‘I better give you advice on what it takes to be a teacher’

Dear B_____, Well, you decided to go into teacher training. I guess this means I’m your favourite parent – after all, I inspired you to become an English teacher like me. Looking back to when you and your younger sister played teacher, I think I better give you some advice, or at least let you in on some secrets, on what it really takes to be a secondary schoolteacher. You have to know and love your subject. This is a basic requirement. How can you teach something that you don’t love? With this comes the understanding that you are an expert in that subject. Don’t forget that you have a degree in English. Reading books, watching films, going to plays, is now considered “work”, so don’t listen to anyone who says you don’t work during your time off. Pedagogy, how you teach, and classroom management happen at the same time. We all teach in our own idiosyncratic ways. It’ll take you years to find out the best approach for you. Experiment with your pedagogy, but you should be able to go into the class with just a book and teach. Use technology if you want, when you want, but never forget the simplicity of reading, talking, writing. You will spend five years working out the best way to teach. Then you’ll realise that you still haven’t a clue and, after another five, you’ll realise that you have to keep changing and adapting to whatever group is in front of you. Ignore teachers who tell you, “This is the only way to teach” – they’re egotists and should be disregarded. [ Interviewing Gen Z teachers: A candidate told me I was in a bidding war for herOpens in new window ] This is the first real secret: be willing to abandon one approach if it doesn’t work for a particular cohort of students. This is because it is not about you, it is all about the student. And I’m using the singular on purpose. It is not about the student body, but about the individual student in front of you. A teacher’s role is that of a character actor there to facilitate the protagonist’s plot, their six-year arc. We will be forgotten, only story fragments will remain, told and retold until the truth disappears to be replaced by myths. But that’s all we ever were in the first place; mythic creatures, unseen in the real world, only existing in context, in the other place, the place the hero must travel through.