Becoming a Teacher -- Peter Leyland
Becoming a Teacher * My first teaching job was at a school in Guildford named Clark’s College. It had at one time been a Pitman’s shorthand and typing establishment which now charged fees to those who wanted their children to be educated privately. I don’t think it exists anymore. Mind you I’m not surprised considering that in the 70s they took on people like me – untrained, untried, untested. I was fresh out of university with that great badge of my time: an Honours Degree in English. Wow! – 600 lines of Chaucer, most of Beowulf, something odd known as the Ancrene Wisse , and a smattering of truly modern work like Dickens and Keats. And yet I was appointed to teach children. How? I asked myself at the beginning of the first week. I was ok on English, although believe it or not I spelled Grammar incorrectly on the front of my planning book, a fact that did not escape the eagle eye of Mrs Sherwood-King who pointed this out to me with delight. She was an...