reading time: 3m 9s

I’ve looked back and seen ‘school life’ through your eyes, and it shocks me what I see.
What alarms me is your tunnel vision on the conversation you were having or the friend you were turning around to. I look through your eyes and realise each lesson was a blur to you. The teacher was no more than a distant siren that went off in the background. If you turned around or were talking too much it would go off, then once it finished you could carry on, just being mildly aware that the siren was ‘recharging’ and would go off again if you didn’t write a few words down or take a breath between conversations.

When you go to school and you turn around and you talk and you throw things around the room, please spend a second to think about how it affected the teacher or the pupils in your class. Believe it or not, they do not enjoy telling you off. You seem so sure that they do. Their minds are racing wondering what else they can do to help you focus, and what they are doing so wrong with you that you aren’t, was it something in their lesson plan, are the activities and tasks they so carefully selected for you, are they not working? Aren’t they good enough? Why don’t you see the effort that went into them?

Another thing I’d like you to think about is lesson plans. You won’t have given it an ounce of thought (you must assume lessons just magically appear out of nowhere) but teachers actually plan their lessons with you themselves in their free time. Yes. They are the ones that decide what you’re doing, they’re the ones that choose the worksheets and the powerpoints and all the activities.

On the topic of lesson plans, I beg you to read up on what SEND stands for.
Teachers spend their time tailoring their lessons to suit needs in your class you don’t even know exist; SLD, MLD, ADHD, ASD, ODD – you don’t even know what any of this means, but these are the things on the minds of teachers everyday. They make it look effortless, but you’d have much more respect for them all if you knew the million things they balance in their head every day, in every lesson.

On Fridays when you go home and completely forget about that lesson where you got sent out, you’d be so surprised to know that the teacher most likely hasn’t. You will finish that week or possible even finish that day or lesson and NEVER think about it again, but they will. They might sit all evening speaking to the husbands and wives you don’t really consider they have, about the awful class they had or the awful pupil. They will sigh and question “Is it me?” “What am I doing wrong?” “Why can’t I do my job?” or “Am I a rubbish teacher?”. It makes me so sad now to think that some teacher somewhere may have spent their whole evening or weekend dwelling on the events of that lesson, when I hadn’t even given it a second thought, or even considered at all that they have. The extent of the emotions of a teacher are some that you, my younger self, cannot comprehend and me also, as a trainee teacher, have not experienced in full either yet.

So my message to my younger self is to think twice next time you want to turn around or talk over the lesson someone has spent their weekend planning instead of spending time with their children or family “boring”.
I know if you had known all of this at the time, you would not have been the student you were.

Best wishes,
Your future (teacher!!) self!

Miss O Home
Trainee Maths Teacher, 2020 entry