This time of year is when the pressure truly mounts up on a teacher. Students are rarely taught time management skills, as the teachers who taught them rarely are too.
Time management is not a natural way of being. Essentially, time-management involves subverting your instincts to do that which is immediately in front of you in order to achieve something else. Pretty much all of what I am doing at the moment is subverting various aspects of myself in order to achieve something else.
I am subverting the furniture I have accumulated and the car I have purchased in order to achieve something else.
I have stepped back from relationships somewhat in order to achieve something else.
I have chosen to sacrifice more of my time in the evenings in order to achieve something else.
In all of these things and more, I am benefitted by the smallness of my life to date. I believe I would to epic things when I was younger. This was down to my imagination and my reading and my small travels rather than anything given to me. One quality that I am reminded of by these ideas is that lack of ambition given to me by my mother and my father. I see myself driving the quietly winding hedges that shadow the road near my childhood home as I write those words.
That smallness has meant that I, aside from what unchurched faith I have nurtured, I have felt sovereign over that which defines me. I feel aware of myself.
I remember in my rough-and-tumble experience of inner-city teaching (which I no longer do) that I passed a senior leader on some stairs. Having organised a fairly ambitious public event, she praised me for my endeavour. I politely accepted this, but felt little of the glow of her definition. Instead, her appreciation was a shadowy gloss over the reasons why I had given so much of myself to that task I had done.
And so this leads me to the real reason why I want to teach abroad. When I started teaching in this 'Good with outstanding features' secondary school, I would put most of myself into the experience. I loved my lessons, and they excited me. I remember my profound exhilaration each lesson as what I had conceived was lived into being. Of course, various reasons knocked the shine from the surface of my ambition, and that wasn't an entirely bad thing.
I detest the complaints of my school right now. Cynicism and sarcasm are essential teaching tools in order to manage, with due humour, the tension of working closely with others. Yet negativity is, for me, the inability to create purpose in what you do. It is the angsty ennui of the puppet, of the teacher who chooses to not define that which they want to do.
You can understand why, with the pressures of 'New' Ofsted and the like why that might be.
Ultimately, though, you need an excited leader with a profound and confident vision of what they do, and why they do it, in order to live through such times.
And that is a statement for all times.
My time at the moment is spent thinking more pertinently about my purpose. That, and putting things into piles...
Time management is not a natural way of being. Essentially, time-management involves subverting your instincts to do that which is immediately in front of you in order to achieve something else. Pretty much all of what I am doing at the moment is subverting various aspects of myself in order to achieve something else.
I am subverting the furniture I have accumulated and the car I have purchased in order to achieve something else.
I have stepped back from relationships somewhat in order to achieve something else.
I have chosen to sacrifice more of my time in the evenings in order to achieve something else.
In all of these things and more, I am benefitted by the smallness of my life to date. I believe I would to epic things when I was younger. This was down to my imagination and my reading and my small travels rather than anything given to me. One quality that I am reminded of by these ideas is that lack of ambition given to me by my mother and my father. I see myself driving the quietly winding hedges that shadow the road near my childhood home as I write those words.
That smallness has meant that I, aside from what unchurched faith I have nurtured, I have felt sovereign over that which defines me. I feel aware of myself.
I remember in my rough-and-tumble experience of inner-city teaching (which I no longer do) that I passed a senior leader on some stairs. Having organised a fairly ambitious public event, she praised me for my endeavour. I politely accepted this, but felt little of the glow of her definition. Instead, her appreciation was a shadowy gloss over the reasons why I had given so much of myself to that task I had done.
And so this leads me to the real reason why I want to teach abroad. When I started teaching in this 'Good with outstanding features' secondary school, I would put most of myself into the experience. I loved my lessons, and they excited me. I remember my profound exhilaration each lesson as what I had conceived was lived into being. Of course, various reasons knocked the shine from the surface of my ambition, and that wasn't an entirely bad thing.
I detest the complaints of my school right now. Cynicism and sarcasm are essential teaching tools in order to manage, with due humour, the tension of working closely with others. Yet negativity is, for me, the inability to create purpose in what you do. It is the angsty ennui of the puppet, of the teacher who chooses to not define that which they want to do.
You can understand why, with the pressures of 'New' Ofsted and the like why that might be.
Ultimately, though, you need an excited leader with a profound and confident vision of what they do, and why they do it, in order to live through such times.
And that is a statement for all times.
My time at the moment is spent thinking more pertinently about my purpose. That, and putting things into piles...
