Teacher Training

I spent a year training to be a teacher in the late 1980s. Apart from a couple of months spent teaching in a school, the whole thing was an utter waste of time which I enjoyed immensely; as it was very easy and enabled me to be a student for another year, but with more money. Also, the girls were better looking than on my Degree Course.

To be honest, teaching is one of those jobs that you can either do or you can't. If the course had been three weeks long and simply involved following a few teachers and getting some useful tips, then I can't honestly say that I would have been any better or worse at the end than I was after the best part of a year sleeping through endless waffle on educational theory, didactic somethingorother, multicultural lesson plans etc. Oh and copying; sorry- writing a few essays, which of course simply regurgitated what our lecturers had said. (Actually, I could usually only speculate on what they might have said)

I recently spoke to someone who had just finished their PGCE Year enthusing about how beneficial it had been. After hearing a bit more, I realised that it sounded just like my course was 20 years ago but with new buzzwords!

Now the Government is proposing to cut the course down to 6 months and the Teaching Unions say that this is a Bad Thing.