Be afraid, be very afraid. My PGCE course starts tomorrow, and I’m scared witless. For those fans of intertextuality, you may have got the reference to dated 70’s horror films, and that is exactly what I feel like, that I’m stepping into a 70’s horror film. This isn’t helped by the gothic building of St. Martha’s, its even got battlements for goodness sake. If Hammer House of Horror never made a film there, someone should be sacked.
However, the source of my fear is not a large shark / metamorphosis into a fly / guys in cloaks with fangs, it’s that I’ve got to start being a student again. I haven’t done this for 20 years, and I’ve no idea if I can still do it. It’s not just the passage of time, it’s the processes that happen with time, like losing brain cells. When those die you don’t get them back. I had a peak of grey matter, it was a long time ago, and it’s been down hill all the way since then, ably assisted by my not altogether successful attempt to drink as much alcohol as possible whilst I was still young enough. Once I left college I had no intention of ever going back, those brain cells that I had been happily killing, I weren’t gonna use them no more. Until now.
My fears have not been eased by the reaction of people I know. The typical reaction, as articulated by the “Nicest Person in the World” (NPiTW – see “Rescuing my future career – Part one” below) is that my experience gives me many compensations for this lack of brain cells. And it may well be the case that in teaching this is true. But tomorrow, I’m not going to be facing a bunch of kids in a classroom, I’m presumably going to be sitting in a lecture hall trying to assimilate sufficient information to be able to complete essays and whatever else I need to do to complete the academic (sic) elements of the course.
This feeling of doom has not been helped with my experience over the last few weeks with the reading list. I’ve got those 19 books to read and I’ve put a major dent in the reading list (along with some rainforest somewhere, those books take up a lot of real estate on the book shelves). I’ve made some good progress on reading them, but I can’t say that I’ve actually learnt anything. Without cheating, can you remember what is written at the beginning of this post? No? Well that’s exactly how I feel about many hundreds of pages on the mystical art of teaching of only recently read.
Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, no, not really.
