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Page 1 of 2 Four years ago, I like many others decided to change to a rewarding and challenging new career in teaching. At 30 years of age, having a mortgage and a car to run the only financially viable option open to me to switch to teaching was the GTP training route. A PGCE was unappealing for a number of other reasons. I had worked in industry at middle management level for a number of years. I’d been responsible for research project budgets of over a million pounds. I’d been a lifelong learner but in my career as a research chemist I’d learned by doing. I was highly skilled and had done presentations to hundreds of people. How different could teaching be?
A lot to learn… I realised quickly once I started to train that I had a lot to learn about teaching. I also learned I had a lot to give. I set up a number of weird and wonderful chemistry experiments that were dramatic show stoppers. Explosions, smoke and flames were often seen coming from my classroom. My knowledge of my own specialism was not questioned throughout my training year and I taught A-level in a second placement school with very little guidance. In KS4 I had to teach physics and asked the laboratory technician if we had a spectrometer. “What’s one of those?” came the reply. In the back of a cupboard in the prep room I found one. “How had they managed to teach this aspect of the GCSE course without one” I thought.  Looking to teach overseas ICT skills within the department I was working in were poor. In fact, there was no ICT equipment. The laptops of most teachers were treated like “type-writers that rubbed out mistakes” or expensive doorstops. After setting up a database for videos for the department and a pupil achievement tracking system for my own classes, members of the department began to ask about resources I’d developed for my own classes. Interactive quizzes, animations, diagrams and movies all produced by a trainee who had never taught a class before that academic year. We know as teachers that resources are only a small part of the package. Classroom management, student rapport and relationships were all seen as major strengths in a very difficult school. One sixth of the school have statements and three quarters of the school have SEN requirements in their education plans. A high proportion of these are Emotional Behavioural Difficulty (EBD) students. One fifth of the school is now EAL. These are difficult conditions to teach effectively in and yet I have thrived in this climate. I also revived a failing Music Department by starting a “Rock School”, so much so that they wanted to give me an NQT timetable with 25% of my timetable in music.
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