It was 1st of March 2016, and I had just finished handing our accounting practice over to a team of young fresh accountants who were busy building an empire on the Gold Coast. This was the first time in a long time that I was unemployed, I still had the responsibilities of two kids and a mortgage, but I was no longer a slave to the accounting practice. It was time to take life in a new direction, but first I had some study to get through. 

My plan was to spend a year studying at The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) to upgrade my degree so that I could become a secondary teacher. There wasn’t time for a break as the uni course started the day after the handover. We did however shift down to the coast for a couple of weeks so that I could start each day with a surf session before sitting down to listen to lectures and work through the course material. The time passed quickly with many catch ups and dinners with friends, as well as quite a few surfing, skating and cycling sessions, all of the good things that go with being on the coast. 

Election work

Being without income for the year was a little difficult, but there were two elections in this year, and thanks to some of Tiff’s contacts we were able to secure paid work supervising the polling booths, which helped us to get through. These were massive days and reminded me of when I used to do the markets with Dad as a kid when we were first building B&J Tools. The first election was a local election which was fairly straight forward, especially as I was operating a guest booth. The second election was a federal election and this was the year that came with these huge senate papers that were an absolute nightmare to count. 

Help from the past

As I worked through my various assignments I came to one where I had to contact people in the industry, and ask them for strategies that could be applied in the classroom. As I hadn’t completed any practical at this stage I didn’t really have a great deal of contacts to call upon. So I reached out to JP, a language blogger I had come across on the now defunct Google+ social media site, and my old year coordinator, Paul Murphy, who had been my year coordinator from the beginning of year seven through until the end of year twelve, when I was at high school twenty years ago. 

Both of these fine gentlemen were a wealth of knowledge, providing me with a stack of strategies, and it was great to catch up with Paul, who suggested that I should try teaching in Latin America, relaying the story of a friend of his who had gone for a two month stint, only to return two and a half years later after falling in love with the place.

The first Practicum

My first prac was at the school where within a couple of years I would be a full time teacher. When I arrived the prac supervisor, Craig, was in his office with one of the other prac teachers looking through Facebook profiles to see what the kids were going to find when they decided to search us on line. When Craig looked at my profile he found lots of fitness information from Bipyfit, our personal training studio. My prac supervisor was a great bloke by the name of Michael, who was an experienced teacher with 10 years under his belt. He made handling the classes look easy and taught a variety of history and business classes. Michael was a wealth of information, was really supportive and offered loads of useful feedback on my performance.

The classrooms were vastly different from when I was at school 20 years previously, for a start, the chalk boards had all been replaced with interactive white boards, where you could project anything you wanted from slides and word documents through to videos. The students all had iPads and MacBooks, gone were the old computer labs. This has made an abundance of resources available to teachers including games like Kahoot, where students can interact with the game from their devices and as such receive immediate feedback on their progress. 

Another major difference was the amount of opportunities that students now had, with fully equipped music rooms with their own recording studios, media rooms with built in green screens, Dance studios, trade training centers, where students could finish school with an industry recognized certificate, or the first part of their apprenticeship completed. Even while I was doing my first prac one of the classrooms was being converted into a fully equipped Gym, where students could work out before school and during their lunch breaks. The Gym was also to be used as a training facility so that students could become qualified as Gym instructors. As a trained Gym instructor myself, I would later come to spend many hours in that gym helping students with exercise programming, and training the next generation of Gym instructors. 

The Second Prac 

Now this prac was supposed to have occurred in the first semester, but didn’t happen until the second semester as USQ had trouble placing me. This made the first semester a great semester, but the second semester, well…..

This prac was the only one that I did at a different school and it was also the only one where I was teaching accounting, ewww. My mentor teacher was your typical rule orientated accountant who loved things to be complicated and wordy, perhaps a judge in a former life. She was one of those people who said that they had done it tough during their time as a prac teacher, and that it had made them a better teacher, so therefor she was going to make my time as tough as she could. I love this type of logic, it follows that dying of radiation poisoning made Marie Curie a better scientist, so therefore all future scientists should make the same mistakes. 

I was under one main prac teacher who then had a trusty side kick. Between the two of them they had a double classroom block with a staffroom type area between the two classrooms, and they were the masters of their domain. These two teachers were one half of the business department, I met the other half of the business department, who had retreated to another part of the school, at a business department meeting. After the meeting I well understood why they had chosen to retreat, the open hostility at the meeting was something else. 

Now of course not being privy to any of this when I first arrived, I had made myself comfortable in the above mentioned staff room area by setting up my computer and paperwork so that I could prepare lesson plans and write up reflections between classes. By around day four my mentor hinted that she had noticed that I wasn’t using the desk that she had secured for me down in the manual arts block. Taking the hint, I decided that I would start using the desk in the manual arts block, to which she then decided to ensure that she kept me up at the classrooms through breaks and between classes so that we could “debrief”, making it impossible to get things done during that time. 

