Dear Me

Letter to self from a trainee teacher

As I have previously mentioned, the academic year of 2021/22 saw me working towards a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) with the goal of becoming a secondary school Science teacher.

The first half of September was spent in a relatively standard University classroom setting, with about four teachers-turned-lecturers taking turns giving us a crash course on pedagogy, behaviour management, how schools work, and whatever you can think of that would scare you if you’d never taught before and you were told you’d need to go teach a lesson to actual kids tomorrow. (Not to mention the occasional much less “technical” session comprised of “open” discussions of the role of schools in society and our social “duties” as teachers.)

Then for the rest of the month we were gradually weaned off the lecture hall and made to learn by spending most of our time in a placement school, at first mostly observing lessons and eventually mostly teaching them – as the usual class teacher observed so they could subsequently help us reflect on all the aspects of the lesson that had gone well and “not so well”. (Which I know sounds like complaining, but I still think was the good kind of painful. I at least often find that being forced to rebuild my ego over and over again is an excellent way to learn and build confidence in the long run.)

After that, my personal experience (which was very influenced by the additional constant demand that a one-year-old kept on my energy) was that each month was more intense and more demanding and more exhausting than the last. Before September I had no idea how tired I would be feeling throughout October, but the physical and mental exhaustion I was feeling by the end of June were beyond my ability to comprehend in October.

I was looking for an illustration for this post which conveyed what it felt like to go through the process of training to be a teacher. I found this meme here. This meme is a lie: at this point, Frodo was contemplating the the end of his ordeal – sure, he was exhausted beyond his natural limits, but he could feel the comfort of his success and the relief of imminent rest. A student teacher at the end of their first month might be sharing Frodo’s physical condition, but has no idea how much more demanding the months to come will be – plus they have a very clear notion of how inadequate they still are as teachers.

Anyway, more insights from my brief time (however long it felt) spent becoming a qualified teacher may come up in later posts. What I want to show you today is something I found when going through my PGCE stuff sorting what I could toss and what I wanted to archive (so if tomorrow I decide to give a teaching career another go I will be ready for it). At some point during that first month at University, having already experienced some time (one full week, I believe) at school, we were asked to write letters to our future selves and put them in envelopes to be returned to us a week or two before the completion of our teaching degrees. I forget what the full purpose of this was, but mostly I saw it as a way to be able to later look back on our progress and feel good about ourselves. Anyway, I certainly enjoyed rerereading it and the perspective it gave me of one of the most bittersweet experiences in my life. I hope you enjoy it too.

19th September 2021

Dear me,

I’m you from not long ago. I am writing to you across our light-cone to fulfill my PGCE written task for this week – and to congratulate you on how much you’ve learnt and grown and all that jazz (at any rate, I expect they won’t give this to you on the odd chance things go horribly wrong and that’s not the case).

This past week was truly exhausting¹. The plan was to work hard during the day, get some needed extra work done at the end of the day, and have some free time for writing² and relaxation… How you must be laughing at such naïvety! As it turns out, fatigue, [1-year-old’s name], and other responsibilities took away all the after-school time – and here I am, Sunday afternoon, finishing this up less than 24h ahead of the deadline. And yet I still believe, I do, that I’ll get used to this routine and be able to pull off that sort of weekly expectation consistently. How you must be laughing at such naïvety! (Or did this actually work out? Well done to you if it did.³)

On Thursday, on my first day at school, I was taken aback by and thoroughly enjoyed my marvelous and surreal interaction with little L. E. from year 7. Do you remember that feeling? Did you get to follow up with her about her theory⁴? That one certainly has some of the important qualities for becoming a scientist that matters. I hope you’re still looking out for that, and eager to nourish those kinds of potential.

Are you now able to routinely deal with the administrative side of teaching? That side looks seriously scary to me! Well done if you are!

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I hope teaching has been as rewarding and stimulating and as much fun as I’m hoping it will be⁵! (Even if it’s also been as tough and frustrating as I’m thinking it will be⁶.) That is the most important thing.

Yours sincerely,

José Vieira

Footnotes

1. I laugh-cry rereading this bit. I truly thought I was exhausted. Turns out I was yet to learn the true meaning of the word “exhausted”.

2. Yes, at this stage I still thought I would be able to keep writing for this blog without any hiatus. I thought maybe I might do a few more “light” posts with just one translated poem or something. But I actually believed I would be able to keep going. In my defence, after this letter I was still able to finish two more posts!

3. Well… Not exactly…

4. Sadly that turned out to be my only interaction with little L. E. I do still wonder what she’s been up to though. You see, during one of the very first lessons I got to observe in school, this little girl coyly asked me “Are you a Science teacher?” I told her I was trying to become one, and she very shyly told me she had “a theory”. I asked her what her theory was and her face just lit up: she proceeded to excitedly draw a few diagrams on a piece of paper as she explained to me how she thought a complex optical illusion (based on a mirage-like mechanism you could believe if you knew what happens to light in mirages but not why) could make an actually-flat Earth appear to be round. I remember having made a very conscious effort not to display any outward sign that could be interpreted as dismissiveness or derision. Sure, the “theory” was scientifically unsound, to say the least, and I was left wondering what sort of influences made such a girl come up with such a complicated mechanism to salvage the idea of a flat Earth (but in a way that tried to engage with what evidence she was aware of for the Earth’s roundness!). But this girl had also clearly demonstrated: (a) familiarity with some scientific concepts which she couldn’t have learnt about at school yet (b) interest in trying to devise a scientific explanation for a perceived “fact” (c) a hell of a lot of creativity in weaving together what concepts of physics she had at her disposal into a coherent-sounding model. I was so excited! This is the sort of girl who I am sure has everything to become a brilliant physicist if only she can learn some good epistemic hygiene. So I did my best to smile and praise her for these qualities I could glimpse from her exposition, and told her I did not think her theory was up to the standards of a proper scientific theory. I then gave her a few questions to ponder on, about what someone believing her theory might expect to see in the world that someone else might not, and about other spheres we often come about in nature. I like to think those lines of enquiry did lead her down the right path, and she did end our interaction with an expression of how she couldn’t wait to properly think about the stuff I’d given her to think about… But it sure would have been nice to follow up. Alas, I never even observed that class again.

5. Knowing I’m no longer teaching you could guess that I did not in fact find teaching to be “as rewarding and stimulating and as much fun as [I was hoping it to be]”. As a matter of fact, you would be wrong. At the time I had naïvely assumed that if I didn’t end up a career teacher it would be because I didn’t love the reality of teaching in a classroom as much as the idea of it. As it turns out, I did love that reality: it was different than expected in many ways, but it enabled me to experience highs like nothing else. I just failed to properly account for all the constraints teaching would bring to my life outside of the classroom (you know, small things like how many pairs of hours I got to sleep, or how much I could play with my son without feeling guilty about the work I wasn’t doing). In the end, I did truly love teaching; just not being a teacher.

6. Amen!