When people talk about how hard they work, it’s normal for them to disparage working too many hours. They’ll say they don’t want to glorify working every hour of the day, but in the same sentence they’ll tell you about how they find 5:00am works is the best time in the day to mark books cause it’s before the kids have got up. People say that you shouldn't have to work that hard, but they don’t believe it; they don’t believe it for themselves. They are the exception who does have to work hard, and if you don’t work as hard as them, they still think of you as lazy.
SLT will tell you, switch off, go home. Meetings end with “let’s all go and enjoy the weekend”, “Don’t take any books home over the holidays”, “you need to take better care of yourself”. But in one breath they’ll say “don’t take any books home for the weekend, remember data on the spreadsheet for 9.00am Monday.” They’ll say “go home early, you look exhausted. Come in early tomorrow instead” but you’ve got 5 lessons to plan, so you’d have to get to work at 4.00 in the morning to do that and they know it.
So let’s have a realistic chat about work life 'balance'. It’s different depending on what subject you teach. It just is. When I was doing my PGCE, I lived with an Art teacher, and when she marked a set of books she would tick boxes that said things like “more subtle shading”, “more dynamic colour contrast”. She would look and tick. She would do afterschool club for two hours (tbf that is looooooong). Then come home and it would stress her out because she couldn’t sleep as I was always printing at 11:00 or 11:30 at night.
I was a terrible housemate.
She was right to be fed up with me. But that doesn’t change the fact that she felt like she’d put in a shift when she finished at five, and I’d feel like I’d done well if I was finished before ten. Remember that, when you’re in your next all staff; many of the staff don’t actually have a scooby doo about how much hard work goes into being an English teacher. They just don’t even have an inkling about it. They think they already work that hard. (which tbf some do)
Much of being a new teacher is enforcing your boundaries. Your school is a business and it will scrape you dry, like the teaching vanilla pod you are, if you let it. Remember you will be setting boundaries with people who don’t understand why you need them, but set them you must. You must set them with yourself too.
It’s up to you how you do this. For me this would look like committing to spending a little bit of money, to ensure I knew what I was doing. My PGCE was so bad, I spent 400 quid on personalised training from Mr Bruff. I was just desperate to know WTAF I should actually be doing. I’d already spent thousands on the PGCE, I wasn’t going to let the last little bit of money be the reason I didn’t have a clue. It was not great training, but compared to that of my actual Scitt provider, at least I wasn't required to stick any post it notes to another whiteboard.
Well made resources are a life saver (and literally a career saver) even if I do say so myself. If you can lay your hands on well made schemes of work as a trainee or young teacher, the rest of your career will be easier as a consequence. It matters because the resources you make in year 2,3,4 or teaching will be the ones you like and will keep using again and again. But to make good ones you have to know what you’re emulating. If you’ve got no Scheme or work, no power points and no models of pupil work or moderation material, you aren’t going to have a clear idea of what you might need to produce. You obvs don’t have to get them from here. Lit drive is really good, they offer a subscription model. Twinkle is really good if you need SEN resources, and there’s of course teachers pay teachers and TES. There’s a vast number of contributors on these sites, so you’ll have to do some quality control, but that’s good cause it teaches you discernment. You learn to tell what is useful and what just looked colourful on the thumbnail.
Invest in your resources a little bit and it will make your life much easier. Hopefully, you’re in such an organised school that the your department lead has an entire fully established curriculum and you just follow that. Then you can just look at other resources for fun when you get asked to plan a singular unit. If you’re in a house of carnage though, commit a little to saving yourself. Maybe chat with a colleague and agree to buy separate things.
Hopefully the advantage of the resources on EnglishteacherCPD is that it will save you oodles of time in sorting good from terrible resources, but also that you can train yourself to be good enough that your pupils really have a chance of success.
Also, these resources should hopefully enable you to differentiate like an absolute boss without having to do your marking at 5:00am. That’s just sort of gross. Teaching just doesn’t have to be that hard. It’s repugnant that it’s so difficult. As a new teacher, it is incumbent upon you to make teaching as light a burden as it can be. Otherwise, you just perpetuate the torment for those who follow you.
The statistics suggest that you won’t invest now because you feel broke, and that you’ll burn out in around five years or less. Everyone thinks they can do it at first. Give it two or three years though of working at that 'I can do it all from scratch' pace and you’ll be bitter, or you’ll have already quit. If you want to stay in this game for a while, or you want your relationship to last whilst you are a teacher, you are going to have to figure out ways to make teaching light work. It should be an 8-4 job. Don’t let anybody make you feel guilty for thinking that. You just need to figure out how to get all your work done within that time. That’s where this blog and this organisation come in.
Invest in yourself.