Hence at nights I was working until quite late preparing lesson plans, slides and other material for class the next day, as well as completing the general university course work. This meant that things were starting to become a little overwhelming.

Thankfully the end of this three week prac was fast approaching, however not one to make things easy, for one last parting shot, my tormentor made sure that she kept me back late on the Friday afternoon, gave me until the weekend to have my lesson plans and materials in for a make up day, on the following week, and then gave me a stack of marking that she wanted completed knowing full well that I had an assignment to hand in on Monday. Later when USQ asked if I was happy to go back to that school for another prac my answer was an emphatic “no”.

USQ and some bad advice 

By this stage I was struggling under the pressure of the uni course and was looking at the prospect of another two prac placements to undertake by the end of the year. I wrote to USQ to see if I could defer one of my courses into the summer semester without affecting my ability to be finished in time to start work with the beginning of the school term next year, “sure no problem” they wrote back. This was going to come back to bite me.

The third prac 

Going back to the first prac school was a welcome change after the antics of the second prac school. This time around I would get to teach complete units for year 9 business and year 7 history. One cool thing was that I had started back in time for the sports carnival, which is a great event and an excellent opportunity to talk to teachers and students outside of the classroom environment. 

During this prac I started a routine that would follow me through the next few years where I would come home each evening and then do planning to get me through the next day, the amount of unpaid hours that teachers put in is something else. 

USQ and their bad advice strikes 

About mid way through the third prac someone from USQ called to say that because I had deferred one of my subjects, I wasn’t going to be able to do my final prac until early next year. This wasn’t really an option as we were fast running out of funds and I needed to get back to work. I also pointed out the other Universities such as Griffith were running their courses so that the theory was out of the way prior to the prac so that students weren’t doing what I was doing by juggling classroom planning and university assignments. It took another couple of weeks or so but in the end there was nobody at the university who could make anything happen, and I had spoken to people right up to the Dean. To say that I was unimpressed with this situation was an understatement. To make matters worse the school had juggled things around so that they could fit in my internship, had signed the paperwork and were ready to roll. To add insult to injury, the University contacted the school to offer a replacement student. To this day every student that I encourage to go to a University other than USQ is a win for me, it has become a personal quest.

ITTT to the Rescue

Thankfully I had undertaken a TESOL Certificate through an organisation known as, International TEFL and TESOL training, back in 2014 as a way of making myself a better language exchange partner. This course gave me the qualifications that I needed to teach English to foreigners. I set about applying to various English language schools at the end of September and started my first day of teaching on the 7th December 2016. I was hooked from the beginning, teaching English to foreigners is a highly rewarding experience. The students on the whole are intelligent, interesting, fun and motivated to learn. The work was fun and engaging and brought in the extra funds that we needed to get us through the holidays and into 2017.

The Internship

I was doing my internship, a four week unsupervised final placement, at the school where I had done the majority of my prac placements. The first thing I noticed when I arrived back was the number of new faces. Michael said that around 16 teachers had left and 10 had been replaced over the break. There is a good chance that one of those new faces could have been myself had it not been for USQ. The other thing was that it was go time. This was February and one of the busiest times of the year, especially for the year 12 students who only have around 3/4 of the year in which to finish up their courses and undertake a stack of exams. The time went quickly and I was kept busy preparing lessons, presenting classes, marking work and writing exams.

My last week of prac corresponded with the annual activities week that the students get to participate in. This involves various activities including camps, surfing and adventure courses. This was a great way to finish up my career change adventure.

On the second last day of my prac it was Michael’s birthday. Over the last few weeks I had organised with the students in his home room to create a video wishing him a happy birthday. Then with Tiff’s help I organised a birthday cake and all of the supplies that the students would need to hold a mini party for him. As often happens in teaching I was redeployed to take the year 11 students to an adventure course that morning and wouldn’t be at Michael’s home room. So I left all of the supplies with Brad, a practical joker, who relished the opportunity to create a disturbance. He found someone to cover his home room and then promptly locked Michael out of his room so that he could set up with the students. By all reports the event was successful and those teachers who managed to get some of the cake said it was absolutely delicious.

The final day was spent abseiling and raft building with some of the 10s who I had taught last year when they were in year 9 and I was on my first prac. (In 2019, I would be there to see these guys graduate on their last day of school). When we arrived back at school and I was heading to the office I met up with Cass, one of teachers from the prac school who I had become quite fond of during my time there. She gave me a huge hug  when she realized it was last day and asked me to try to come back if there was any way I could.

That afternoon I received a call from one of the English language schools saying that I had a week of work starting Monday. I worked between the language schools and registered for relief work with the state schools, in May the prac school got in touch with me to see if I wanted to do a few days per week there. This continued until I went full time at the prac school in….