Wednesday 2 July 2008

I'm not a teacher, I just play one on TV

Just a brief post to say that I'm still alive. Apologies for the lack of activity here from me recently, but it's been a turbulent couple of weeks. Not least because I've now finished my PGCE (I passed at Masters level - get me) and finishing a PGCE is apparently quite a busy thing to do.

Instead of writing a rambling couple of paragraphs on my feelings at the moment, I'm going to do what all good English students do and steal what someone else has already said and claim it as my own. My good friend Alex, who lived across the corridor from me this year and who is now an ICT NQT (Information & Communication Technology Newly Qualified Teacher), wrote this on his blog about his feelings at the end of the course. My feelings are pretty much the same (all SPG errors are Alex's and not mine ;-D):

"It's somewhat of an anti climax when you finish the pgce. When you leave school at 16, you feel like the weight of the world has been lifted off your shoulders. When you leave uni, you feel like you've just finished a marathon and look forward to a massive summer jolly without a care in the world. When you finish the pgce, you smile contentedly, allow yourself to feel slightly smug and then start worrying about putting together next years stuff.

It doesn't feel like you've finished, it's on going, probably because in reality you've been doing the job for a year now and in 2 months or so, you'll be carrying on doing it - that doesn't change.
"

I'm travelling back down to London tomorrow, so once I'm back down there hopefully the entries here should become more regular again.

4 comments:

James said...

Congratulations Master Bambi.

I've been playing chess with kids recently at a local primary school and am begining to feel glad I did not get into teaching. Maybe you can give me tips on how to get them understand that chess is a quiet thoughtful game, and one that does not require throwing a tennis ball around or hitting each other with a giant inflatable dice.

TheTelf said...

Conglaturations indeed sir. Is it everything you thought it'd be and more?

Also, James: "I've been playing chess with kids recently at a local primary school" - like, as a hobby? Or is there some sort of organised thing going on there?

James said...

It's a voluntary thing organised through work.

Hanspan said...

I don't know that the ongoing feeling is specific to teaching... thought I guess it depends on how your course is structured. I did a vocational post-graduate qualification which had a large degree of verisimilitude about it to the extent that we spent the last three months, exams aside, working as local journalists producing our own newspapers... so apart from the gap between the end of exams and actually finding a job, I certainly felt I had a lot of inertia... even when I was unemployed I was trying very hard not to be.

But congratulations :) You now have two degrees. Feel proud.