Teacher – There is no job that’s more exciting

I had a gap year before I went to university where I spent a year in China, just to travel and learn Chinese but I ended up teaching English to university students. I really enjoyed it – and that was the first time I’d thought about teaching. I’d gone just to experience being abroad, but the teaching was the best part for me.

So by the time I’d was at university, teaching had really started to take root as an idea. I loved studying for my history degree at Cambridge. I found (and still find) history intensely fascinating. I did a very diverse degree, not particularly specialising in any particular period or area. I couldn’t imagine just taking one aspect of it further to the exclusion of all others so I didn’t feel that doing a Phd was right for me, especially as it felt that would be quite solitary. So, as I imagined back before I started my degree, I went on to do a PGCE.

The advice I was given was that to carry on at Cambridge doing a teaching degree would indicate that I wasn’t really serious about teaching but just wanted to extend my student days particularly as I was involved in college-level sport. So I did my PGCE at Hull and it was a fabulous course with great combination of theory and advice.

I discovered that teaching is never dull and you have to constantly think on your feet. It has to be one of the most difficult jobs, for example to differentiate effectively in a class full of children working at very different levels…

Choosen excerpts by JMM from

via Why I became a teacher: there is no job that’s more exciting | Teacher Network | Guardian Professional.