PGCE, Peru and Phones.

PGCE, Peru and Phones.


Those who know me will have recently heard me mostly banging on about two things. The first is that I recently successfully completed my PGCE (yay!), the second is that I have just booked my flights for my two month trip to Peru (more yay!). Amongst all this enjoyment is just one tiny little bee in my bonnet. T-Mobile have somehow managed to change me from an 18 month contract to a 24 month contract without me knowing about it. Oh well. 


I am mostly looking forward to Peru because this year I have been one of those boring people who works all the time. When I first got into teaching I thought that placement would probably involve staying in school until around half 5 to get my paperwork done. Unknown to me, placement would consist of staying up until about midnight every night to finish everything that needed to be done (planning, assessment, Uni work etc). The times I wasn't on placement were a bit easier but the Uni side was often quite boring to be honest. Teaching also has a lot of great points, mostly the fact that children are hilarious, but its fair to say I need a bloody holiday. 


When I say children are hilarious I mean it in that cheesy 'kids say the funniest things' sort of way. I can have quite an immature sense of humour which I was pretty good at hiding from the children I taught. I was actually quite a strict teacher for the most part. Although there were times when it was okay for the class to be a bit chaotic I generally preferred quite a calm atmosphere in my classroom. However, getting 30 children to create a calm atmosphere can often only be achieved by the teacher being not quite so calm. Basically, I mastered the scary look and scary voice every teacher needs to be a disciplinarian. 


However, now and again I would let myself drop to their level a bit. When I was teaching last week I overheard one of the year 6 girls in my class gossiping to her friends about another girl in the class. I said,


"Don't you think it would be better for everyone if you kept opinions like that to yourself and only talk about people you have nice things to say about?" To which she responded,


"Well, when you're with your friends do you talk about people you don't like?"


"Yeah, I guess so."


"So what's the problem then? We all do it."


She had a fair point to be honest. This is why I shouldn't always try to reason with children.