When I first started thinking about becoming a teacher, I was volunteering at the Isamilo International School in Mwanza, Tanzania. I had just finished a degree in Astrophysics and Literature. Like many young adults these days, I really hadn’t thought much further ahead than finishing my degree. I’d spent three years concentrating on my degree, but as graduation day came and went, I slowly began to realise that now I had gotten my degree, I had no idea what to do with it. So I decided to take some time off to ‘get my life sorted’. Through volunteering at IISM I realised teaching was definitely something that I wanted to do.

And so I started looking into teaching degrees. Before I knew it, I had flown to England to start a PGCE in Physics teaching. Almost immediately, two things struck me.

• Teaching was not going to be easy. At all.
• Teaching is not something you do alone.

As a teacher, you constantly work with many other people. You share resources and lesson plans with your department. You borrow ideas and strategies with other teachers in your school. You observe other teachers, and are in turn observed, to improve your teaching methods. You receive training from other teachers in your school, as well as from experts that your school have brought in. You spend hours searching the internet for extra resources to engage your students in the next lesson. You browse TES continuously for new ideas, lesson plans, games, revision tactics, videos, powerpoints.

The list is endless. And this constant sharing of ideas is how teachers get better and better at what we do. But sometimes it can be overwhelming. Your resources folder gets bigger and bigger and you begin to forget which ones were good, which ones didn’t work for you, which ones needed ‘tweaking’.

And that is one of the reasons I have decided to start this blog. It is an attempt to keep track of the different things that go on in (and outside) my classroom. The things that worked. The things that didn’t work. The things that turn out differently from what I expected.