As I write this diary entry, it is Tuesday – the second day back after the half-term break – and I am conscious that I would like to “hit the ground running” as we prepare for the push towards Christmas.
There has certainly been no slow ease back into the school week, although due to our two-week timetable I did have a nice “easy” three-lesson day yesterday.
The students seemed to have settled down straight away and all seems normal again. However, I am so tired. You would think that a week off would help refresh me. Making me bright-eyed and bushy tailed ready for the next half-term ahead.
But it feels like the week off is already a distant memory. I am back into the routines of the week and ready for the next long, but hopefully rewarding half-term.
As I have already said, there is no such thing as a slow ease back into work and this week has a lot going on. After-school on Thursday we have the sixth form open evening. This is where year 11 and external students come in to look at A level options and try to decide what they are going to do next year – and ultimately where they aspire to go in life.
Just today this topic came up in one of my year 11 lessons. This is a group that I usually do not look forward to teaching; a lot of students in the group do not have a natural love of chemistry.
However, it was great to see the passion that they have for other subjects inside school. As they worked, I discussed with some of them their plans and what they would like to do later on in life. This is something I haven’t done before with many of my groups.
I could see straight away that it changed the student-teacher relationship. Some of them wanted opinions or advice, which we quietly discussed while they completed the work at hand.
Overall it was a great lesson. I think part of the reason is because of something a teacher in my training once told me: “Be friendly, but don’t be a friend.”
I think this is really the key when engaging students in all aspects of school life. It would have been really easy for me to have dismissed chat about A level options in my lesson, saying “that’s not relevant to today’s work”. But, that really wouldn’t have achieved anything.
Instead, I feel that by being friendly and helping in the conversation, the group engaged and enjoyed the lesson more. Okay, there was off-topic chat, but the students all competed the work set (I usually have to push this group along to complete tasks).
It was really nice and actually a very enjoyable conversation, finding out about these students’ ambitions and aspirations.
This evening I am helping to run the school’s STEM club. I will be taking around 10 students and running an investigation on colours in fireworks and tracer ammunition. I am really excited about this. It is the first time I have run an extra-curricular activity on my own and I love having the opportunity to make science come alive by applying it to fun and exciting real-life examples.
I might not have had any earth-shattering revelations yet in this first week back. However, I have started to see that maybe, just maybe I have been a little tightly strung with some of my groups. I know there’s the controversial “don’t smile ‘til Christmas”, but I think it’s about time to be a little more human with the groups that have shown me they can work effectively.
- SecEd’s NQT diarist this year is a teacher of science from a school in the Midlands.