Teaching Without the Paperwork

Any regular readers - or people who actually know me in real life - know that I'm a qualified teacher. I graduated in 2013 with a degree in Education, Religion and English. I've done my teaching hours. I've passed my exams.

But I haven't gotten a teaching job. I haven't registered to be a teacher - and that was a strategic decision, made on the basis of having to reach a certain amount of teaching hours within a couple of years...which I knew wasn't going to happen unless I started teaching immediately. Truth be told, I haven't actively pursued teaching as a career since finishing college, because I knew that I was going to be doing a Masters. I knew I wouldn't have time to teach and study, particularly not when I didn't even know what I would be studying.

In November, I was offered an assistant position in a web design course in college. It's a bit of a change from English and Religion, but more importantly, it came without a ridiculous amount of paperwork.

When I was on teaching placement, I didn't just have to teach. I also had to produce lesson plans every week - one for every class, each one unique, even if I was teaching the same material to different class groups. To add to the fun, I also had to send my Schemes of Work to my supervisors by Monday afternoon each week, for the week ahead. And each Sunday evening, my Reflective Statements for the previous week's lessons had to be uploaded for them to see, too.

Typically, a teacher should spend at least as much time preparing a lesson as they spend teaching it. That's an impractical demand, particularly for newly qualified teachers or teachers in training, but it ends up being something that has to be done - no complaining about it, because there's no one to listen.

Thankfully, this time around things are easier. No lesson plans. No schemes of work. No reflective statements. I don't have to spend six hours a day preparing the class for the next day.

This is, for all intents and purposes, teaching without the paperwork. This is liberating.

Web design is a funny ol' thing to teach, because in a few years it's incredibly likely that most of what we've taught the students will be obsolete, or at least less important. Heck, the only reason knowing how to code a website is important for the general user these days is if they want to set up their own website and edit the templates provided by Wordpress or Blogger. Just knowing what goes where, really.

See, unless you really understand the languages behind web design, you can't do much with them. If you don't understand the tags used in HTML, you almost certainly can't create a website that looks anything like a website. Trust me, I've been a student of the very same course I'm teaching and even though

tags existed back when I did it, we didn't use them. Even though CSS existed, we didn't use it. We had webpages that looked awful, and we didn't understand why.

The difficulty in teaching this sort of stuff in a week is that we need to teach the students what the tags do, why they're important, and how to use them. The last part is the most difficult one. With a little bit of time and playing around, students begin to understand that they need to close tags to make sure the page looks the way it's supposed to. They understand which tags they need to change. They just aren't sure how to start it from scratch. At least, I'm not sure they'd want to try.

And who can blame them? If I were on teaching placement, I'd have to come up with a reason for not teaching them to use everything all by themselves. The problem is, they only have a week. They have a week to learn something that's entirely new to them, and it seems that some the students don't even use computers at home. It's all mobile technology, these days.

Without a lesson plan to encourage teaching them everything from scratch, to have them create everything without a template (they've tried, then they were given a template to edit), and without the time to really let them at it, it's difficult to ensure that the students have learned anything.

The best we can do with a week - yes, a week - is to teach them to understand, and to try get them interested in web design. Some of them really have an eye for the design side of things, too, which was nice to discover. We can give them the tools to go and learn more. We can show them resources to use to create websites of their own. Sure, we can't ensure they'll actually continue. And we can't ensure they'll actually remember anything. But we can do an awful lot towards making sure they can come out of the class with a greater understanding of web design.

And all without the paperwork.

And Finally

Less than a week before Christmas, my first semester of college at a Masters level came to an end, all assignments submitted, all the panic over and done with until the results officially come out in February. (I suspect the reason for the wait is actually because of the courses that have examinations after each semester, so we have them to thank for the delay in finding out how we did. Thanks guys!)

Despite the fact that being a Masters student is in some way supposed to be an indicator of maturity and adulthoodness (Blogger's spell-check doesn't recognise that as a word, but neither does it recognise its own name) we decided to go the way of the Undergrad. Namely, we went out for a few celebratory drinks.

Thirteen weeks before this, we hadn't even met each other. We had our orientation, in which we were commended on being mature, responsible adults, capable of the anticipating the challenges of adulthoodness. I might be paraphrasing. The point is that we were strangers, save for two trios who either (a) were in the same classes at Undergrad level or (b) were one year apart in the same Undergrad programme. That's about a quarter of the class entering with some sort of familiarity with someone else, even if that was just a face and a vague memory.

