Wednesday, June 27, 2007

SSE Day 3

I am experiencing considerable "the grass is greener" type thoughts. My metro horoscope told me I would.

Another TFer was in school with me today, on the last day of his own Second School Experience. He's a maths teacher at Highbury Grove, and his school sounds just as rough as mine. We both spent much of the day sharing anecdotes and generally winding up the TFers at Mulberry about how easy their jobs were compared to ours. Obviously I don't believe that - teaching is hard everywhere, and I can see working with the Mulberry girls would also definitely have its downsides e.g. the incessant chatter, the bitchiness of girls, EAL demands including the use of Bengali in the classroom (am continually paranoid they are saying bad things...in fact, rule 7 of the classroom rules clearly states pupils should only be using English in the classroom unless given permission to do otherwise).

Nevertheless, other members of the maths department at Mulberry felt that some schools were certainly tougher places to work in than others. Mulberry seems to be a lovely training environment, and I'm pretty sure I would have done well there. I'm also pretty sure the TFers at Mulberry would have survived at my academy. But would they be as good teachers now if they'd had to go through our experiences? Like I say, the grass is always greener....

Can you figure out which kids belong to which school?