On my About Me page, I mention that I am a soon to be History teacher in training, and I decided that I wanted to address that with this post, because this page is something that I plan to continue with throughout my teaching journey.
This post is hopefully going to give an idea of my first experiences as a teacher and also why I want to be a teacher. “But how can you talk about your first experiences as a teacher if you haven’t started training yet?”, I hear you ask. Well I am fortunate enough to have had a few chances to get some experience as a teacher prior to starting my training, which I will go into very shortly.
So, early experiences of teaching. The first real look into the world of teaching was in an environment where I wasn’t technically a teacher. During the summer of 2019 I was lucky enough to get a job working as a team leader for the National Citizen Service, or NCS. This is a programme run across the country for mostly 16-17 year olds, where they can learn life skills and help their communities. My role as a team leader was to help guide these young people in their development over a 3 week period. Looking after these young people and helping guide them was a fantastic experience and one that overall I felt very rewarded by. My second experience as a teacher is my current job, where I work as a cover teacher at my old high school. I am incredibly lucky to be in this job and overall it has shown me that being a teacher really is what I want to do as a career.
When it comes to why I want to be a teacher, I think it can be traced back to two events in my past, that realistically are quite similar in nature. During my time in sixth form, I had to resit year 12, and at university I had to resit my third year. In both of these situations, I wasn’t sure whether I would manage to finish my time at these institutions. And honestly, if it hadn’t been for the encouragement of certain teachers and lecturers in both situations, I may not have gotten any of the qualifications I now have. The reason I want to be a teacher is because I want to do for others what was done for me, because the support of those teachers and lecturers convinced me that I could finish my qualifications, and now I can sit here knowing that I managed it, and that’s because of the encouragement of my teachers. I know how much it meant to me to have teachers who believed in me, so I want to make that difference to others. Because sometimes, having someone believe in you, when maybe no one else does, can make a world of difference.
So my hope for this is to have given an insight into my reasoning for becoming a teacher, and also to have shown that positive mentality that can make all the difference to someone who really needs it.
Be the change people, and this is Conor, signing off
