The R Word
There are three types of teachers. Or at least from my observations there are. First there are the career teachers, those in it for the long run, who live and breathe the profession. Typically these might be people who knew from an early age that they wanted to be in teaching and quite possibly have never done anything else for work. Then, at the opposite end of the spectrum there are the teachers who are in it for the perks…..what perks could teaching have I can hear you thinking. Well, I am, of course, talking about the holidays. Honestly don’t underestimate the lure of twelve whole weeks of blissful time off, approximately three times what you would get in your typical nine to five. And they are PAID. A huge appeal would be the understatement of the year. Lastly, there are the middle of the road teachers. These can include but are not restricted to: teachers who may have fallen into the career accidentally but now quite like it, are quite good at it and at this stage can’t really think of what else they would do for a living. This final category also usually includes people who have suffered either some sort of burnout from a high powered job or alternatively a terrible boredom, unchallenged in a monotonous office job and they have opted for a career change (why didn’t someone warn these guys…). Now whichever of these descriptions apply, there is one factor that connects them all and that is the dreaded R word. The one which causes sleepless nights and cold sweats. Results. Now, whilst the motivation for good results is likely to be different for each of the aforementioned teacher, one thing I know for sure is the better your results, the easier your job is all round.
At my current place of work there are three strands of English teaching and three corresponding sets of results to worry about. There’s the A Level class - academic, diligent and incredibly bright. There’s the creative writing class - artsy, thoughtful and poetic. And then there’s my personal favourite. The GCSE resit class. Nothing screams challenge like a class of vulnerable, sometimes lost and nearly always disillusioned young people who are just crying out for some love and support. They have always been my favourite class to teach and at the start of this year when I learnt that I would no longer be teaching them due to timetable complications I was devastated to say the least. However my one saving grace was that I was given a single resit student whose timetable was an anomaly and therefore he had to be taught by me in a 1:1 setting. He is a clever boy, hardworking and compliant and one who definitely should not have failed first time round. We entered him for the exam early and I am thrilled to say that when the results came in last week, he had passed! Delivering him the news on results day was lovely but it didn’t quite have the same feel to it that previous years of delivering whole sets of results to a class has. Maybe it’s because he is clever and it was pretty much a given that he was going to be successful or maybe it’s because I taught him for such a short time that I didn’t quite get to know him as other classes that I have taught. Either way it got me thinking back to some of my fondest memories here around results day and what seeing the responses from the young people has taught me about resilience.
GCSE results day here has become somewhat of a joke. I still remember vividly the first one in my first year of this job. I won’t bore you with all of the details, but in a nutshell, the results were brilliant and there were A LOT of tears. We operate an X Factor style system here where we give each student a five minute meeting slot, call them in and deliver the news as to whether they have or haven’t made it. And is exceptionally emotional. I’m usually bleary eyed for a couple of days having had to deal with the heartbreaking disappointment as well as the sheer joy and beautiful compliments from the students.
One of my fondest memories of results day was in my second year. I had been struggling to get two remaining Year 13 boys through their GCSE for the third time. To give you some context they had both been unsuccessful in their previous schools and still hadn’t managed to pass on the two occasions that they had tried with us and so there were a lot riding on these results. Whilst these two little rascals felt like my children by now and I was fonder of them than most of the others I had taught in my whole career, failure at this point could well have put me at risk of losing them, our strong bond had an expiry date. Resit GCSE has a habit of doing that. It is one of the main reasons for the horrendous nationwide GCSE results in the resit category. The pass rate across the country is approximately 30 per cent, disheartening would be putting it lightly. But seeing as you need a C or above in GCSE Maths and English to even get the most basic of retail or service industry jobs, there is a lot riding on these grades.
On the day, our head teacher just happened to be wearing an uncharacteristically formal outfit for a meeting later in the day and in line with tradition we called the boys in one at a time for their 1:1 meeting. As there were only two results in this window we called them into the head's office to give them the good news. But with candidate one it backfired completely. He had chronically low attendance and he was so shaken by the sight of our usually casually dressed head in a suit that he had convinced himself that this meeting was going to be one informing him of the termination of his college contract and he got himself into such a state that he was barely even able to comprehend the fact that he had passed!
Next up was my all time career highlight. One of my favourite ever students had been the naughty boy for so long it is truly my belief that he couldn’t recognise himself as anything else by this point. His self esteem was so low that you could see he had no confidence in his performance this time round. In typical naughty boy trend he was also popular boy and unbeknownst to him, ALL of the other students were waiting on tenterhooks outside the office to hear his results. As we told him the amazing news it became impossible for us to contain our excitement which alerted his waiting peers and within seconds the whole cohort were chanting his name outside the office. It was such a wonderful moment of love, support and community spirit that it really made me realise that with hard work and resilience, anything is possible. Those boys genuinely believed that they weren’t ever going to get their GCSEs. And whilst they could have given up, they carried on fighting and working and now they have something for the rest of their life, that no one can take away from them.