(Side note: as I mentioned in a previous post, one of my friends' girlfriends is actually sort of a neighbour of mine, whom I've never met. It also happens that someone else went to the same secondary school as someone else's boyfriend, the someone else originally from the States. And about a quarter of the class - at least - have some connection to Galway. We're not sure how to explain these small coincidences. Retrospectively, someone might say we were meant to come together as a class group, and I like to think that means we did/will do well enough after the programme to warrant mass-stalking of the group. Or just someone reading my blog.)

I could, once again, break down the thirteen weeks of the course for your reading pleasure, but it's much easier if you just read the previous posts about my progress in the Masters. What you'll find in there, aside from a brief overview of what I've been doing in the course and how sentimentally attached I've gotten to the group (on the few occasions we've gone out for drinks, I estimate I've been between 1-3 drinks away from "I love you guys!" Those of you reading this - that's how you know you've reached 100% completion in the game of Get Paul Drunk! Alternatively, just re-read this.)

[Insert incredibly subtle segue here!] 

No, today I want to talk about me, because eventually my egocentricity had to come to the fore.

Back when the course began, I hadn't considered much of myself. I didn't immediately introduce myself with "I've published 7 books on Amazon, and written a few more on top of that." I could have. The opportunity was there. Instead, I chose to talk about The Curve and my desire to get into publishing, and the fact that I come from an Education background but never managed to escape retail. Now, I want to talk to about another book - one I haven't gotten to actually read yet, but which I've taken part in a small section of a course based on the book: The Motivation Manifesto, by Brendon Burchard.

Early into the course, homework was set: write your own Manifesto. So I did. I'm not going to share the whole thing here. There are some things on it that are still quite personal. But the main point I want to make from it is the ending of what I'd written.

Life should be fun. Life should be full of joy. There will always be struggles. There will always be fear. But they don't need to define how you live. Let yourself be happy. Let yourself get to know people. Let yourself get hurt. It's all part of the adventure.

Okay, it's a little bit...dramatic? Sappy? I don't know. It's supposed to be something that keeps me motivated. And did it?

Well, as it happens, yes. Inadvertently. I guess putting it into words helped immediately. This is where we get a bit personal. Very early on, I got a feeling about one of my classmates - like, a vibe, not a crush. It's hard to put this into words - easier when drunk and talking with someone who knows him. The feeling said to me that I could be friends with this person. I won't name him. I'm sure my classmates know who it is. What was significant for me was that I hadn't felt this way about someone since I met one of my very close friends four years beforehand, and a year beforehand with pretty much everyone else from my Undergrad college I still talk to (including one who wasn't in my year.) I didn't get much of a chance for this to happen with other people, in fairness, but I hadn't felt something so certain in a long time.

And it was a scary feeling.

Historically, I'm not great at close friendships. I don't tend to be close in the right way. I know exactly why I behave this way, but when the other person doesn't, that's very difficult to deal with. So, I have a tendency not to talk about myself. At all. It's not healthy, I know. I didn't really break that habit until the summer of 2010, and not again until 2012, And then, nothing. Not until late October this year, and much more much quickly than any other time.

End result; more panic. More worry. It wasn't enough to talk about myself, if I wasn't sure it was the right idea. I promise that in due course this will all make a lot more sense, but the effective result of everything going through my head was a belief that I needed to alienate myself from that one person who I'd actually let myself open up, and who had been ridiculously supportive about the whole thing.

What happened next completely shocked me, and this really goes to show how far gone I'd become. A little bit of madness on a Monday morning was dealt with rationally and compassionately, and not with anger. Not with vehemence. Not with any sort of disdain for me having a freak-out in the same week we had deadlines for assignments. I hadn't thought that this specific person would react in this way; my fears were - and I suppose still are - founded on how I think everyone would react in this situation.

The conversation we had wasn't especially long - at least it didn't feel that way - but it was incredibly important. He talked me down from a freak-out, asked all the right questions to help me understand what was going on in my own head...and it seems like that was what I'd never experienced before. Historically, whenever I had a similar sort of freak-out (and it only ever seems to happen with people I feel like I'm getting too close to too quickly, because how unfair is it on me to dump any of my personal stuff on them) I didn't deal with it very well. It usually repeated itself on a regular basis. We're talking daily, here. But since Monday, nothing.

See, I didn't really pay much attention to the Manifesto I'd written for myself, despite the fact that it's within my eye-line so often. I didn't pay attention to a part near the top - Be Yourself. Be Honest. Be Open.

