17 posts tagged “teaching”

I am only half-heartedly looking for another job. The truth is that I don’t actually want to teach anymore. 5 months of teaching in England has changed my perception of the job completely. I see it now as a torture, to a greater or lesser extent.

The thought of going into another school and facing another horde of rude, obnoxious children fills me with despair. That is not what I went into teaching for. I did it to inspire creativity and to share what I love doing most in this world, not to fight and argue with teenagers who have no ability or interest in what I am teaching anyway.  I am not a correctional officer. I derive no pleasure haranguing kids. In fact I hate it.

As an alternative to teaching I thought of doing a Masters in Art Therapy in London. The problem is that it is an expensive course that takes 2 years full time to complete. That is a big investment in something that is essentially an escape route from teaching.

I would be keen to do a Masters degree in Fine Art or Illustration so that I could get into lecturing but I have some reservations about that too. To begin with I don’t know what I would want to do. I have no particular angle or style or direction.

All in all I don’t know what I am meant to be doing with my life. I wish that I could just do art and be left in peace, but of course it is not that simple. Somehow I need to earn a living in a way that does not make living itself a horrible thing.

On Friday the headmaster called me into his office. He told me that the new deputy head teacher appointed last week would be taking over my classes and that I was no longer needed at the school.

The news came as a shock because I was expecting to be given a permanent contract. As much as I hate the school I figured it would be best to stay with the devil I know and get qualified teaching status before moving on.

Now I feel like a fish out of water. It is nerve wracking to be out of a job without another lined up. How long will I be flapping about before I find another post? With luck the agency I am registered with will to put me in touch with some schools in the next month and I can take it from there.

Despite the worry of being unemployed I must say that I feel immensely relieved to be out of the school. It was an absolutely soul-destroying place to work. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I am looking forward to finding another job.

The only thing I am not happy about is moving out. I live in a lovely quiet house that would be next to impossible to find elsewhere for the price I am paying. It is a one in a million find. If there is any consolation to be had, it is that I could move to a nicer part of England. Gravesend is nothing to write home about.

The thought of going into school tomorrow makes me feel ill. It always does, but especially after some time off. Weekends are just long enough for me to slip back into the normal world: one where I can choose the company I keep and speak in a normal tone of voice. At school I have to suffer the company of so many grating people who have as little interest in me as I have in them. I hate having to repress their rebellious spirit and make them pay attention to what I would rather be telling or showing someone else. If only I could just liberate them from their school hell and let them be free to find their way in the world outside. It doesn’t bother me if they completely fail and end up living miserably because I know some of them will make it, just like countless rockers have for example. If Johnny Rotten did all his homework and behaved in class there would have been no Sex Pistols. It’s a good thing he dropped out. It’s a good thing not everyone does well at school because then who would stack the shelves at Tesco?

I don’t know how much longer I will last as a teacher. Tomorrow might be the day I finally crack and just walk out the class, out the school and the out the profession. Sometimes I wonder if that would that be such a bad thing anyway? It might be just the catalyst I need to do something that is more fulfilling to me.

If I were to find myself out of a job I would probably look into going back to university and “retooling” as someone put it. I have been thinking of doing a Masters in Art Psychotherapy and I would certainly enjoy that a whole lot more than teaching. I might go back to Taiwan and open a recreational art centre for adults – an idea I have toyed with for many years. I could even work as a part time language instructor again and focus on becoming a professional artist during the day.

Attractive as these options are however I am still hesitant to throw in the teaching towel. One reason for that is money. Dreams tend to cost money to realise, and the dreams I have are rather expensive. The Art Psychotherapy course for instance takes three years and would cost a fortune. On top of that it might not land even me a job after I graduate. The art centre idea would leave me in even more debt and there is no guarantee it would even be a success.

Teaching is at least a sure bet. It can even be quite lucrative if you don’t mind where you work. Expatriate teachers in the UAE earn in the region of 40 000 Pounds Sterling a year I am told, tax-free. Plus they get other benefits like subsidised housing and annual flights abroad. It follows that teaching allows one to work all over the world. If I wanted to immigrate to Australia down the line, teaching would probably get me in regardless of whether I actually did that once I was there. Having an art centre in Taiwan would limit my ability to live elsewhere, as would being a full time artist as I would probably rely on my wife to have a fixed job.

