PGCE - Current Students Thread

I seriously admire you guys, my sister did her PGCE last year and she literally had no time to herself i must have only seen her three times that year. The hard work pays off though, she's been lucky enough to get a job teaching in a secondary school in London.

I was considering a career in teaching before she told me what the PGCE involves and how draining it is. I think i'll stalk this thread, in an attempt to regain the urge to teach.

I've not been a mentor for about 12 years now, and my observations from afar suggest it's got even more paper heavy and busy-work dependent than it was then, so maybe more people are allowed to fall by the wayside these days.

I feel exactly like you.. its taken me AAALLLLL weekend, about 25hours in total to create 3 lessons (THREE!) because I've been creating differentiated worksheets and outcomes. These are to be taught at the end of this week, and then I'm teaching 9hours the week after, I'm not sure that there are enough hours in the day to plan that many lessons

In my experience, people are encouraged to drop out rather than being failed. If you drop out of the placement before you're pushed out by failing then you've technically got the option of repeating the placement at a later date providing the university and GTC (I think its them) agree whereas if you fail then its harder for them to let you repeat a placement. I also felt that schools were quite happy to put people on cause for concern. These people didn't fail in the end, but I knew a lot of people who ended up on cause for concern at the end of our second placement because their schools felt that they weren't ready to take full responsibility for a class in September and needed intervention.

On my PGCE, around 20-25% of people dropped out during the year. Some people just realised they didn't enjoy it whereas others really struggled in school and just weren't cut out to teach. If they hadn't dropped out then they would have been failed, as the people I knew went to meetings to decide what they were going to do about it. I suppose in terms of the university its better for them to have a high drop out rate than a high fail rate as if its a drop out rate then they can just imply that these people weren't suited to teaching so left on their own accord whereas a fail rate would make prospective trainee teachers worry more.

Hahaha I got a MASSIVE compliment from the teacher I've been having problems with today, because I essentially emulated one of his lessons at last rather than trying out my own thing, he loved it! "That's the best lesson you've ever given" was exactly what he said.

To be fair, he has a point, it worked. So I'll carry on doing it where I can! But I shouldn't only be getting praise when I do what he wants so I'm still annoyed with him!

(am I being too stubborn?)

How exactly do you fail? How are you just not cut out to be a teacher? I'm just curious really. Is it things like just not being able to control the children, poor subject knowledge? I only got satisfactory for my first placement because of confidence issues mostly (not formally assessed though) so I'm hoping that that was the case rather than just not being cut out for it. Of course I need to give myself a proper chance, I'm just curious what I've had to do badly wrong to actually fail.

Reading through some of these posts has massively put me off doing the PGCE!

The 10th circle of Dante's Inferno should be reserved for endless, tortuous, back-breaking filing. So many pieces of paper to arrange into so many already-straining ringbinders. It's like a card sort from Hell. Higher-order thinking eat your heart out.

On the plus side, I can't wait to see Year 7's faces when I cut up a teddy bear with scissors on Weds morning.

Just booked my QTS skills tests!

Be pragmatic. Do it like he does until you've become ruler of your own classroom and can do whatever works for you. It's a hard enough year as it is without battling with your mentor all the time.

So is it the creation of resources that's taking you longer, not coming up with ideas? That's happening to me, I can bash out a few ideas fairly quickly (they might not be great...) but it's the powerpoint making and worksheet making and course form filling that gets me. I can only presume that gets easier once you've taught for a couple of years as you end up using largely the same stuff.