I’m a primary teacher, I have been for nearly 10 years. I loved my job. The money has been ok, good even as a new graduate, and (until recently) went up every year. The holidays were good and I knew I never had more than 8 weeks to get through before I had my next break. The hours were long and some of the holidays were used up with preparing for next term, but it was worth it. The kids made it worth it. I believed in what I was doing. I was helping children to make the best of themselves, helping them to reach their potential. I enabled them to move forward with their lives, to explore new ideas, to enjoy learning...
In the last 10 years, I have gone from loving my job to resenting it and now to actively disagreeing with what education in the UK has become. I can no longer concentrate on making lessons fun and exciting. I want to. I really want to! I want to make all the children in my class excited about coming into school, to make them look forward to learning, to teach them things that are not only relevant to them now, but also in their future. To inspire them to start looking at things from a new perspective, to challenge them to think again. And yet I can’t. Despite starting at 8 am and finishing at 7 pm each day and then doing, at least, another day at home – usually a day and a half.
The latest revision of the curriculum has pushed the required understanding of primary aged children to the level I reached in year 9 (aged 14) or later. Our 11-year-olds are expected to reach the same standard in some areas as people who are taking lower tier GCSE’s! How can that be good for them? Where is the joy in learning when you are marched straight past the point that you are ready to learn to, way past that into the vaguely intelligible, and then past that into the realms of ‘ I can do it on paper but how is it relevant to my life now or in the future’. How can I justify standing in front of 30 children and trying to make them reach an unachievable goal? To set them up for failure? I don’t want to be a part of making children fail!
Stop the ride! I want to get off!
I have looked, for the last few years, for another option; to find an escape route, a way out of the teaching-trap. The money really isn’t bad – just don’t work out the hourly rate! The holidays fit around school holidays. The work is fairly local. There can be great job satisfaction. Where else can I find all of that? I have wanted my whole life to be a teacher. If I leave the one thing I always wanted to do, what then?
But… Teaching is no longer what I signed up for. And so I’m finally making the decision to quit.
It is with excitement, and a little trepidation, that I’m looking forward to having a life again! A life that revolves around my family. I look forward to playing with my own children. I look forward to not being a grumpy, stressed-out Mummy! I may even re-train and do something totally different. Who knows what will happen next? There is a whole other world out there and the possibilities are limitless. I am ready to start again: life after teaching begins here!
