So here I am at Stoke rail station again, waiting for a train over an hour away. Why? Because Newcastle United are playing at home.
I do so wish I had a car. I would certainly save a lot of hassle. It would definitely lead to me being less tired!
I taught today. It’s not the first time: it’s just the first time I’ve mentioned it here. It didn’t go terribly badly, there was still a lot of criticisms but I’m still learning. So despite being catastrophically tired, it’s all still good.
Another day, another day without a dollar. I had an interview for a job as a Post-16 Tutor at Gosforth High School. I say "interview", there was a challenging ‘carousel’ of activities. Amongst those activities was to present a twenty minute tutorial on revision techniques, have an interview in front of existing post-16 tutors, answer the questions of a student panel, write a reference for a fictional character with some given information, and then to face a formal interview in front of a panel of four senior members of the post-16 team.
The tutorial could have gone better. I had gone into the tutorial with an idea of trying to get the students to talk as much as possible about their experiences of revision so that they can discuss together how they could improve their revision techniques. I managed to make it last the twenty minutes (further than some others had reported) but it became a little fragmented towards the end. The interview in front of the post-16 tutors and the student panel were more fun, and I felt I did well in those. I also did rather well in writing the reference, though I did not manage to finish within the twenty minutes (and I made the schoolboy error of forgetting to write my name on the paper…).
The final interview was also much more relaxed and comfortable than I had anticipated. They gave me scenarios of some things that could happen in the course of the job. I think I coped rather well.
However I did not get any of the jobs that were available. I did well to be in the shortlist of ten from the 111 that applied, but it seems in the end not having school experience was again my downfall: the other candidates apparently had been in positions of similar roles in other schools.
It’s unfortunate. They were quite clear and accepted that many of those applying want to get paid experience in a school in order to eventually become a teacher; and that any decision they would make would not be impacted by my desire to teach in the future. In my feedback I was told I would make a good teacher "without doubt", but it’s looking even further away now.
People often ask me why I dislike London so much. It’s the pretentiousness and arrogance of the place.
Take this morning. I received an email from the TDA trying to persuade me to get into teaching. It has announced its new pay rises for newly qualified teachers. From £20,627 to £20,155 marks a whopping 2.45% pay increase. That is of course unless you happen to teach in London, where starting salaries rise from £24,168 to £25,000, making a rise of over 3.4%.
If people are so drawn to London, why do they have to give bigger pay rises to people that would otherwise be there in the first place?
I have returned — I have fixed the problem I was having, which seemed more to do with my host than WordPress itself. A lot has happened since my last post.
I’ve been told that I have been rejected a place on the PGCE course, to my extreme annoyance. It seems the reason for declining my application was because I am not a teacher. The feedback suggested I ought to get experience teaching for a length of time before applying again. However, getting a decent run at teaching a class of secondary school pupils is hard to obtain: you need a teaching qualification. For much of the PGCE course, this is exactly the experience you get. So it feels like I can’t do the course because I haven’t done the course before. It’s a shame.
I guess I am a fool for applying to Newcastle University again. It seems a ridiculous reason to turn away what would have been a committed and enthusiastic student and a talented teacher. I suppose it also serves me right for chasing after a position doing a thankless task. It used to be medicine. Perhaps I ought to chase after self-glory, easy wealth and the supposed lure of the City. There seem plenty faceless, ruthlessly competitive financial jobs there, but they just don’t interest me, and as for London…
I suppose I’m too picky. I want a job with pressure I can handle; I want to be creative and to be able to apply all the skills I have collected from a wide variety of disciplines; I want to be an important member of an organisation so I can feel committed and settled. These are few and far between.
We get the Evening Chronicle every Thursday for jobs: the number of jobs available is getting lower to the tune of around 100 a week. There were less than 500 this week. Most of those were either teaching jobs or those that request a ridiculous amount of experience for the wage they offer. They aren’t even willing to buy experience; they just expect it. Every receptionist job going wants three years experience "in a similar environment". Why bother? I may as well look into self-employment.
Applying for a place on a PGCE course isn’t as simple as just completing an application form then popping in for an interview, as I found out this week. The application process is controlled by an arm of UCAS, the university admissions service. As such, it costs £5 just to enquire. Furthermore, any correspondence you make to any universities you apply to must pass through their hands first. That is just the first obstacle.
I was invited for an interview on Wednesday (yesterday). However, this “interview” would last from 11am until 4pm. The actual interview lasted half an hour at the end of the day. Beforehand, we were asked to present a small presentation on some rather appalling “stimuli” for starter activities for a lesson; discussed the worst piece of television journalism ever created to support private schools in the developing world; and finally writing an essay on how labelling children as problems based on their welfare is bound to inhibit their self-esteem. Two sides of A4…
That’s not to say I didn’t learn anything: the interview was rather useful. The head of maths in the education department pointed out my errors when attempting to answer his classroom-based questions. And I committed a few errors. I’m not so sure I shall get a place on this course, so I was rather hopeless (in more way than one) until today.
Today was the deadline of my written project. It’s funny, most people were very reluctant to hand it in. They were talking about asking the secretary to pull hard on the file to prise the object from the author’s hands. I’m not so sure why that is. Perhaps it is a fear of the impending scrutinising of the work inside. Perhaps it is the fact that they have spent the best part of a year working on it, and continually changing it and never truly reaching satisfaction. I was quite pleased to hand it in in the end. It isn’t perfect. I would have liked to have added more, particularly proving that the simplicial homology groups of a space make a topological invariant. But it’s not bad either.
So often as I do come across stories of note on the BBC website – such as this one: The Beauty of Maths – it is not often that these stories strike a chord particularly.
But this one does. It highlights the problem of a lack of teachers of Mathematics in secondary schools, and how such a negative view of Mathematics by adults and children alike are damaging the chances of finding raw mathematical talent.
I had once been drawn to teaching, and particularly of Mathematics at secondary school. However, there is little that draws me there now. All those things that attracted me to the profession are the same ones that make me feel that teaching Mathematics privately is a more attractive option. It is of little wonder that the turnover of teachers in the field is so frequent, when quite frankly the prospect of teaching is financially uncompetitive and offers far more in terms of drawbacks than perks.
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