What a difference a year has made!

A couple of days ago I realised June was almost over. Tempus volat. And it made me think.

In the previous years, June could not come soon enough, the end of June was the beacon towards which I directed all of my energy. It’s as if I put my life on hold until breaks, holidays, and days off. And I felt stifled.

A teacher’s life revolves around these annual cycles: the never-ending September-December, the three and a half months of doom, gloom, and darkness that are somehow longer than the whole year put together. Then the eventful spring when we seem to bounce from one test to another – all tests of knowledge AND mental resilience. And finally, the post-spring-break lull when nobody gives a damn and we all just want the whole shenanigans to be over. Then comes the summer break, which seems to last no longer than a butterfly needs to flap its wings and cause the tsunami that is the end of August filled with all sorts of emotional turmoils. And then in September my countdown to June would begin once again.

It was this lack of freedom and upward mobility (I’ve always been an ambitious kid) that gnawed at me and I knew my teaching days were numbered. First of all, I was never a teacher, I found teaching methodology completely useless in most cases, and I relied on my own unusual set of skills and viewpoints that made me a different cup of tea in the staff room.

I worked as a radio anchor since I was 11 and throughout my teenage years. After years of interviews and live conversations, I have a knack to make people open up, feel comfortable when talking to me, ask the right questions, and get the right answers. I don’t have a bubbly personality, far from it. It’s a learned skill that served very well in the classroom.

I am a writer, a researcher, and a reader, and I enjoyed transferring skills that I use and know inside out and am passionate about. I see language as a means – to work, to create, to have fun. In real life, nobody is going to ask these kids to fill out a worksheet or some such nonsense. They will be asked to put together a report, an article, and a set of instructions for AI. Language needs to be functional and, on the other hand, it needs to provide knowledge and comfort, or an outlet for emotions and creativity.

I taught teenagers, and I know that whenever I mentioned the age group that I taught people would make this face as if they just bit into a particularly sour slice of lemon, because it’s the age when they hit puberty, go off-kilter, quite bonkers actually. I didn’t mind that because I remembered being that age, constantly feeling like a mismatched pair of socks spun around in the vortex of hormones. It’s actually quite a creative age if you can tap into the madness that’s going on inside of you.

So, bottom line – do I miss teaching? Some aspects of it, yes. Throughout the years, I worked with groups of great young women and men (some of them graduated uni recently, and some of them are as old as I was when I first taught them, which feels quite staggering.)

Would I go back to teaching? Never. Because within the system itself, you never feel appreciated, you can’t make progress, you can’t FEEL progress, and you give much more than you get in all respects. There are so many things that you disagree with but have to implement because education is big business and there are some standardised tests that really must be satisfied (and paid for).

Now, starting on your own is no easy feat, don’t get me wrong. If you choose to start a business, at any stage in your life, it will take guts to turn your back on whatever you’d built so far and start anew, and you will work more than ever before BUT there will be a certain joy to it, the knowledge that whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it for yourself.

Nothing compares to the feeling when you wake up on a Wednesday morning, and you’re free to do whatever you want.