Tag: teachers

Finding My Place: Returning to School After Six Years Away

This week, I returned to work in a primary school in a supernumerary capacity. For the past six years, I have been working for the Department of Education as a literacy leader. Now, I am back, ready to assist a school in whatever way I can.

The campus is large, and it will no doubt take me some time to find where everything is located. The number of staff is daunting – so many people and many of them newbies like me. I hope they will all wear their name tags for quite a while. During staff development days, we address each other by our first names. Once the students are back, I will have to relearn the names so I can address them more formally.

Those of us who were new watched at a more leisurely pace, knowing that soon, we too would be caught up in the whirlwind once our roles became clear. I found myself in that liminal space where I was both there and not quite there at the same time. It is an odd space to inhabit.

Yet it all felt so familiar. Finding the office, the staff room, a desk. Signing on, looking for accustomed procedures and then making myself useful in whatever way I could. The teachers were friendly and kind. It makes such a difference to be welcomed and made to feel that I belong.

My role will become clear in time, and I will make use of this opportunity to learn and grow. My hope is that I can stay a while and that I am not moved on too quickly. It takes time to establish trusting relationships and make a difference in an organisation. Because in the end, what truly matters is this: to leave a mark, to uplift teachers, and to shape the lives of the students they teach.

School holidays

For many years as a teacher, I lived my life in ten-week blocks. The first few weeks of term were always crazy busy as I wrote programs, prepared for extra-curricular activities and of course faced the day-to-day challenges of teaching up to 30 children. During the term, very little was done on the home front except for cooking, shopping, washing, and keeping a basic level of hygiene around the house.  Everything else was put on the backburner until ‘the holidays.’ Inevitably, when those two weeks arrived, the first week was spent in a stupor on the lounge. The best I could do was to finally read a novel or two. The second week, I madly spent tidying up and trying to get ready for the term. At the end of the year, during those blissful five weeks off, I would finally relax and wonder how I would ever ramp up again to face a new year, but I somehow, I did.

For the past four years I have been in the privileged position of mainly working from an office and going into schools assisting teachers with improving their students’ literacy. I have set lunch breaks, can make a cup of tea whenever I want, I have weekends off, and rarely bring work home. It is the closest I have come to a ‘work-life-balance.’ My heart goes out to the teachers in front of classes who must cope with the pressures of teaching, the increasing burden of admin and the expectation to constantly improve their practice. Whenever I am in schools, I do my utmost to help teachers in ways that don’t increase their already unsustainable workload. I have not forgotten what it is like at the chalkface.

These school holidays, I am taking a week off to see my sister, elderly mother-in-law, and my daughter. That’s quite a bit in a week, especially as I will travel several hundred kilometres. When I get home, I will be going straight back to work, and everything will be left in the state that it was in before I left. But unlike my colleagues at school, I know it will only take me a weekend to catch up. So, these school holidays, spare a thought for teachers who have not only finished a long term of teaching but have also written reports, had parent-teacher interviews, spent hours on playground duty and are now preparing for the term ahead. I have nothing but admiration and respect for everything that teachers manage to accomplish.