I am also reluctant to quit teaching just yet because I have invested so much time and money to get this far. Leaving it now, just before I have gained Qualified Teaching Status in the UK would seem a waste. Although I am qualified to teach in South Africa, acquiring the UK equivalent would hold far more weight and be a much better job insurance policy if I had to fall back on it down the line.

Whenever I feel sick from school I self-administer this dosage of reasoning and encouragement but it doesn’t actually help much. The awful feeling of having to survive another day there remains... Ugh. It is now 11pm and I am going to go to sleep. It is the one true source of refuge.

My days consist mostly of telling kids who don’t listen what not to do: Stop this and don’t do that all day long. It’s pointless. Most of the students I teach come to school precisely for the entertainment value in riling their teachers up so why would they behave? I try to stay calm to deprive them of that pleasure, but the constant level of self-control required is exhausting in itself. By the time I get home I can hardly think straight.

It really is difficult for me to be a sergeant major in class. I hate making people do things that they don’t want to. My natural inclination is to let them do what they wish as long as it doesn’t bother me, and if it does my natural inclination is to distance myself from them. As a teacher I cannot do either of these things unfortunately. Not only do I have to put up with dozens of people who give me a hard time, I have to serve them an education as well.

Perhaps it is time for me to get out of teaching. It is not quite the job I imagined it to be and I still have the chance to do something else with my life.

You could say I have jumped from the pan into the fire. Despite all that I have heard and read up on teaching in English state schools, nothing could have prepared me for the reality of facing mobs of unruly children. It is utterly exhausting.

I wake up at 5 am and get to school just after 7. My first class each day only starts at 8:40 but I need the hour and a half before hand to mentally prepare myself for the noisy, chaotic onslaught that lies ahead.

Picture 25 kids at a time all yelling and carrying on. My job starts by getting them to enter the classroom in somewhat of an orderly fashion. Then comes the far greater challenge of getting them to sit down and actually listen to anything I have to say. This usually takes up the remaining 50 minutes of the lesson.

I like to think that as times goes by I’ll develop a rapport with the students and they will stop giving me such a hard time, but at times I feel it is a lost cause. Some of the teachers I work with face the same problems I do after years at the school. Perhaps the discipline problems are so deeply entrenched that it will require a long period of time and exceptionally dedicated teachers to work itself out the school.

This is unlikely to happen though considering that in my department alone at least half the teachers are openly looking out for other posts and the other half probably doing so in private. It doesn’t surprise me. I am sure that even by English standards this particular school is a tough nut to crack. Only a crummy inner city school could be harder. Then again I heard about a past teacher now working in the kind of inner city school in London where kids carry knives who said that the school I am in is what really toughened her up. It’s worrying to think that she found an inner city school a step up.

Every morning on my way to work I wonder how I’ll make it through to the end of the day with my sanity in tact. Every evening on my way home I wonder how I am going to get myself back to the school the next day. It is torturous to be in a job where you are not only unappreciated but abused left right and centre. Sometimes when I am at my wits end during a lesson I feel like throwing in the towel right there and then. Any other job, even working behind a MacDonald’s counter, seems more appealing than trying to teach kids who wouldn’t even notice if you dropped dead in front of them.

The only way I can keep going at the school is to constantly keep the things I wish to achieve there at the forefront of my mind - gaining qualified teaching status in the UK being the main one. The teaching experience I gain in the process will pad up my resume nicely too.

So in a year from now I will have either made a niche for myself at my current school or I will be at another more congenial school. Either way I’ll definitely be in a better position - I just have to ride out the storm to get there.  

Last week Friday I had an interview for a job teaching Design Technology at a “technology college” in England. It lasted for an hour and a half. The agency who arranged the interview said it was much longer than normal and predicted a favourable outcome. On Monday I was offered the post - which I accepted.

