Two months into being a teacher, a recap 📙📝

Dear reader,

It has officially been almost two months or so since I started teaching literature to teenagers. If you don’t know, at the beginning of 2019 I sat the French teaching exams and actually passed them all (both written and oral exams), and therefor have started teaching since September. I can teach any teens in middle and high school (meaning in France between 11 and 18 years old), but this year I’m teaching two classes of 13 years old. It has been nerve wrecking, it involved a lot of work, both academic one but also on myself, and I’m now on vacations for two weeks.

So let’s recap those two months of teaching literature, shall we?

(For the privacy of my students, my school and all that go with it I won’t talk in too much details of my job. This is an overview of my thoughts on it, and my thoughts only.)

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Before being a teacher, I was terrified. What if I didn’t know how to deal with teenagers? And how am I supposed to create lectures? Do I truly know enough to teach? What if I don’t teach them what they’re supposed to learn? and so on. But I breathed deeply, jumped into it because I had no other choice… and ended up loving it. I love the school I’m at, I love my students, I love my co-workers and I even made great friends at the teachers school (I have to go for a year and then I’ll be free). It’s all a dream and I’m adoring every single day, but I have to be honest and to explain the pros just like the cons of the job. Let’s get through it all.

❥ THE CONS

I’m starting with the cons because they’re minors and I don’t want to end on a negative note. Please keep in mind that I love my job, but like any other jobs it can be hard at times. For example, it’s tiring. Not physically because it’s not like working a 9 to 6 job like I used to in my publishing house, but mentally. Working with teenagers is wonderful but they’re not all kind and ready to learn. As people told me times and times again, I won’t be able to help them all. I’m trying my best to do so but some won’t listen to me or anything, and it can be exhausting. As I said I have two classes, and though one is amazing, the other one is pretty hard to deal with because all the students talk all the time and because some of them aren’t that nice with others. I still have to find another way to deal with them when school will start again, but for now let’s say they’re tiring.

Teaching teenagers really test your patience, so it can be nerve wrecking at times, especially when teens attack you personally (it never happened to me, well one started being mean but I stopped it right away, but it could get worse, and you always have to tell yourself they don’t know you and that this shouldn’t touch you). Some days I come out of a lecture I just gave and think it didn’t go that well, always trying to think of what I could do differently rather than blaming the teens. (Oh, you also always have to think of a billion things and having an agenda is life saving.) You really have to reinvent yourself all the time with this job, you’re always trying something new and sometimes it fails, but some other times it works and it’s fantastic. So let’s now take a look at the pros…

❥ THE PROS

Ah, finally. Teaching has been a dream to me. First of all, I have tons of free time. As I said I used to work a 9 to 6 job, and a 9 to 7 job on Fridays too, so having the time table of a 13 years old is everything. I never come home later than 6pm (but it only happens once a week) and I have tons of hours in the morning (mostly because I still have to go to university, so I have less classes and therefor less hours, but no matter what, teachers do have a lot of free time). Of course this free time is dedicated to create lecture and grading papers, but I still find the time to read and to blog, to work on my IG, so it’s all good to me!

Also teaching is extremely rewarding. No matter what I said about some teenagers being hard to deal with, all the other ones are a charm. I always loved to work with children, but teens are something else and I feel like I can understand a lot when it comes to them. I adore working with my students, I’m always happy when I go to them and I hope they are happy to come to my lectures. (Some told me they do, but can I really trust them? Ah!) I feel so useful and obviously I ended up loving them. I already don’t want to leave and I really hope I’ll get to work there next year. (Please pray for me!)

Overall I’m truly enjoying myself as a teacher. Working in publishing was okay (I disliked the publishing house I was working at, close to none of my coworkers liked me, but I really enjoyed working in communications there so that’s why I’m spending a lot of time on my blog and IG because I never want to stop working somehow in digital communications) but being a teacher is something else. I’m always happy, and it’s only been two months! It feels like I found my place in the universe, and I can’t wait to see what the futur has in store for me.

To more amazing months with my amazing students!

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And that’s all! I’ll probably do another blog post like this one during the Christmas break, so I hope that you loved it. I’m so glad to keep a track of my time being a teacher here, as I kinda see this blog as my diary. (Not so private, uh.)

Now tell me: What is your dream job? (I personally still want to work in the UK, so hopefully I’ll end up teaching French as a foreign langage in an English university in the next ten years!)

Love always,

Clara