Moving On Up

Today was Move Up Day at school - where the children all move on to their new class and new teacher for a session to get a taster of what is in store for them after the summer holidays. As a little introduction I got each child to tell me their name (all of which I promptly forgot - depression has turned my short term memory to mush, I used to be excellent at picking up names with new classes!) and then roll a dice. Depending on the number the dice landed on, I would ask them a question to get to know a little bit more about them. This saved the blank moments of little children racking their brains for 'something interesting about yourself' and ensured that one person didn't hog lots of time chatting and eat into the activity I had planned. The questions were:

1. How many brothers and sisters do you have?

2. What is your favourite food?

3. Do you have any pets?

4. When is your birthday?

5. What is your favourite toy or book?

6. What do you want to be when you grow up?

Quite a few of the girls threw a number six and answered with a wee smile in my direction "A teacher..." - I'm fairly certain it was more for brownie points than the truth, but it made me smile. I threw a six too and was rather stumped with how to answer!

After the little introduction, I worked on a team building activity because the children in my class are being merged together from three separate classes. I decided that a good way to build a team would be to chat a little bit about my move from England to Scotland and tell the class how much the idea of the different clans, with their clan names and tartans and their fierce loyalty and teamwork, had fascinated me. I split the children into three groups and assigned each a task towards creating our clan. Here are their (adorable!) efforts:

The writing is a little hard to see due to the past-its-best felt tip the wee boys used but our new name is Clan Spotlight Stars and our clan motto is "Never be sad." The picture inside the clan crest shows two pupils working on a project together, and is representing teamwork. The tartan is woven from strips of sugar paper.

I'm so glad I did this activity with them; their responses to the class discussion and the set tasks were lovely and I really like the little motto they came up with. There are a set of twins in the class and one of them explained that to follow our class motto, she would always try to cheer her twin sister up if she ever looked sad!

If anyone would like to copy the activity with a class, this is the Clan version which I used, but I have also created a Coat of Arms version for those who don't have ties to Scotland.

Professional-ity or Personality?

Today was the Probationer Welcome Day, when we were all officially introduced to our mentors for next year, had to fill out the last few pieces of paperwork for our upcoming jobs and visited our schools for the first time. I think it technically counts as our first piece of Continuing Professional Learning and Development (CPD) for the year, and given the looks of the timetable we were handed today, there is a lot more to come!

Having met my mentor and headteacher at the School Fete the other week, I was feeling fairly relaxed about most of the day. The thing stressing me out the most was how to dress... I often wonder whether it is just vanity that makes me fuss about what to wear to school, or whether there really is some psychology behind it. I studied drama in my final year of secondary school, and much the same as putting on your costume for a dress rehearsal makes you feel very in character, I don't really feel like I'm a teacher unless I've got my 'teacher clothes' on.

I'm quite a girly girl, and my personal style is very feminine, but I sometimes struggle to see myself as a teacher (and essentially, an authority figure) when I am dressed in very 'pretty' clothes. The outfit on the left is the one I had planned to wear, but whilst trying it on this morning, I decided it wasn't 'teachery' enough and changed at the last minute to the outfit on the right (a little crumpled in the picture I'm afraid, as it wasn't taken until the end of the afternoon!). Looking back at the photos, I'm not sure if there is really all that much difference in the way I come across... Is it more important to dress for your job, or dress for your personality? Or am I creating a problem where there isn't one?

Buzzing Bee!

I'm one excited little Bee today! I received a text earlier this morning from my new headteacher confirming that I will be teaching the Primary 2/3/4 composite next year. This means the children in my class will be between the ages of six and eight - just about the age group I like working with J

Hopefully when I attend the Probationer Welcome Day on Monday I will get a little more information from the school about the topics to be covered this year and the abilities of the children, which means I can really get my teeth into some planning!

As promised, I have uploaded the worksheets designed to help me (or other teachers!) on stressful days. This first document, the To Do List, was explained to me by a university professor. I didn't think much of it at the time, but through my counselling sessions, I've come to realise that I have a bad habit of leaving the things I really need to do until last, and spending lots of time on the things I enjoy instead. This meant that the few weeks I did spend teaching last August were quite muddled and I seemed to be constantly chasing my tail! This teaching-specific To Do organiser should help me to work through what I need to do in the most efficient manner. 

Because I have a tendency to let my thoughts run away with themselves, and end up very down-in-the-dumps, I have found it useful to use this Thought Record to bring myself back into a more positive way of thinking. Asking "What's the evidence for this thought...?" is an amazing way of making you realise you are actually blowing things way out of proportion. If the Thought Record is a little confusing, feel free to comment and I'll try to explain it in more detail, or you could give the more simple Action Plan a go. 

My plan at the moment is to print all three of these documents off and keep some photocopies stashed in the back of my planning folder for when they are needed. I'll let you know how they work out!

