What do you wanna be when you grow up?
There’s a lot riding on the answer to that question, right?!
This year feels like the weirdest year to have finished my teaching career. And I wonder if I will ever make peace with leaving a small group of year 11’s who I’d taught since year 7 mid way through the strangest year of their lives (though I did leave them in very excellent hands).
Of all the things I’ve seen about exam results this summer, one thing hit a nerve….
A girl. Who’d been downgraded by 2 grades across the board who cried that her life was over. At 18. 😢 I could feel her broken heart and at the same time I was in utter despair at a system that makes teenagers feel like this.
My own education story was not a straight forward one. My school teachers were so sure I wouldn't get the grades to go to sixth form college that they made me have 4 interviews at the tech college to decide on some vocational courses. I refused to decide, because I WAS doing A Levels.
And I did... Just getting the grades to get in.
I remember my sixth form psych teacher whispering to my parents at parents evening 'she might just have to face the fact that she isn't bright enough to go to university'.
I failed my Biology A Level (having got a B in my mock.. what can I say, I panicked!), scraped a grade in Law (why I chose to do an A Level in Law I can’t really remember*!!) and got a C in Psychology.
My university contacted me and said 'come anyway - here's a foundation year you can do before your degree instead'.
So I did.
Somehow(!) I ended up teaching Science, for 14 years. I niched in teaching students who struggled with education, either because of behaviour or their ability to understand it. And I LOVED it. I was in the middle of the upper pay scale and coordinator of the Key Stage 3 Science Curriculum. I thought I would teach until retirement.
But then one day, I realised I had found my summit of that particular ‘mountain’ and I was done looking at the view.
So I left**, to find another 'mountain to climb'.
You don't have to be one thing in your life.
If you do decide there is one thing you want to do, amazing. Go for it. But also be open to what God/life/the universe (who or whatever you believe in) might have in store for you.
And be prepared for it to not look like what you thought!
hw.x
*this is a total lie… I was absolutely channelling my inner Elle Woods.
**of course, the reality was quite a lot more complicated... but this is how I’m making sense of it.