When I told Nancy about it she laughed and asked me how I am going to manage it. “You might as well have accepted a job teaching Maths or Science”. I was quite upset by her response to be honest. I had been expecting her to say, “Well done you!”, and gush a bit. Still, Nancy knows me better than anyone and I wonder if she is right about me biting of more than I can chew with this job.

It is an all-boys school of nearly a thousand students, each one of them taking Design technology. This year I found the 20-odd students I had for art class enough, so how I will manage with 50 times that amount is something I cannot even imagine yet. I will have to deal with it when I am there.

So why did I accept the post? Well to begin with I don’t mind the challenge (albeit it a masochistic one). I will be learning new skills, like how to handle a variety of machines well enough to instruct others how to do so and how to use different CAD programs. I’ll also gain the confidence I currently lack to present myself to a large group of young people and maintain my ground. I’ll learn to be more organised and more efficient.

From a career point of view, Design technology is a good subject to be able to teach because it is a core subject in the UK with many available posts. So once I am okay with teaching it I will be able to cast a far wider net than I can with only Art and Design when looking for a job. In fact, it will probably stand me in good stead when looking for posts in international schools as well. Teaching in international schools is an excellent way to earn good money as a teacher, see the world and experience different cultures, and it is something I would like to do in the future once I have a solid base in the England. Accepting this post is a tactical step towards that goal.

Nonetheless, I am aware that the job might get the better of me after all. Despite all that I stand to gain the fact remains that I prefer teaching Art and Design, I prefer small classes and I prefer teaching girls. But if it really does turn out terribly I will simply leave it at the end of the semester in June when my probation period ends. Even so I will have gained valuable experience and by then I would have found my feet in England, saved some money and be in a better position to go after jobs without the need of an agency.

Time will tell how things turn out.  

Lately I have been doing little else besides compiling all the work I have done this year into portfolios and studying for my exams, which started today.

Although the first one went well enough, I couldn’t help feeling put out because of it. I just feel too old to still be writing tests.  I don’t mind the idea of studying. That I like. So much so I want to keep on at for the next few years if I can. It’s just the idea of writing tests that gets to me: Having to memorise stuff at home and then sit in a room for three hours and spew it all out again. There’s no point to it anymore.

On Friday I wrote an Afrikaans test to get an endorsement for a second language. Apparently state schools in South Africa require proficiency in at least two of the eleven official languages before they can offer teachers a permanent post. Since I’ll be working at a state school next year I had no choice but do take the test. It wasn’t too bad though. All it entailed was a written comprehension, a piece of writing and a 20-minute oral test afterwards. It was actually quite fun. I was curious to know where my Afrikaans stood anyway because I haven’t spoken more than a few words of it in absolute years. In South Africa Afrikaans people speak Afrikaans to each other and English to pretty much everyone else. The same was true in Taiwan. Although the majority of South Africans there were Afrikaners they always spoke to me in English. Nevertheless, I was glad to discover my Afrikaans is still in working order despite the layer of dust that covers it.

In two short weeks from now my course will be over and I’ll get the certificate that I wanted out of it. It will certainly make me more employable than I was this time a year ago, which is a comfort. To me a teaching qualification is a kind of insurance policy. It guarantees me job in many countries and I feel far more confident to take certain career risks now (like becoming a professional artist) with the sense of security that comes from being able to get a teaching job if it doesn’t work out. Besides, I do like teaching. I could do it as a career quite happily too. It’s just that it's not my dream job… more like my bread and butter job that’s not too bad.

The other day I went into the school where I’ll be working next year and got talking to the sculpture teacher. He is a little older than me and was saying how difficult it was for him to get a job a few years ago. He said that for a long time after the 1994 democratic elections that saw in the new government, white males were the very last choice amongst job applicants, especially for state positions. His CV was constantly overlooked and as an artist he struggled to find a gallery that would even look at his portfolio before they rejected him.

