Teacher Training

I found myself last week at something of a crossroads (something of a cliche I know, but apt for the position I found myself in).  The news of my rejection from the police having slowly and painfully settled in, a seemingly terminal tide bearing down on me.  A career… a calling… something to get me out of bed in the morning. I needed solutions, goals, a brighter light at the end of a tunnel I had only too knowingly wandered straight into. Then it came to me, the final resting place of Robert Batley’s fixation with greatness… those who can’t do teach!

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Now I’m being incredibly harsh here, and I know that this is a horrible lie and something that couldn’t be any further from the truth. It’s just that ever since someone (in most likely-hood, an asshole!) muttered these words to me when I had just graduated (me – “I’m thinking about going into teaching”… ahole – “well you know what they say, those who can’t do”), these bile-ridden words stuck in my gut like some unwanted post pub curry.

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Recently though, I’ve come to accept that I’m always going to be the type of person who is never happy with his station in life – a ‘grass is always greener’ type of guy. This is not to say that I’m not able to appreciate how fortunate I am and how much worse off other people are. It’s just I fear that I’m doomed to go through life never satisfied with things, no matter how good I have it. I can never sit still, never settle down, I have the proverbial ‘ants in the pants’ twenty-four-seven.

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I know what your thinking though… get over it and just grow the hell up! And it’s true, it’s about time I swallowed my ridiculous sense of self-importance and actually took part in life. Some of the smartest and my most favourite people in the world are teachers and I think the job they do is beyond reproach, it’s just that I never saw it coming once I stuck my head in the clouds aged 23 and refused to look down. So once again, I’m back in the initial, tenacious pursuit of something that one month ago I would have scoffed at the mere mention of me becoming… I’m going to be a teacher.

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Which brings me to today.  I went into school for the first time as something other than a student. My good friend Ad, only recently a teacher himself, graciously allowed me to shadow him and a few of his work colleagues for the day… call it basic teacher training if you will. Access to the staff room (and more importantly, staff room toilets), ability to walk into any area of the school at will, infinite amounts of tea, straight to the front of the queue in the cafeteria… maybe I was getting carried away on some undernourished power trip but I’ll tell you something… I really enjoyed myself.

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More importantly, I think I may have found something of real substance. A career I could do well at and possibly make a difference in. Now if only someone would give me a job!