Chapter Text
“You need to give me your complete lesson plans.”
I stare across at where my ‘mentor’, Isobelle, is frowning at me. Keeping my jaw clenched instead of snapping back at her, I do my best to hide the irritation that is flaring up inside me. I have student loans left over from my failed attempt at being an academic, I need this job to work out. I can’t shove another career down the drain.
Mentally, I take a deep breath. She’s been on my case for being snappish before, even when I haven’t been trying to be, even when I don’t know what she means because I’m certain I’ve replied normally. I need to get this right.
“They just take so long to write out properly,” I counter. “Fifteen minutes for each one, when I could be doing other things. I know what I’m doing now, surely it’s a better use of my time to just scribble them down in a notebook.”
“So, you have better things to do with your time?”
I frown. “Well, yes?” There’s all the reading up on the curriculum I have to do, the notebooks to grade that I need to balance on the back of my bike every night, not to mention all the resources I need to prepare from scratch. I’m living off coffee and takeout and barely six hours sleep. They keep telling me to manage my time better, surely not writing detailed lesson plans is the way to go about it?
She steeples her hands together. “Well, if that’s the way you feel then maybe teaching isn’t for you. Teaching is for people who care to put the time in.”
I stare at her. I don’t understand how she could have gotten that impression? I do care. A heck of a lot more than I thought I would when Marissa pressured me into teaching to stop me becoming an angry, depressed blob on her couch for the rest of my life. Why did I give her the impression that I don’t want this?
“I am putting the time in,” I argue. “I’m spending all my time on this, I’m going to bed at midnight, I barely have time for anything that I used to do, I just don’t understand why I can’t just talk you through what my lesson plans are.”
Isobelle’s mouth is scrunched into a line that I can only describe as sceptical and disappointed. I clench my fists together. Adults who don’t want to end up homeless don’t get the urge to throw chairs halfway across the room. “The lesson plans are a requirement of the course. Every student teacher is required to do them properly. Gabrielle seems to manage it.”
I stop trying to meet her gaze, staring down at my hands instead, blinking rapidly as exhausted and frustrated tears start to gather at the corners of my eyes, embarrassment flaring through me. Gabrielle seems to be able to manage anything, including a second job at the weekends - ‘I guess I’d just be bored without it!’ - while all I seem to be doing is lying down in a darkened room feeling exhausted. She doesn’t have problems with time management or lesson planning or understanding what all the demands of the education system seem to be. She’s finished by 7pm every evening, making herself a home cooked meal, then waking up early every morning for a run around the bay. A week ago she told me she hadn’t really been stressed this year, that she was expecting it to be difficult but everything had actually seemed to go pretty smoothly.
I probably shouldn’t hate my fellow student-teacher, but I do.
“Right,” I say.
“To help you manage your time correctly, I will need your plans four days in advance now.”
I open my mouth as a wave of panicked-despair washes through me - how am I supposed to do that? It’s followed closely by a searing burst of anger that drives the short nails of my fingers into the skin of my palms - how can she do this to me? It’s not fair, it’s not-
I can’t blow up at anyone again.
“Okay,” I say.
Five minutes later, I’ve locked myself into the only stall in the male teacher’s restroom and am gripping tightly onto the strands of my hair.
I don’t know how I’m meant to do this. How I’m meant to run off five hours sleep a night. And I’ll have to, because I don’t have another option. And I can’t get another job.
I scream silently through my teeth, fury escaping out of me. I don’t understand why it’s so easy for everyone else, I don’t understand why my mentor doesn’t understand me, I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong.
I hate this, I hate all of it. I hate that I feel so out of control, I hate that, most of the time now, I feel like I'm not the confident adult that I once thought of myself as, but some kid who can't cope, who doesn't understand how anything is meant to work.
I am almost thirty years old. I have to get myself under control. I can’t turn up to my next observation ready to shout at everyone.
I let out another silent scream, kicking the toilet bowl in frustration before turning and unlocking the stall door.
George from the English department stares at me. I freeze.
“It gets easier when you have your own class,” he tells me.
* * *
The best days are the ones that I get to work with Tom.
He’s into his second year of being an actual teacher, and always gets the most out of his classes, makes things exciting for them, makes them actually want to learn science.
