Teaching
Picking my subjects last year was pretty difficult. By the end of my fifth year at high school I’d pretty much covered all the subjects I’m interested in: English, Maths, Geography, French and Chemistry. So trying to come up with another four subjects to tackle in my sixth and final year was pretty difficult; this led me to take the natural, if not particularly interesting choice of taking three of those subjects, English, Maths and Chemistry, to Advanced Higher level, as well as picking up Modern Studies as an extra Higher due to my passing interest in politics.
This wasn’t a great call as I discovered relatively quickly down the line; Advanced Higher English had me comfortably out of my depth and Chemistry had me comfortably out of my interest level. I stuck with Maths for some reason, probably my mum’s influence since she did the same course at school, as well as Modern Studies which was a good course, but just had to change the other two. On a whim, I picked up Spanish as a column-filler; the teacher was the same French teacher I’d had since second year and I’d always quite fancied picking up the language. But there was nothing else. So as a bit of a skive, I picked up ‘school service’: helping out with younger kids’ classes and around the school departments. I chose to do most of my school service in the languages department (just French classes as it turned out) mostly because I thought it would be a shame to lose touch with my French that I’d been working with since I was around 10.
I really enjoyed it. Of course, some classes were tougher to deal with than others, (fourth year foundation class who’re only there because they’ve been forced to take the subject? No thanks) but none were awful, and I’d like to think that at least a handful of kids in each class benefited in some way from my being there. Often just providing an alternative angle to how the class teacher is explaining things or offering interesting ways of remembering words and so on, or even just joining in with a bit of their childish fun could make the difference. It felt good, being of genuine assistance.
And now, by the end of the year where I’ve decided that my “column-filler” Spanish will make up half of my degree along with French, my “skive class” from last year, I feel like going into teaching is a real possibility. Combining my long-time knack for languages with my newly-found actual enjoyment of languages as well as helping kids learn, it does make a lot of sense. But there’s still so much time, I still could end up anywhere really.
