Bryony's Blog

When I first began teaching fifteen years ago, the school where I worked was not particularly interested in special needs teaching or differentiating between students in a class.  I had a small group of boys that I would take for remedial lessons every week and that was the extent of the help given to them.  Some of these pupils had an educational psychologist's report and were deemed dyslexic, but not much notice was taken by the school - which is not to say that their conditions were ignored, they just weren't given much emphasis and no one was excused from doing anything because of their difficulty. Some educationalists take umbrage at this way of doing things.  The last twenty or so years have seen a considerable change in the way in which learning difficulties are viewed.  Students taking the University of Cambridge's examinations can apply to have a reader (someone who reads the questions out aloud) or a scribe (someone who writes the answers do...

One of the worst moments in your life is when you come to realise that you are not happy in your job anymore.  There can be varying reasons for this and it may be a passing phase in which case the feeling itself  passes and you are able to continue your job as you have done in the past. It's something else when you realise the job itself and what it demands of you is changing and it's no longer what you want. I think of myself as an 'accidental' teacher.  I didn't have any plans to go into teaching, it's more of something I fell into after leaving university.  I had a Master's degree in English Literature, but I had no particular training in anything.  A couple of years' of teaching would look better on my CV than a career in waitressing, I thought.  How little was I to know that I would spend the next fifteen years in the job. Teaching is a profession that grew on me. I didn't always enjoy it at the beginning, but I came to enjoy it immensely....