Any secondary English teachers around?

[Pretendbookworm]

I’ve just finished studying at university for an English Literature degree. Ive been studying part-time for 6 years while working as a carer for the elderly, the dream has always to be an English teacher. I had some amazing teachers when I was at school. I was a really lonely child with mentally ill parents. Books and a passion for reading and then talking/debating about them really helped me get through some tough times. I would love to see that light bulb moment myself, to have lively discussions with pupils about the texts and get a debate going. Tbh I just love to talk about books and wider meanings behind them. I would love to help encourage other pupils to find a love of books.

But....

Oh my god in the news every week. Teachers quitting. No work/life balance. It’s scaring me off. Is it really that bad? Does it get easier at all? Should I run for the hills? My problem is I have spent a year looking at other options, going for interviews etc and no one will have me as I only have experience working in care. So I’ve decided that despite the negative press I will follow my dream. Am I making a big mistake?

I agree that it can be more engaging to teach, say, Blood Brothers than Trigonometry, but ultimately all of the questions in the Literature exams are essays so it is far more likely that the student will simply not answer at all. At least the first few questions on the maths papers tend to be slightly more accessible before they give up.

We all invigilate, so I can be reasonably certain in saying the weakest of our (very small sample of) challenging students spend more time on Romeo and Juliet/ Lord of the Flies et al. than they do on Maths. The more able (grade 2 up) do find Maths as accessible as Lit, although English Language is still ahead.

And so they get better results?

At KS4 we don’t summarise texts but we do sometimes skip a scene that seems unimportant in Shakespeare. (Yes I know it’s all veeeeery important 🙄)
Alsowe do the shortest texts possible. A Christmas Carol An inspector calls etc. Ones that can be read in class. Otherwise we would never manage.

However at KS3? Forget it. We very rarely do whole texts. 19th C lit is an abridged version, Shakespeare is select scenes only esp for year 7&8. We don’t have the time. Units are a for a half term only. That’s 6-7 weeks. It would take most of that time to just read the texts.

I’ve been teaching for 15 years. In inner city London schools. Am PT now with kids. I started fresh out of a PGCE at 22. It was A LOT different.

I’m glad others get to foster a love of lit. We try and the kids do enjoy lots of the texts (except Shakespeare. You just can’t make them love it despite all the ‘fun’ activities you try and do). They love An Inspector Calls and Lord of the Flies.
But you just kill it all with the minutiae of analysis you have to do. And the repetitive rote essay writing.

At KS3 we used to do fun texts. Anyone remember doing Holes in the early noughties?! That’s a primary book now I think.
Texts have had to become more ‘challenging’ for KS3. Try doing Wuthering Heights with a year 8 class 🤦🏽‍♀️

I enjoy the planning. I like being in the classroom. I teach in a school with good behaviour so kids will do the work.

I also teach A Level and what I find is that most of them absolutely CANNOT make the leap between the spoon fed rote teaching of GCSE where we do short texts and analyse them to death and ram exam skills down their throats and the much more independent enquiring explorative learning requires at A Level.
Moving from An Inspector Calls to The Handmaids Tale (absolutely the hardest thing I’ve taught and I love that book) is an absolute shocker. They just can’t cope when asked to think for themselves. And read the book outside of class! ( they don’t).

I don't disagree with nay of those things : when I said I teach whole texts , I was thinking KS4. But, yes, guilty as charged, I skipped the Porter scene this year (year 10 and different exam board) but will now have to go back to it...

What you say about KS3 (my school starts at Year 9) is true in many schools. And, yes , the bloody half term units. Shakespeare in 4 1/2 weeks, anyone!?

What is particularly noticeable at A Level is the number of students who take Lit because 'it's a facilitating subject' and hate reading! Several of my students simply did not read Atonement or God of Small Things. Sigh. Still, I love the books and so I was happy!

The weakest ones do better in English, yes. As I said, from above grade 2 it is more even. And in lessons, there confidence is far higher in English. Once we make sure they can read!

Their!

I've been an English teacher since 1996. The job is v different now, and the complaints about data, teaching to the test etc (though I remember ks3 SATs and there was plenty then!) are all true. It's also absolutely the case that behaviour is worse and difficult parents are more frequent than they they were.

That said, I still love it. I work largely because I want to - we are lucky enough to manage frugally on one wage in this house - but I enjoy every day. It's never dull even if it is often difficult in one way or another. And there are still those moments when a kid switches on - even if only briefly - and says something like "actually Miss, I didn't expect to like Macbeth but you've made it really cool".

So my advice is give it a go. You can always leave if you decide it's too much.