I remember reading and hearing about affirmative action and black empowerment when I was abroad but it never affected me directly. Since I have been back in South Africa the issue has come up a few times, but it was only over the weekend that really struck a chord. I was filling out a hefty application form for the position of a House Warden at one of the student residences at Rhodes University when I came to section that asked to specify if I was Black, Coloured or Asian. Underneath it explained that this information was necessary for equity purposes, but to me it read that the job was not open to whites. I felt incredibly discouraged and reluctant to even complete the form. When I handed it in today I noticed that most of the applications in the box were from black candidates. I would imagine that many whites felt the same way as I did and did not bother wasting their time.

Still, I cling on to the hope that I at least get an interview. A friend of mine who was a Warden for 6 years at the university said that if I get an interview it means that there is a space for a white Warden and that I could well get the job. But she admitted that it is more likely that the university is required to employ a black Warden, even if it means employing someone less qualified or suitable to do the job than other candidates.

I wish that it could be a case of the best man winning, but that is not the way equity works in South Africa. The national rugby team is a perfect example. Even though they won the World Cup this year (which united the country with a sense of pride like nothing else), the coach has been driven to quit and the jubilation that swept through the country has been put out by all the emphasis placed on the fact that the team is made up of mostly white players. It overlooks the fact that the player of year is black and that black people in South Africa are quite comfortable with the idea of rugby being a ‘white’ sport anyway, just as whites are comfortable with the idea of soccer being a ‘black’ sport. The players were chosen according to ability, not colour. One would think that is a more equitable stance.

The employment situation for white males in official posts may be a lot better now that it was for the sculpture teacher I was chatting to, but there is still a lot of reverse discrimination and I have only now began to feel the brunt of it. It is a pity that the powers that be in the South African government practice the same kind of discrimination that they fought so hard to overcome. But such is the world.

In my exam today I wrote an essay on humanism, which argues that people have the capacity to live moral, productive lives in harmony with each other if only they employ reason. Unfortunately this is easier said than done.

For the past few weeks I have been feverishly trying to decide what to do next year once I finish my course. I was considering going to London for the obvious reasons, but then I was offered a job at a lovely school in Cape Town, which made me reconsider staying in South Africa. I was about to accept the job when I was also offered a post at an art school across the road from Rhodes University. The art school job is quite unlike a regular teaching post though. For one it is a specialised school, geared only towards teaching art and design. It is comprised of a sculpture, painting, ceramic, textile, drawing and graphic printmaking studio, each with a designated teacher. The teachers themselves are all artists, so the whole centre is a hub of creativity.

The art school basically caters for the public schools in the Grahamstown area. Pupils who wish to take art as a matric subject come to the art school by bus for their lessons. As such there are kids from three schools who come in at various times in the day for classes. For the kids, the art school is like a huge art classroom off their school campus. For the teachers at the art school, it is like a personal studio where they teach as well. Since there are no assemblies, parent teacher meetings, extra-curricular sport activities and so on at the art school the teachers have far more time on their hands to prepare well conceived lessons and to work on their own projects. Also, with class sizes never more than a few kids it is possible to get to know each pupil and give them proper attention. So unlike regular schools, there are hardly any discipline issues to contend with. The kids are for the most part delighted to get out of their schools for a while to come to the art centre and it clearly shows that they enjoy what they do there.

All in all I really couldn’t wish for a nicer job. Even the late Victorian school buildings and the peaceful area around them are perfect. It is in walking distance to the shops and cafes along High street and close enough to cycle to work every day. And the best thing about working there is that I can continue studying at Rhodes University to get a Masters Degree.

There is one aspect to the job however that is not so great and that is the pay. Some months ago, teachers across South Africa staged a huge four-week strike insisting on a 12% wage increase, with the government eventually agreeing to a 9% increase. Although this a welcome change, government employed teachers still earn an abysmal salary. The money I will earn at the art school will just cover my living expenses. Buying property next year as planned will simply be impossible. Nancy and I could survive off my salary alone, but we will have no way of saving any money unless Nancy finds a job, which may be difficult in Grahamstown. The only way to make a living is for us to start up a business of sorts. With the money I would have used as a deposit on a house I’ll try and set Nancy up with a little shop or something. Meanwhile, I’ll focus on building up a body of artwork that I can exhibit and make money off down the line.