When kids give a really dumb answer to a question he doesn’t just tell them they’re wrong, or that they’re being stupid (which, to be honest, is often my internal response, and might have been my external one if not for Tom), he tells them, ‘not quite’, or ‘I like the way you’re thinking’, or ‘so you’ve actually done a great job remembering the answer to… but…’. He says it makes them unafraid to say the wrong thing in his class, and he’s right. Everytime I see him teach I think, okay, Ryland, you gotta crush the urge to tell a kid they’re wrong, it might be satisfying, but it’s not cool.
Whatever he’s doing, it seems to work on me too. Instead of just telling me everything I need to improve at the end of my teaching, he asks me what I think I did well, what I would change next time.
He complains about how long grading takes, about how stupid all the check-boxes in education are, about the irrelevant staff meetings.
I figure that if I had him as my actual mentor, I’d probably be hanging in there much better than I am now.
* * *
I’ve taken to eating outside.
I don’t have my own classroom yet, and the staff room is noisy and I never know where to sit. The conversations tend to be completely pointless, all about the latest gossip or reality TV.
The downsides - or upsides - to eating outside are that I keep being joined by my students.
They seem to have the impression that I’m the ‘cool teacher’ because I’m new and in my late twenties. I know what they’re on about when they talk about minecraft, I’ve seen the same memes.
They have their limits though - “Mr Grace, you can’t call something ‘cringe’.”, “Why not, I’m 28?”, “It’s just wrong, you’re too old!” - and I have mine - “No, Aaliyah I do not want your instagram, I am your teacher!” - but, if I’m perfectly honest, they are much more fun company than many of my colleagues, and far easier to understand.
In the end, it leads me to finding a spare room and setting up a sort of lunchtime science club. When I am leading them through fun experiments and listening to their excited theories about why certain things are happening, I realise that I want to become a teacher, and this is the reason why.
* * *
“You aren’t strict enough with them,” Isobelle tells me. “They’re running riot over you.”
I frown, earlier Tom had just said he liked the way my respect for them meant that they listened to me.
“They listen when I need them to,” I try, feeling like a kid yet again. “And they are enjoying their classes, they like learning science.”
And wasn’t that the whole point?
She sniffs. “They won’t get through the whole syllabus. Look at all the things you haven’t managed to fit into this lesson…”
It’ll be easier, I tell myself, easier when I have my own classroom, when I can do what I know is best when I think it’s best.
* * *
“You’re my favourite teacher, Mr Grace,” Jordan says as I look through what he’s written in his notebook.
“Oh,” I say, a warmth spreading through my chest. He really thought that? “Thank-”
“Hmmm, I think Mr Grace is my third,” Nathan tells him. Okay, third wasn’t bad! “First it’s Mrs Butler, and then it’s Mr Sanchez, and then it’s Mr Grace, and then…” I nod along, okay, so he seems to have written down the chemical formula for photosynthesis correctly. “... and finally it’s Mrs Kelly, because she’s really mean.”
“Oh yeah,” Jordan agrees as my pen freezes on the paper. “She’s really mean but you’re really nice, I wish you were our actual teacher.”
“Uh,” I say, my back seeming to tingle with the knowledge that Isobelle was only a few feet behind me, that there was absolutely no way she hadn’t heard the students say they thought she was their worst teacher, that she was probably looking at us right now. Shi- shoot, I think, because I should probably be saying something here, but I don’t quite know what it is, and it’s not exactly the kids’ fault that the two of them combined have less social skills than even I did when I was their age. There’s also the part of me that glows inside at being thought better than her, that after everything she’d said to me, she was their least favourite, and I was their first (or third).
“Uh, I think maybe we shouldn’t be comparing teachers,” I manage lamely, well aware that I should probably be telling them off, but not wanting to do so. “I think that’s something you should be doing at recess.”
I walk away feeling lighter than I did before.
Isobelle was probably going to fail me before this, and she’s definitely going to fail me now, but I’m one of their favourites, and they don’t like her.
Sometimes, I can do things right.
* * *
By some unfortunate - or fortunate for me - twist of fate, Isobelle actually ends up getting the flu near the end of the semester. Tom says I probably need to work on my time management a bit, but grades me highly. And with that, I’m officially a middle-school science teacher.
I figure nothing can really go worse than my training year.