The first few weeks

8th November 2002, 12:00am

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The first few weeks

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/first-few-weeks-0
Since my PGCE application was accepted just under a year ago, I’ve been an avid reader of the TES Staffroom website forum. As the time for leaving my comfortable but dull job and entering the world of education approached, the topic headings in the PGCE section of these message boards seemed to get worse and worse: “Cr@p mentor”, “School placement from hell - please help”, “Man-eating children - where can I buy a cattle prod?” and “My mentor is on long-term sick leave and hates my guts”. My heart sank with each topic I read.

Many of my legal colleagues were no better. “Rather you than me” or “Are you mad?” they’d say. I began to believe them, especially when, during a day’s work experience in a local school, one member of the staffroom “escape committee” looked over his glasses at me and said, a la Anne Robinson, “I thought solicitors were supposed to be intelligent”.

So I was understandably nervous on arrival at my first placement, at Lord Williams’s school in Thame. But I needn’t have been. Within a few minutes of arriving, most of my concerns had been assuaged. Lord Williams’s has training school status, and apart from me there are 14 other “interns”, one on the graduate teacher programme. There is a programme of professional development, which is jointly run with Oxford University’s educational studies department and which incorporates after-school seminars every Wednesday on topics that trainees worry about, such as practical classroom management and contact with parents. There is also a programme on special needs education delivered by the school’s inclusion unit.

Staff are very welcoming, the school is very well run and well resourced and the children are friendly and polite (well, most of them). My mentor is excellent. The school has a mentor training scheme, which results in approachable, professional, enthusiastic and positive mentors. She is easing my teaching partner and me into it fairly gently - our first teaching task is next week. We are to teach half a lesson on “opposition to the invention of vaccination in the 19th century” to a mixed ability class of Year 10s, whom we have already met and who seem nice enough. I know that if we have any problems, the school will provide support.

Somewhere along the line, I am sure that my naive enthusiasm will be dented. I bet that there’ll be times during the next academic year when an 80-page commercial agreement on a posh desk in a very clean, very warm and very quiet office environment will seem like an inviting thought. But at the moment, I am looking forward to grossing out Year 10 next week with some gruesome pictures of smallpox that I’ve just found on the Internet.

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