I’m stretching the concept of ‘contentment’ today to include embarrassed
smugness. I have a trainee teacher in
with one of my lessons, she’s lovely and going to be a very good teacher. She’s a languages teacher, but the training school thought she ought to get
some experience with PSHE as it is often parachuted into timetables as a filler,
and would be useful on her CV. I’m quite
passionate about good quality PSHE education.
I’ve taught some appalling PSHE lessons in my time, and yet when I left
my last job, the cards I had from my young students were touching and demonstrated
maturity of thought, so perhaps my assessment of myself isn’t always dead
accurate.
Fortunately in this job I have a head of PSHE who has time
to plan a decent set of lessons that only need a small amount of tweaking to
make them appropriate for each of the groups I teach. This means that I can relax into the teaching
and enjoy the wondrous experience of watching young minds grow. So at the start of our lesson today my trainee says she has her mentor
coming next time and would it be ok if she took the whole lesson next time. Of course it is fine, and she said, more or
less unprompted, she thought I was a very good teacher (lovely to hear), cool
but strict at the same time. Now
compliments don’t come much bigger than that.
I beamed and buzzed through my lesson (me, cool, I mean no way, I
thought to myself in little inward jumps of joy), and the happy, productive
mayhem that was my lesson to year 7 on ‘moral
responsibility’ was a joy for all of us in the room.
Say something nice you really mean. You can’t imagine what good you are dropping
into the world. And you’ll probably
never know, but do it anyway.
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