The thing is, I'm trying. I'm trying really hard to pay attention to my own Manifesto. I'm trying to be a good friend. I'm trying to be a good son, and brother, and uncle (as well as nephew, grandson, cousin, godson, etc.) I'm trying, and it's difficult coming from the point of view that getting close to people isn't necessarily the best thing I can do (there's a whole set of stories about that one, but basically things got better for a while when I started my Undergrad, and then plateaued until recently.)

I don't believe life should be spent alone. I'm not very good at practising that belief, but I carry it with me every day, and I try not to be alone when it matters, when it can be helped. It took a long time to get to this point. I definitely wasn't ready for this way of thinking a year ago. I wasn't ready for adulthoodness and the accompanying pressures, expectations, and maturity that come from it. Similarly, I was completely unprepared to make even one extremely valuable friend - valuable not because I'm allowed to talk about whatever's going on in my head, but because I'm allowed to just be myself and speak my mind, and even when our opinions don't match, they still fit. I'm not sure I can really count how many I've made this semester, and I can't quantify the good it's done me.

These past thirteen weeks have brought me almost entirely out of my comfort zone. I have practically no technical background that would have helped with the course. I didn't study art or the media at an academic level before. More significantly, more personally, I don't do well meeting large groups of people for the first time when the expectation is that I should be able to work with them. (The first three days of teaching placement every year were especially terrifying in that regard.) I haven't been in a new class group since 2009, and I've never started in a new educational institution without my twin brother. We've been with each other the entire way, from the first day of primary school to our graduation from Mater Dei in 2013. I was scared. I was nervous. And bit by bit, as the first couple of weeks went by, I started to get the vibe-feeling about other people. Bit by bit, I started to feel like I was in the right place. Finally.

How Well Do We Really Know Each Other?

Meeting new people and making new friends is weird. Society's pressure to "fit in" requires that we do what other people do, laugh at their jokes, make our own, talk to people, and maybe get to know them. Fitting in requires either finding people who are like you, or adapting to the status quo of social paradigms. That, or spend your days alone.

Those are the options, right?

What if I told you that, for the past six weeks, I've worn my passions on my clothes? What if I told you that, despite not knowing a single person in my Masters course, I wore t-shirts with Final Fantasy VII characters, Guardians of the Galaxy references, and Harry Potter icons on them? For all I knew, I could have immediately alienated myself from the class group.

The big question still remains: have I been myself? While I've been unironically enthusiastic about a lot of different things that aren't exactly "normal" (a word that loses all meaning when personal expression is the aim), and while I've exposed a lot about myself to my classmates, I certainly haven't been myself, not 100% of the way.

This is no reflection on them. I don't feel like I can't be myself around them. I don't think they would think any less of me if I showed my full palette of colours. However, like everyone else with an insecurity issue or two, it's not always a matter of whether the other people will accept me. The problem isn't that I can't be myself, in the sense that I would be in intimate, private situations, but that, maybe, I shouldn't be myself.

My reasoning is simple, maybe to its detriment: emotional baggage.

My formative years weren't the best for developing social skills. I take jokes slightly too far. I don't always read people correctly. I have trouble shutting up. These consequences of my youth - say, age 12-15, give or take - are obvious after spending a bit of time with me. But the reason why things turned out that way, that remains a secret except to those who probably don't realise the lasting effect those years have had on my life.

I certainly haven't spoken at length about those years with the majority of the people in my life. This isn't a trust issue, except maybe in the sense that I don't trust myself not to dump every modicum of emotional baggage I carry on those who don't know how to deal with it. Put simply, I don't think I can volunteer that information to anyone any more.

And just by that decision, I'm hiding part of myself. But the fact is, if I felt like I could trust someone, and if they really wanted to know, and if I could feel it from them that they wanted to know for more reasons that sheer curiosity.

I hide my secrets under masks, masks carved from personal truths. I wear masks that say I'm a nerd, that say I like to bake, that say I like to stay on top of college work and the little intricacies of information that fly about in emails. I wear masks that tell people who I want to be when I'm in public, to hide the person I don't like to be, the person who panics, who stresses out, who succumbs to fear and doubt and dread.

The evidence has been made clearer to me over the past six weeks than ever before that I'm not the only person who does this. We all hide things about ourselves, little interests, stories from our pasts we don't share, opinions on the world around us. Everyone does it, because there's a prevailing fear of the intimacy of personal knowledge about other people, and letting them know more about us than we care to admit.

Bad jokes, nerdy t-shirts, enthusiasm, anger, curiosity, baking; these are the masks I wear, to hide the rest of what makes me up. It's all true, it's just not the full truth.

Any friends or family who may end up reading this, here's the thing: the next time you see me, if it really matters for you to know something about me, just ask. The thing about masks is that eventually, they have to come off.