Perhaps the lack of money in teaching is precisely the impetus I need to take my work as an artist very seriously, and for Nancy to seriously figure out how to get a business off the ground. We have both been toying with these ideas since we met, but until last year earning comfortable salaries made us too complacent to actually act on them. Now it is a matter of necessity.

If in a year or two I really have not made it as an artist and Nancy and I have failed to generate money by our own invention, I have no reservation about moving to England to earn those precious Pounds. The opportunity to earn money by teaching there is there to stay, but until I’m forced to take it up, I’m going to make a go of things in South Africa. If I do end up going to the UK down the line, I will at least have gained some teaching experience and hopefully a Masters to my name, which will get me a better job. As for Nancy, her English will have improved dramatically, which will make life in England so much smoother… Anyway, for now I am excited to experience what it is to have an enjoyable job. It is something I have wished for ever since I graduated from university seven years ago.

Almost everyday for the past year I have been going to St. Andrew’s College and the Diocesan School for Girls across the road as part of my teacher training. In that time I have become quite familiar with the two schools, especially College where I did the bulk of my teaching practice. I have made friends with the staff, gotten to know the kids, learnt the layout of the campus and generally figured out how things run.

Just as I am well settled into the school though I am done with my teaching training. Today was the last day I had to go into the schools, and I must say that I am going to miss it. Both of the schools are lovely places to teach. The pupils are polite and respectful and the staff a welcoming team. The schools are beautifully maintained too, which makes working there that much more pleasurable. With all the resources and facilities available at the schools there is no limit to what can be taught or produced by the kids and that too makes them stimulating, creative places to work.

Going into a school next year with the usual discipline issues and a low budget is going to be a tough adjustment. Hopefully I’ll get a job at a school more in line with College and DSG and avoid the harsh reality of teaching that is the norm. I leave for Johannesburg this evening to see my cousin and his wife who were recently married in Italy. While I am up there I’ll drop my CV off at some good schools. Then I fly down to the Cape to see my sister and go for an interview at St. Andrew’s brother school in Claremont. When I return to Grahamstown next week I’ll have an interview lined up at an art school across the road from the university. I would imagine that at least one of the schools will offer me a post for 2008. In the mean time I am still strongly considering going to the UK next year to find a post there. The exchange rate between the British Pound and South African Rand is 14 to 1, which makes it an attractive option from a financial point of view. Also, the chance to live a train ride away from various enchanting European countries is appealing.

My fate at the moment is subject to the way the wind blows, but I am not too put out by that. Whichever direction I go to from here seems fine.

Last week the word for Illustration Friday was “momentum”, which got me thinking because I seem to have lost my momentum during my teaching training recently. Although my lessons have been going well enough and I have built quite a good report with the students and the rest of the staff, I have a growing suspicion that I might not be cut out for teaching after all. The reason being that I am a hopeless disciplinarian.

When I am faced with a class of well-behaved intelligent kids I have no problem teaching them. All my best qualities as a teacher come to the fore, my lessons are enjoyable and productive and I quickly develop a close relationship with the class. But when I am faced with a class of ruffians I am at a loss. I just don’t have it in me to be domineering. I absolutely hate making people do things they don’t want to do and usually I avoid situations where that is required of me. If a student is not interested in the subjects I teach, I have no desire to persuade him or her otherwise. If they don’t do their work and fail their exams I don’t particularly care. I am exclusively interested in the people who take Art and Design because they want to and they want to get somewhere with it. For these people I will do all that I can to help them achieve their goals.

To reach the people who want to learn there needs to be a conductive learning environment though and that is where the policing work in teaching comes in. Even the best of classes will have the odd kid who wants to tip the apple cart and it is up to me to put kids like these in their place. But I am so terrible at it. I don’t yell at them, I don’t come across is threatening and I don’t punish them. I have always relied on treating the students I teach, even those who give me a hard time, with respect and kindness. It is a tightrope to walk though because it is easily seen as a weakness and a license to push me even further. My classes therefore go either very, very well, or not well at all.

Thankfully most of my classes go well, which makes the rowdy, hard to control ones seem less important. Still, after teaching a difficult class I always ask myself the same question: What am I thinking going into teaching? I must be mad!