It’s Friday and I have just completed my first full week of school. Unsurprisingly, and very frustratingly, after eight days of teaching I am still far from being a perfect teacher. I do however feel like I have perfected the angry teacher glare. I’ve even already used the angry “Right, put everything back on the…
Back to school
In our last session of the summer institute, we were asked to write down our biggest concern about our first day on a post-it note. Jokingly, I wrote that my biggest concern was that I would be crying by lunchtime on my first day. I did not think that it would actually happen. Well, how…
(Almost) The End of Summer Institute
Somehow, it is already the fifth and final week of summer institute. By the end of this week, the 2017 cohort, over one thousand of us, will have officially passed the final stage of the recruitment process and will therefore be ready (I use that word lightly) to start teaching in our schools in September.…
Week 2: Observations, osmosis and on the road again
One of the things that I was most worried about going into teaching straight from university is whether I look too young to teach. I feel like I really haven’t changed much since I left school myself, so how do I expect students to take me seriously let alone listen to what I have to…
Week 1: Practicals, planning and the periodic table
It’s Sunday night and I have officially survived my first week of the Teach First summer institute training, so I thought now would be a good time for another blog post. The first day of training saw around 70 of us participants come together in our local area, where we had a short time to…
How I ended up here…
When I was in primary school, one of my favourite games was pretending to be a teacher. This essentially involved doing a register with a list of all the names I could think of, then using a whiteboard marker to write the date on my wardrobe, as a substitute for an actual whiteboard. But although…