Monday: I begin the week full of enthusiasm, having prepared enough lessons to last me to retirement, with some left for my children to inherit. This is the final week of my last teaching practice and I am in control. I begin to load the car when a carrier bag which holds 65 carefully marked books disgorges its contents all over the drive. I resolve to get a plastic crate, like real teachers have.
Once in school, I find a cheerful engineer where the photocopier usually is. The machine itself has devolved into a pile of rollers and screws. He tells me it will only be a few days, which sends me into catatonic despair. In a previous incarnation (how distant the years of commerce now seem), I would have demanded a replacement copier and got one .
My new career, however, is over before it has even begun. Doesn’t he know about worksheets? Of course not, and probably couldn’t care less. This is the public sector. This is teaching. I am merely a student. Mature yes, but still a student.
Tuesday: My mentor, fresh from a relaxing morning making labels for his shelves (there is an inspection next term) suggests we retire to his place for lunch and dog walking. I’ve got a whole morning’s maths to mark, a display to mount, six lesson evaluations and an essay to write, but cheerily I put them behind me and say yes. This is what it is like for real teachers, isn’t it? I don’t wish to be reminded, so I share my tuna sandwich with the dogs and try to forget the pleasures of business lunches. By the evening, l0pm finds me grim-faced but steadfast at the kitchen table, bitterly regretting that wasted lunch hour. Perhaps teaching is not for me after all. Is it always going to be like this?
Wednesday: My two-year-old decides that 5am is just about right for breakfast, so I capitalise by getting an early start in school. In a moment of rash stupidity last week, I suggested to my mentor that a 3ft-high class newspaper would make a pretty impressive display for the inspection. Today I need 10 hours of printing, cutting and sticking like I need a wet playtime. Sam H has written a particularly good piece and I’m anxious to incorporate it but I can’t find it on the computer.
Thursday: Success! Sam reminds me that he filed his article under his mother’s name, so I wouldn’t confuse his and Sam B’s work. He is such a conscientious child, I cannot doubt him but I’m slightly bothered by the tone he uses when explaining all this to me. It is not insolent, or disrespectful - just a bit too much like the tone my own children use with me when explaining how not to cook a beefburger. This is not at all how I see myself in the workplace, and it worries me.
Friday: By way of celebrating the end of my practice, we are doing culinary things with chocolate. I make sure the best efforts are placed reverentially on my mentor’s desk. All term other teachers have been sending him pairs of children bearing gifts - after all, he is the head of stock control.
This afternoon’s winter sun would be strong enough to take all the colour out of my displays, if I were still rookie enough to use sugar paper.
We decide to play baseball on the field and the class is keen that I take a turn with the bat. Remarkably, I give the ball a magnificent slug, which sends it straight to the end of the field. I am rewarded with such awed and happy faces that I almost forget to run.
Suddenly, I’m a hero, and I realise that this, for me, is what it is really all about.
Lynne Barrett-Lee previously ran her own recruitment agency but this year she qualified as a teacher through the Open University’s PGCE course.
