply wasn’t a good fit for a job that requires you to be authoritative, to make decisions, to give out punishments, and to handle conflicts, all of which I am not naturally good at.
Somehow, though, I’ve found a way to keep going and to keep pushing through. I’ve come to realise that the only reason I’m able to keep going is because I truly love teaching and I have had a fair few moments where I’ve been in front of my classes completely in love with what I’m doing. I’ve also decided to change my perspective and to view all of the challenges that I am faced with as a learning experience and to look at myself in a different way. I don’t have the right qualities for teaching because I don’t think that I have them, not because I’m not capable of having them.
All in all, I don’t regret becoming a teacher, but I don’t think that I’ll be able to do this job for the rest of my life if something doesn’t change on a government level. I also wish that I had been told more about what to expect when becoming a teacher for the first time so that I could better reassure myself that what I was experiencing was normal and all a part of the process. Teaching is really hard. It’s not the ‘easy route’ or the ‘backup career’. It’s the biggest lesson that you can ever be taught, all whilst teaching lessons to others.