UTTER TERROR OF MY FIRST TERM

BY THE end of the first day as a trainee teacher, I am wet with sweat. There are great circles under my arms and my hair is stuck to my head.

I remember some advice given by a teacher on how to survive the first term, which at the time I thought was an exaggeration. ‘Wear a jacket you hate — you’ll sweat so much it’ll never recover.’

Now I must face my 35-year-old mentor Yasmeen, who will be responsible for me and my progress. On a sheet of A4 paper, she has drawn two columns headed WWW and EBI — ‘What Went Well’ and ‘Even Better If’.

In my previous life at the Financial Times, I would have scorned these euphemistic acronyms. Now I must take them seriously.

What went well, it turns out, is I have a good teacher presence. What went badly was everything else.

The EBI column contains 23 items, starting: too fast; mistake on the board; workings not clear; Jamal didn’t understand; Yunus was looking out of the window.

Tomorrow I have the same class for a double lesson and I haven’t started planning.

I stay up until 1am preparing my slides and the next day, stressed and bleary, I make more mistakes on the board.

On Friday I go for drinks with my maths colleagues. We start drinking at 4.45pm and an hour later I’m really enjoying myself.

They are mystified as to why I would have taken a pay cut to be a teacher, but I think they are flattered that I have chosen to do what they do. I buy another round, glowing inside at how well I’m fitting in. But then

Roisin, a 25-year-old teacher from Ireland who I’ve singled out as a future friend, turns to me and says: ‘You really remind me of my grandmother.’

Two weeks pass. The unwanted thought that I really might not be any good at teaching is starting to occur to me.

At least I’ve proved I’m good at other things. This thought is allowing my ego to hold up, just about, though no one could care less that I used to write decent columns on the FT. The students have never even heard of it.

‘How long are you going to stick with teaching?’ asks the regular teacher of my class during a particularly bad post-mortem. Out of nowhere comes my defiant answer: I am going to teach until I’m 75. She looks incredulous but the more incredulous she is, the more determined I am to prove her wrong.

When I go back after half-term, the head of maths comes to observe me. I am eager to impress and have planned a careful lesson teaching Year 7s.

The department head invites me into her office afterwards and tells me the things I know I’m bad at: careless modelling, not enough structure, too many students calling out answers. Then she says the reason they were calling out was that they were excited and — here was the heart of the problem — I had made them excited by being excited myself.

I look at her goody-goody plait and seethe. I want to say: I fundamentally disagree with your view on education. Anything that makes them excited is good. And I would much rather have an exciting teacher than a boring one. More than that, I want to say: shove your job. I refuse to be a robot.

For now, I have to get a grip. ‘Thank you so much,’ I say. ‘That is really useful feedback.’ I may not be good at teaching but I am good at office politics, having built up my skill over 30 years.

This time, I am pretty sure I nailed it: I don’t think she can see the mutiny behind my eyes.