Hi everyone - can I ask your advice on my current situation please?
I’m an NQT in a secondary school, teaching a shortage subject where the school has had a lot of problems recently. There was lots of absence in the department last year, poor GCSE results this summer and there still is low staff morale from what I’ve gathered from other teachers. I’m doing maternity cover and I’ve been here since the start of September.
I hate it already. The behaviour at the school is poor, in a sort of insidious, low-level disruption way but with a large handful of students causing problems for their teachers and the rest of their classes with no real consequences. Even the good students routinely talk over me, answer back and ignore me – I can ask kids to pick up their rubbish from the table when I’m on break duty, and they look at me and walk off like I’m not even worth their time. They take no responsibility for their behaviour – if you try to send them out of a lesson for disruptive behaviour, they refuse to go because they don’t see what they’ve done wrong (even if you clearly explain and give them prior warnings).
Furthermore, there’s no coherent behaviour system to back teachers up. There are about five or six steps involving moving students around your classroom, parking them with other members of staff and so disrupting their lessons instead, etc. I’ve been given an old-fashioned ‘bottom set’ Year 9 class which the head of department described as having all the characters in it. It’s literally all the students who most likely need one-to-one support and specialist intervention, but the budget doesn’t stretch to that, so they’ve stuck them all with the NQT.
My form group are supposedly some of the nice lot but there was an incident on Friday when they and other students in their year came into my room while I was in a meeting – a light fitting was knocked off the ceiling by students repeatedly throwing the board rubber at it and they graffiti-ed the board as well. I dealt with it as best I could myself by letting them know the consequences of their behaviour (they’re no longer allowed in my room unsupervised) and took names to the heads of school and my head of department, thinking at least they’d be put in detention or something for damaging my classroom, but there’s been no follow-up because ‘they were just having a game of catch’!
I dread coming in to work every day because of how awful the classes are. Nobody listens to me or cares about anything I do or say – lessons that I spend my mornings, breaks, evenings and weekends planning are wasted because I can’t get them right for the kids, they just play up. Somehow in my training, I got graded ‘outstanding’ (I think I had a particularly nice mentor!), but I certainly don’t feel it! I’m so fed up with having to shout over thirty children to even be heard, I hate being a strict, telling-off teacher and I can’t bear it that the nice kids ‘feel sorry’ for me (they’ve actually come up to me and said this!) None of this is remotely why I came into teaching and I feel like I’ve completely bought the ‘making a difference’, ‘most fulfilling job in the world’ marketing lie!
Essentially, I want to leave the school before my NQT year is finished, because I think my mental health is suffering that much. I got upset a couple of weeks ago and ended up crying in the office in front of my head of department (which was so embarrassing and I never cried in school at all during my PGCE) – but she just said to make sure not to do it again and gave me a game to play with the worst-behaved students. There’s no coherent plan for anything and I’ve been left to my own devices with Year 11 too, like trying to schedule and plan a mock by myself because they haven’t had one yet. They didn’t even know what exams their GCSE will be made up of. SLT are also keeping a close eye on this subject because of the poor results in the summer so I feel particularly under pressure.
I’m questioning whether I’m even suited to teaching. I feel like I have to put on a performance every hour of the school day and it just isn’t me. It’s wearing down my self-esteem and my confidence and I feel like a fake and a fraud.
If I were to leave, I have other work I could go to for a while in order to make ends meet and to give me the time to assess whether I really want to be in teaching. But I feel like I’d be letting down a lot of people – the school, the department (especially as they had so much disruption last year), the kids, particularly the Year 11 class I’ve got. It also feels like giving up! But the thought of actually not having to stick it out here for the year is such a relief. If things don’t improve, I’m thinking of giving my notice at Christmas, so staying until February.
Sorry for the ramble! Thank you for reading if you got through all that. Does anyone have any advice?
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AIBU to want to leave before completing my NQT?
27 replies
nqtomg · 25/09/2018 08:19
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