What Teachers Make

After ten long months of counselling, my counsellor bid me farewell today! I am in a much better place than I could have hoped to be at the end of those ten months and literally smiled for the whole session. It was bizarre trying to look back to the early days of being ill and try to work out how far I've managed to come, as the Bee from back then doesn't even vaguely resemble the Bee I am now.

As this was the final session, we worked on creating a 'Relapse Action Plan', so that on bad days or times when I feel like depression could be creeping back, I have things in place to help me bounce back to my usual self. Once I have turned my scribbled notes from the counselling session into coherent sheets to sit in the back of my planning folder, I will upload them for others to use if they want. Teaching is stressful, whether you have depression or not, so I imagine my Action Plan could be of use to any other teachers or students who are feeling the strain. 

Despite having a rather snazzy new Action Plan in place, this video is still my favourite pick-me-up at the end of a stressful day:

I first stumbled across Taylor Mali after a friend pinned this video on Pinterest months back, and have grown to love him. I dare you to watch this video and not feel empowered and worthwhile at the end! 

Being Brave

As a child, I suffered from bouts of existential anxiety. Obviously, I didn’t know the name for it until years later, whilst studying a Philosophy module at university, but I used to lie awake for hours on end pondering Big Questions and scaring myself silly worrying about the meaning of life. As a child who often dwelled on these sorts of worries, the scariest villain of my childhood was not Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars or Miss Trunchball from Matilda, but The Nothing from The Neverending Story. Something about the fact that I couldn’t even wrap my head around the idea of ‘nothingness’ taking over Fantasia made it a thousand times scarier than the much more tangible Chokey.

The three weeks of probationary year that I managed last August have become my own personal Nothing, a shady shadowy creature squatting in the corner of my mind. Something that I can’t see clearly, or even quite understand, but that scares me half to death. And the more I try to fathom it, the more confusing and ominous it becomes until I shy away from it again. Now that I am learning to cope with my depression and am thinking more clearly about things, I can rationalise that the three weeks I spent teaching were difficult, and a sad and confusing time for me, but not the horror story it has become in my head. Being the stubborn little thing that I am, (I think it comes from growing up with brothers, this need to prove myself to be tough!) I decided that being able to rationalise it wasn’t enough for me and I would return to the school, just to prove to myself that I could.

Today was the first time I have set foot in the school since I left in September 2012 and it was actually amazing! I’m pretty sure I just grinned all day long J

The building –especially the staff room – was not the enormous terrifying space I had remembered. And although the children there are from an area of social deprivation and have some behavioural issues, they weren’t the monsters with a personal vendetta against me that they had morphed into in my head. In fact, the bad behaviour I saw today wasn’t anything that I haven’t encountered before on university placements and dealt with effectively myself. It was such a confidence boost to realise these things and know for certain that those ‘awful’ three weeks were mostly due to the demons in my own head. Probably the only time in my life when I have been pleased to discover that I was the problem!

I went back to what had been my old class to say hello to my little Primary Twos (now very nearly Primary Threes!) and was met with the announcement from one little darling:

“I didn’t miss you at all. I don’t even remember who you are.”

A year ago, that would have completely and utterly crushed me, but today I laughed aloud, and even repeated the story to much more laughter in the staff room. You need a thick skin to deal with the no-holds-barred honesty of little kids, and it appears that I have finally grown one J

Tabula Rasa

I received a very exciting letter a few days ago, telling me which school I have been placed at for my induction year into teaching!

I originally started my induction year in August 2012, but had been diagnosed with depression in the April, and found it a struggle to manage the everyday stresses of teaching alongside my shaky mental health. Three weeks into term I made the difficult decision to resign from my job and take the full year off. Up until about Christmas I had a self-indulgent wallow in my illness, but one day in January I woke up and actually felt a glimmer of excitement to be going back to teaching... That little glimmer grew and grew and I began to really look forward to finding out where I would be placed for my second attempt at induction year. By the time the letter actually arrived I was fit to burst!

I know that it will still be a tough year for me, even though I am really looking forward to it, and decided that blogging about my experience might be a more positive way to deal with stress than last year’s response of napping or crying at every given opportunity... We were encouraged at university to be reflective practitioners and I love looking over my old placement folios to see how much I have grown over the past five years. Hopefully having this blog to look back through and see my triumphs and learning curves over the year will be a good confidence boost on my ‘down’ days.

The school I have been placed at is a few miles down the road from me – close enough that I can walk on a good day. It is classed as a rural school and only has around 100 pupils divided into composite classes, which suits me perfectly. I did my final university placement in a composite class and love working with a mixed age group in a small school setting.  The school was hosting a fete and family fun day on Saturday and invited me along to meet my colleagues in an informal setting. Everyone was incredibly friendly and welcoming, from parents to my headteacher and the day really helped to put me at ease for next year.

It was a gorgeous day for a fete, but being as fair-skinned as I am, I came home to discover myself very burnt! Obviously in the excitement of meeting everybody and nosying around the different stalls, I forgot to reapply suncream and now am a beautiful shade of lobster... So begins my journey into my first year as a teacher, sunburnt but smiling J