I have been out of teaching for a while now, since my ideal job came to end with redundancy. I have spent the last couple of years floating without aim, wondering what I should do. It was a TV programme that gave me inspiration and motivation. I don’t generally watch TV and it was by pure chance that I saw the last programme in a series called Educating Yorkshire. I watched it through a haze of tears and was so moved by Musharaf’s struggle to pass his English GCSE and the endless support of his teachers, that I realised how much I missed teaching. It reawakened my desire to go back to something that I had always enjoyed.
Struggle has always been my motivation for being a teacher. Enabling someone to overcome their demons with maths or their struggle to understand numbers and how they work was always the driving force for me. My learners would always thank me for helping them pass their exams but it was wasn’t me who passed the exam and put in the hard work it was them. To see their sense of satisfaction at the end was always a joy and something I never tired of.
So here I am, hoping that this new venture of mine will help my new students achieve their goals, with a little bit of work it can be done.