dan-stewart.co.uk
Diving in at the Deep End!
I’d been drifting by for a little while, going from one temporary
position to another, when I decided I needed to do something to improve my
prospects of having a serious career. I decided to go to college to study for a
level three qualification in mechanical engineering. I’ve always been
interested in how things work, and the subject jumped out as one I’d love to
get to know more about as well as being an area where the skills learned would
be useful in the most practical of ways. While studying at the college, I was
also looking for work, as my most recent position had recently come to an end.
One day, as the head of engineering was walking past, he offered me a job in
jest, and I accepted. For the next couple of months, whenever he walked by in
the corridor, I would ask him about when this job was starting, until one day
he took me to one side and spoke to me seriously about covering some basic
maths classes. I’d never worked in teaching before, but I was very confident in
my mathematical knowledge and I keenly took him up on his offer. At the same
time, I enrolled myself to a PTLLS course as he had encouraged me to do.
I taught my first lesson in December but didn’t get any regular
lessons until after the Christmas break. I started teaching 12-15 hours a week
as well as continuing my studies for my mechanical engineering diploma and
working towards the PTLLS qualification. As the academic year was drawing to a close, I was told that there were some big
plans for the following year and that I should apply for a permanent position
that was being advertised. These plans included overseeing and delivering a
science course at the college. There were talks around a level two BTec as well
as GCSE Science, but nothing concrete. I applied for the job and had my interview
and then heard very little. Then the summer break started and without any
teaching hours and little word about what might happen next, I started looking
for other work. In the last week in August, I received a call asking me to come
into the college the following week. I went in, and sure enough I had a job and
I was starting that week and I’d be teaching the following week. I was
presented with a timetable that had 14 different lessons on it. I would be
teaching functional skills – maths, English and ICT – as well as some of the
units for both level two and three engineering courses. I was also to come up
with a strategy to deliver GCSE Science and potentially a BTec level 2 science
course.
Within 3 weeks I was told that we had to deliver two GCSE science
classes that academic year. Working with another member of staff, we quickly
put together a scheme of work and ran some interviews to fill up additional
numbers. We knew we were delivering the course to some level three childcare
students, but we wanted to make sure we had full classes, and there was quite a
lot of interest in the GCSE. I oversaw the administration of the course,
including entering the students for the exams and submitting their practical
assessments for verification (it was 100% of the students due to the small
numbers). At the same time, I was working to produce lessons for other classes
I was teaching on as well as studying the second year of my own level three
engineering course and starting the CTLLS course. It’s fair to say that with
the full-time teaching hours, this was a difficult year for me, but I got
through it, and with some good results, but with barely a moment for myself.
The following year my timetable was simplified somewhat, teaching
predominantly functional skills maths, but with a couple of functional skills
English and ICT classes and some engineering maths on the level two BTec. The
GCSE Science was transferred to a different department and I stayed with the
engineering section. The year passed without incident, though functional skill
results at the college were not great, including my own classes. That said, my
apprentice classes performed very well but a lot of the full-time students
failed to achieve what they had been aiming for. As the year came to an end, after
a number of changes in the hierarchy at the college
(my own boss was moving from engineering to work force development), it was
made clear to me that the engineering department were going to struggle to find
enough hours for me, and I was asked to move across to the maths and English
team. For the next two years I taught predominantly GCSE maths with some
functional skills maths and ICT classes. My results for the GCSE were some of
the best for full time students in the college and my functional skills maths
results were somewhere in the middle. My functional skills ICT results were
excellent with well over 90% achieving the qualification.
Unfortunately, I had some personal issues and was starting to feel
a little burnt out after four years. I miss the job and would love to get back
into it now that I’ve had a little time to reassess and settle myself, but I’ll
take each day as it comes. I still have plenty of ideas about how to move
forward!