I'm Not Disappointed, I'm Just Angry Chapter 2

Chapter 2

September 2004

They were in touch and from September 2004 I was on my way to becoming a real teacher as I began my training year in the south of England. For me this was the best part of teaching: all the theory and none of the shitty reality. I packed everything I owned and some stuff I didn’t (as well a a slightly reticent girlfriend) into the back of my green Vauxhall Corsa and set sail to England to begin my adventure in education and to meet my fellow crew members on this voyage of vast, over-stretched metaphor.

We were a hardy bunch of new recruits, ranging from the very delicate English roses to the hardened drunks and cynics wanting a career change. One of whom I grew particularly close to was an older student called J. Well let’s call him J because that’s what his name begins with. Over a night of bonding in a London pub playing ‘I’ve never’ we were fixated on J’s glass as it remained firmly on the table as the number steadily increased in answer to the statement, ‘I’ve never slept with x number of people’. 20? Firmly on the table. 30? Not an inch. 40? Still stationery. 50? ‘Well I think it’s about that.’ He quietly supped his pint with a tinge of humility and we watched open-mouthed as this god of a man became my new idol. ‘Well I was in the theatre,’ he said by way of scant explanation.

I was around the middle ages of this gaggle having had a prosperous career in the finest cocktail bars of Belfast and the splendours of Crossnacreevy potato counts under my belt before arriving at teaching as a career. Many of the younger women were fresh out of University with long flowing skirts and bright eyes. The lot of us were on one hand desperately trying to remain as composed and professional as an umpire at The Crucible whilst simultaneously trying to snooker each other and pot as many balls as possible. Was I one of them? Again, depends on who’s reading this.

A lot of the first stages of a PGCE are classroom based and it’s not that dissimilar to University – wherein most people are hungover on Wednesday morning as Tuesday’s happy hour and some prick has brought a dictaphone and is sat at the front. But the real fun starts on your first placement. Five weeks in the run-up to Christmas where you first of all get to wander around a vast new building knowing nobody and having to interact with real people and real children. I have to admit I spent quite a lot of this ‘observation’ period like a beaten Victorian child, unsure of when or when not to enter a room or who to doff my cap to. In one of my first reviews my mentor asked me why I hadn’t attended my tutor group. I came back with the answer that I hadn’t realised and would make the utmost effort to attend in future. It was better than the real answer which was that I arrived every morning to come in but was too frightened to knock and disturb the teacher.

Each student is assigned 2 mentors in their training year. One for the day to day teaching stuff and one to oversee the paperwork. D is my day-to day and S is my overseer. Before meeting them, I imagine someone wise and urbane. Someone who would run through their magnificent wavy beard with heavy strokes as I challenged the very core of teaching. S is, in fact, a hag with more issues than National Geographic. Over the period of the four months I spend under her tutelage she laughs when a Year 9 class laugh at me for shouting at them, mouth rapes me in front that same Y9 whilst playing out some Shakespearian fantasy where she was Lady M and I was some bastardisation of Macbeth and her ex-boyfriend, also Northern Irish, who had seduced her, led her to to the promised land of the south and then buggered off with a witch and finally, she managed to sulk all the way through my leaving do and leave early as nobody has paid her the least bit of attention. My preconceptions of teaching and teachers were sorely tested during my time there.

D, my day-to-day mentor, is a portly man, bit sniffly with an eye that fancied a different compass point at different points in conversation. I always think of the Bond villain L’Chiffre when I think of D and regret never playing poker with him. I wondered if each point his eye reached was an indicator of what he was thinking at the time. East for ‘Where’s your lesson plan?’ West for ‘Don’t bullshit me again’. South for ‘This clown is going on my performance management’.[1] But he was a kind man. A patient man – this was no more evident than when he was observed[2] with the class I was teaching and dropped in quite a few references to ‘No, we don’t do that now I’m in charge’ in which I learned far more about my teaching than in any debrief. It must be like handing over your precious child to an inept monkey with a scalpel and a nice bowler hat when you give your class to a trainee. After all, the great government in all their wisdom judge teachers on their pupils’ performance so what could go wrong?