Doing a PGCE and cant take it anymore

January 28, 2008 at 12:15 am · Filed under Blogroll, city life, computing, downsizing, dropping out, IT, Just in time, PGCE, Student Teachers, teacher training, teaching

That’s not actually how I feel at the moment, but it is something, if you type into a search engine, that will send you careering down the information superhighway to this blog. Strangely, googling “Doing a PGCE and having an absolutely splendid time” doesn’t register at all, so I guess that tells me something about where I’m at.

Last week was a bit of an epiphany. Well, epiphany is a bit strong, but I’ve just finished a draft of my RE assignment (hoorah!) and my brain is steeped in religious sounding words. If your substance is an insult to the readers intelligence, you better have some nice window dressing to wrap it in (to be clear, I’m talking about my RE assignment here, not the blog).

Following my observed lesson early in the week, when an academic expert comes in to watch you teach and tell you exactly how inept you are, one piece of feedback I got was that I should go down the pub. I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone in authority to tell me that. Unfortunately she didn’t write that down. There was a lot of stuff that she did write down, and I’m not sure that it was absolutely essential that she used red biro for doing so, but I’ve chosen not to dwell on that, but concentrate on that pearl of wisdom – “go down the pub”. Epiphany.

Its not clear exactly why she gave that advice. If it was because of the way that I looked, I think she would have said “go to bed”. More likely, she had been observing other students, and had come to the conclusion that something needed to be done to stop the college having a bad completion rate due to suicide.

But good advice is good advice, so I followed it. I went to the pub with my fellow student for a couple of glasses after school. And then went to the pub in the evening, for a few more glasses and a couple of pints of beer.

Unfortunately, my ineptitude in teaching is matched only by ineptitude in drinking (I don’t need an academic to provide this piece of self-knowledge), so not only did I lose that evening in terms of doing my preparation, but the following day as well. I did have one lesson to teach, and either the class was very good, or I was concentrating so hard on physical survival that I didn’t notice, but teaching seemed fine (maybe there is a lesson here). But that meant that there were 2 nights where I wasn’t up until the small hours preparing lessons, and the week seemed to pan out just fine. Epiphany.

And so, this weekend, I haven’t done any lesson preparation. To be fair, for one reason or another I don’t have to teach until later in the week, but still, I’ve made the conscious decision not to spend every waking minute immersed in planning all these lessons, but to see how it works winging it a little bit more – “just in time” rather than “just in case”. Of course, I wont know until later in the week how this pans out for me, but its looking good from where I’m sitting now.

And it does mean that I’ve been able to get a draft together for my RE assignment. I think maybe, just maybe, it will get me a pass. I’m not looking for glory here, a “this guy is really taking the piss but he seems to have met most of the criteria so I guess we should pass him” is absolutely fine by me.

This really should make me feel quite good, but a couple of things are disturbing my happy state of mind. Firstly, I can’t help myself feeling a little guilty about producing work of such appalling quality, and secondly, it did give me the chance to look at what I need to do for my science assignment. This is twice as long as the RE assignment, has a reading list as long as something that is really, really long, and I am told is marked a lot more strictly.

Only one thing to do at a time like this, follow the sage advice of my observer.

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