Secondary School Teacher

I have mixed feelings about this - i spent 3 years teaching in main stream education and to be honest did enjoy my time. I enjoyed the day to day interaction with my tutor group and watching pupils develop and learn plus loved the staff i worked with. The problem for me however was the repetition of what you do on a day to day basis. Due to pressures of targets and grades you are unable to spend as much time on topics as needed and there is a real taregt driven ethos in schools these days. Another issue is long hours at school plus the extra marking/extra curricular activities you do for the "love of the job". People always say "yeah ...  Read the complete review

Whenever I tell people that I am a Secondary School Teacher I get very varied responses, from the "how do you cope with that age group?" to "don't you get great holidays!" to, very occassionally "I would love to do that!". Teaching is one of those careers that is still seen by some as a vocation, for me it is essentially a job which can be rewarding but also damned hard work. It has been my career since the early nineties, some of the children I started out teaching are sending their own children to school by now. Through too many government initiatives to count, the massive increase of IT in the classroom and, in my own private ...  Read the complete review

I have read - quite a few times now - that the average time of a new teacher staying in the teaching profession is 4 years. I am currently in my 6th year and preparing to leave. I have also read that the average lifespan of a lifetime teacher, once retired, is 6 months. My dad was one such teacher and died four months short of his 65th birthday. I write these 'statistics' down to show that teaching is not a profession to go into lightly. Increasingly it is becoming a job heavily loaded with extra tasks as government directives demand more and more new schemes for teachers to implement and report on. I made a ...  Read the complete review

I write the review from having experience of being present in secondary school classrooms and through conversations with a lot of colleagues and friends that are secondary school teachers . The most popular and traditional way of becoming a teacher , is to get a degree in one of your strongest fields English , Maths , I.C.T and so on and so on . Then take teacher training , usually includes a placement and finally hopefully succesfully job search . I can imagine the main appeals of teaching being helping young people develop knowledge and skills and the 'buzz' of preparing them for what could be an exciting life . Other obvious appeals ...  Read the complete review

Secondary School Teacher **Background** I have been a secondary teacher for a couple of years now and thought I would share my experience of how I got into teaching as a career and what the job entails. I went into teaching aged 25/26 and honestly feel it was best to not go in earlier at 21 as it enabled me to gain some life experience and work in different professions first. With teaching you see everyday is a new experience and it is full of ups and downs. Some days are fantastic and you really feel you have made a difference whilst at other times with the constant change in government policies as every year there seems to be a new ...  Read the complete review