The Adventure of the Personal Victory

In which I have some success...

I've been meaning to write this post for about a month but haven't got around to it. I'm not sure why. I think there's a part of me that thinks I've fallen into some unrealistic fantasy and at any minute I will wake up. 

On an ordinary Tuesday morning, I opened up my emails and received the news. I am now a qualified teacher. I'll be honest, I had to go and have a moment alone because I was somewhat overcome with emotion. There may have been a tear or two. 

It feels like a big personal victory to me. I started university in 2010 to gain this qualification but things went wrong in the dying months of the course and I left uni in 2014 without a teaching qualification and a degree that was no use for anything else. I was traumatized by a bad experience and my already low self-esteem hit rock bottom. I basically spent the next six years trying to recover and rebuild without really any direction in my life. 

Covid uprooted all our lives and the long period I had off work because of it gave me the time for reflection I probably should have had many years before. It was time to make a decision about my future and I, and indeed everyone around me, knew that teaching was the thing I should be doing. Even then I postponed my application for a year because I was so nervous about doing it and didn't start my second attempt until September 2022. 

For some reason, I always find it difficult to say that I am good at something but you know what, I nailed that course. The combination of decent writing skills and my previous studies meant I smashed the written elements of the course. In the classroom, I was observed regularly by people I know and complete strangers and taught lots of great lessons. I was terrified about going to a mainstream school but after a few weeks that clicked and I taught some genuinely fantastic lessons that I didn't even realise I was capable of. Somehow along the way, I ended up taking on my own class as an unqualified teacher- I don't recommend full-time teaching and completing an intense teaching qualification at the same time- but it continued to go well and eventually, a certificate arrived. 

Whilst there was some debate to be had about where I'd teach, perhaps inevitably I ended up applying for a teaching job at my current school. Interviews are really not my strong point and I also had to do a presentation. My last experience of such a thing was when I presented my dissertation research at a university in Lativa in 2014 only a few weeks after failing to obtain my qualification. I stumbled through a presentation to a packed out room of an international audience despite knowing the subject inside out. This time around I may have had a small audience but the stakes felt higher because success or failure here would impact my whole life. I absolutely nailed that presentation and as I concluded I felt a swelling of self-pride that was utterly unfamiliar to me. 

As I write, I'm having a relaxing summer holiday after an intense year and before my first official year of teaching. New challenges lay ahead but I feel filled with a new sense of purpose and feel able to deal with anything that is thrown at me (both figuratively and literally). My twenties really sucked but so far at least, my thirties have been pretty great. I still don't feel like the finished article personally or professionally but I am a hell of a lot more sure of myself than I've ever been before. 

Before I end, I should mention that I wouldn't have got here without the support of so many wonderful people, some of whom will probably end up reading this. There's a small number of friends who have been hugely supportive of my fluctuating mental health over the years and without these people I know I would never have even attempted to reach this stage. The whole school community was so supportive from the leadership team who believed in me more than I did to the wonderful teaching assistants in my own class who I could always rely on. There were many people during my course who advised and supported me but none more so than my mentor. I've never properly found the words to thank her for her time and support and I suspect she feels she did very little but her presence was so important to me during this process and I will be grateful to her for the rest of my life. 

I'm not sure how often I'll be writing here in the coming months but I suspect I will be popping up every now and then when I have things to say. Thanks, as always, for reading.

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