Oh, but the fucking porter. That was my exam board. Way to really upset the kids in qu1 of a 2 hour exam.

piggy yep 90% of my A Level class did not read for pleasure outside the classroom. (Unless fantasy fiction 🤨)
They did English because they were the smart ones in their GCSE class and could regurgitate pretty good teacher fed essays.
However put 15 level 8/9 in an A Level class and they suddenly realise they’re not so special anymore and not as bright as they though they were 🤔

And our school takes the grade 6/7 kids onto the A Level course where they flounder completely

The porter is pretty important.

English teacher here but I teach in a college which is much better than secondary. I teach 16+ but the majority of my students are 18+ (last year my older student was 66!) so they actually want to be there for the most part.

I couldn’t handle younger teenagers. I have friends who teach both primary and secondary, the secondary school teachers all want to leave.

Yes RoseandRhubarb, but the non-tiered nature of the English Lit papers means that the question should be accessible to all. "Equivocation" and the metaphor about the gates of Hell really doesn't equate to Juliet worrying about what will happen when she takes the potion.

Yes, fair point. I’m surprised it would be skipped entirely, though.

I’ve been teaching English for 8 years. There are parts of the job I love: engaging with the students, finally being allowed to creating new schemes of work and the staff in the team.
However.
It is now a job for me, not the career I worked bloody hard for. SLT in my school are draining the life out of staff and their expectations are insane for people who barely teach There is no longer money for new and exciting texts (they need to be cheap or you just repeat the same schemes over and over), training courses or classroom updates (my classroom has pee stained ceiling tiles and water runs down the walls and floods the site when it rains). We do however, for a school with less than 120 staff, have an SLT that makes up 10% of our staff. There are no promotions for anyone not currently in SLT and teaching must be done to their ridiculous ideals.

You need to find the right school and be wary of ones where ‘no one leaves’. They’re the worse. It might take a while. I’m still hopeful...

The exam boards four years ago said (nay, promised!) all passages selected would be on major themes and include significant major characters! Hence the outcry. Macbeth is long. They are on - what- their third set of questions and they select the porter, who is in one scene and performs no function in the play other than giving the actor playing Macbeth time to get himself ready? It just feels like the exam board in question suddenly stuck two fingers up to anyone below about grade 8. Bit like the A Level question where one board asked 17 /18 year olds about Hamlet being a comedy! I await the examiners' reports with interest.

I think rose you may not realise the time constraints we teach under : 6 weeks to do the whole of a Shakespeare tragedy means you prioritise some things over others. It even says in my edition 'this scene is often cut in production' ! Hopefully, some of the current thinking in education high circles is moving us away from the ridiculous obsession with data collection and the spurious idea that you should teach everything in year 9 and 10 and then spend 6 months revising everything they forgot because you taught it quickly two years ago...

I also skip the Hecate scene since Shakespeare didn't write it

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays.

I agree with cutting out the Hecate scene but the porter is key to the darkness. I do understand time is an issue, though

Are you a teacher rose?

For A Level this year the Othello question was an extract on Brabantio and Roderigo. Ok fair enough they are relevant characters in the play but after 2 years of deep analysis on Iago and Othello and Desdemona and exploring their complex character dynamics it feels cheap to have a question like this.

The second part is how they are shown in the rest of the play. Brabantio doesn’t appear after Act 1!

My kids were really upset as were other across the country.

See also above the Hamlet question on comedy. It’s like they want to trip the kids up on purpose. It’s bloody horrible.

We’re derailing OP’s thread but it’s interesting to see what other English teachers across the country think!

OP go into it knowing much of what you do is not going to be lofty discussions about literature and lots of schemes of work which you think are about enjoying literature but are actually about drilling in PEE/PEA/PETAL paragraphs.

By the by what acronym are people using these days to teach analytical paragraphing for lit at KS3 and 4?

The Brabantio and Roderigo question is all the more irksome given the theme of Love, I am guessing, although I haven't seen the passage. It does feel like , after a couple of years post reform, the boards are saying 'now we play hard ball, kids!'

I don't teach any acronyms, sorry. Too mechanical for me. There is a fabulous book by Jennifer Webb by the way which I hugely recommend!

engendering a passion for literature in young people isn't really what English teachers in state secondaries are there to do
I disagree. The schools I've been in (other than one with a huge number of bigger challenges) have had love of texts at the heart of their English curriculum.

The best English department I was in did 4 full texts a year in y7-9 and it was glorious. My gripe with my current department is that it's a more extract based than I would like, but we have a good range of topics.

At GCSE we have some really interesting schemes and for the most part we do our best to teach with enthusiasm.

Of course some lessons and classes are more challenging than others but there's still a lot of enjoyment to be had.

The paperwork, endless requests for intervention etc can be a drain. Some schools are worse for it than others.

Why don't you keep with your application but try to get some extensive experience between now and when you get your ITT interviews. You really want to get into multiple schools in different contexts and preferable for a few days or more.

By the by what acronym are people using these days to teach analytical paragraphing for lit at KS3 and 4?
I don't and haven't for years.