Teaching was all-consuming for me, but I could never give my work less than my best. I thought French was a fabulous language, and France was just the other side of the English Channel, oh-so-close. France wasn’t just there for holidays, either. I felt that the world was available to these students if they could speak, read, and write another language. I was passionate about French, and I cared for each student in my class.
Most of my pupils were well-behaved, though some not, of course, but it was the sheer workload involved in teaching several classes of teenagers at different levels and abilities, that I found daunting. We teachers had only one free lesson per week. Nothing else. We taught all day every day, going from class to class as required, without a break, except for the lunch hour, some of which I often spent helping students. Furthermore, if anyone in our department was absent, we lost that one free period to cover for our colleague. It was a punishing schedule. We didn’t have Teachers’ Unions with mandatory teacher enrollment, as is the case in Ottawa. One could choose to join one of the two small unions available, but such organizations were not powerful like the unions here in Canada. I never joined a union and nor did most of my colleagues. I just got on with the business of teaching, aiming to achieve the highest standards possible both for them and for me.
Teaching is fun! One day is never guaranteed to be quite like the next. It keeps you on your toes, as the teacher deals with the numerous questions that arise in any classroom, and with the unexpected events that occur, too. One learns so much about the lives of one’s students, too. As a teacher of teenagers, I soon learned about their favorite sports teams and music. I learned about their families, about their boyfriends and girlfriends, about their hobbies and interests. I knew the films they saw in local theatres and the TV shows they liked to watch, and I incorporated their interests into my lessons where I could. Teaching should be relevant, after all.
Yes, I loved my classes. I liked my colleagues, too, and made some lasting friendships that still endure today, despite the miles that now separate us. I enjoyed my work, but it still tired me. Night after night, I trailed home, pulling along to Havant railway station a wheeled shopping cart, full of student exercise books containing the work that needed correcting by me and handing back the following day. When years later I began teaching in Canada, I found that students handed in single sheets of lined paper with their completed homework. No more carrying around of heavy exercise books. Those single sheets weighed almost nothing, though I soon realized that the least organized students had messy binders with pieces of paper flying all over the place. At least, exercise books had all the work contained therein, with one exercise ruled off neatly, before a new piece of work was added immediately underneath. No wastage of paper, either. Which was the better system? The motivated students managed well with sheet paper stored in their labelled and sectioned binders. The less well organized lost countless piece of work because, despite my regular check on their binders, they didn’t file them away immediately nor properly.
All in all, though, I think I favour single sheets, if only because my shopping cart felt as if it weighed a ton!
