Facing the fear
As a teacher there are a number of deep set fears that tend to naturally exist in you that have a habit of rearing their ugly heads from time to time. They’re not the same for all teachers, they vary from individual to individual but I guarantee that some of the following will hit a nerve with your average secondary school or college teacher. They may include: bumping into a student when you are in any kind of compromising situation. This could include but is not limited to: being intoxicated, scantily clad, entwined in any type of compromising physical position with another person etc etc. You get the idea. It could also look like accidentally ending up on a date with a parent of one of your students (although this one weirdly appeals to me - it happened to one of my teacher friends and actually made me sort of envious). It could be your students getting access to any particularly personal information or visual evidence of you doing something deemed to be inappropriate (I once heard a story, perhaps an urban myth, about a group of students getting access to their teachers phone and managing to uncover a load of her ex rated selfies that she had sent to her boyfriend). Can. You. Imagine. Now whilst all of what I have described above sounds far from ideal, for me, I have a fear that actually regularly causes me a fair amount of stress, sometimes to the point of anxiety. And that fear? Vocabulary. Now this might sound ridiculous coming from an English teacher but let me explain to you exactly why it makes it so terrifying. And before I do, let me make it clear that in my profession I am happiest teaching resit GCSE classes, low ability pupils and generally anything that is bottom set sort of standard. Why? Well in case you hadn’t guessed yet I have a bit of a case of Imposter Syndrome (I’ll talk more about that in a future post). But back to vocabulary. As an English teacher there is an expectation amongst students that you will know all the words. And I totally get it. As a young person if I were to ask my English teacher the meaning of a word and they didn’t know it I probably wouldn’t be too impressed. But the problem is, I don’t know all the words. Of course no one knows ALL the words and of course it’s an unrealistic expectation for students to think that their teachers do BUT when I say I don’t, what I mean is, there are a lot of words that I should know the meaning of that I just don’t. And nothing gives me more fear than the thought of getting asked for a definition and not being able to answer. In the past ten years of my teaching career some of my strategies for dealing with this situation have included: pretending that I haven’t heard what they have asked me, being so involved in the “work” I’m doing on my laptop that I have given myself time to quickly look up the definition ready for the moment when they ask me a second time. I’ve done the age old “why don’t we look it up together” trick or shamelessly asked around the room “does anyone want to help student in question out with a definition?”. The latter is my personal favourite apart from the fact that you have no way of knowing if what they have said is completely accurate. Oh well. Anyway, this week, my second week with my new classes, I was caught out for the first time this year by a boy in my creative writing class. Now I will start by saying that this boy is an absolute legend - great banter, great behaviour and great engagement. But there is one big problem - he is a genius.
He achieved grade 9s in both of his English exams and his Maths which basically means he is about the same level of clever as me. The panic inducing scenario happened on Monday. I was teaching a lesson on war poetry and really getting into it. I’m still at the stage with my classes that they are impressed with me and think I know everything. So I was really giving it my all as I waxed lyrical about the context of World War I, really feeling myself as if I was in some sort of inspirational teacher film. But my Michelle Pfeifer image all hung in the balance when genius boy called me over to ask me for some help. Naturally he was flicking through the extension reading that I had put together and he wanted to know about not only a word that was used in an article that he was unsure of but also a complicated rhyme scheme of a poem and predictably, I didn’t know EITHER. Stuck at the back of the room without the safety net of my laptop to do a sly internet search to get an answer I found myself stumbling on my words, desperately flicking through pages of the booklet as if that was magically going to give me the answer. You might wonder why I would put a poem that I didn’t know inside out or an article with a word that I didn’t know the meaning of into a teaching resource. And in truth, I don’t know why either. But I knew at that moment I could either make something up, make an excuse and change the subject or simply own it. And owning it is exactly what I did. “ You know what it’s been a while since I taught that poem, give me a minute to get my head round it myself I don’t want to tell you something that isn’t 100% accurate”. The genius couldn’t look less bothered and was already contentedly continuing through the booklet looking for more poems to analyse. And just like that the moment of fear had passed. I guess it’s not so bad being honest about your gaps in knowledge after all. And one thing I can be sure of - he’s definitely spent less time thinking about it since Monday than I have!