Those who can’t...

A few days later I drove up to Reading to meet a friend for lunch at a pub near where he works. I hadn’t seen him for a while so it was good to catch up> the food was pretty good too, and pretty substantial too, despite the fact that we’d both ordered “reduced size” portions. I shudder to think how large the regular portions would be. Of course, as with any friend I don’t see every week (and in fact most that I do) the subject of job hunting came up. At this point it really wasn’t going very well (unless you count random emails from companies who saw my CV on monster and want to offer me jobs as a computer programmer or Java scripter just because I have an A-Level in Computer Science, as going well.) This is where the potentially life changing bit comes in. My friends’ boyfriend is a teacher. He suggested that might be a good career move for me. He told me about how you could get a huge bursary (£9000 for the year as it turns out) just for doing the course. I thought about all the holiday time. He told me that it was a fulfilling career, something that would give me a sense of achievement. I thought about what I could do with 13 weeks holiday a year. He said that, as a key worker, I’d have access to affordable housing and get a salary that would allow me to buy my own home. This appealed more than the abundance of holiday time. The last five years that I’ve spent stuck in this boring, mediocre little suburb have bee torturous. I long to actually have a proper life of my own, something that was never going to happen whilst I stuck living in the same house as my mother in Harrow, the closest London equivalent to Tatooine. If there is a bright spot in London, Harrow is the place furthest from it. (For some reason it feels good to reference/paraphrase Star Wars.). So, teaching could offer me a good, fulfilling job, where I could feel like part of the solution, not part of the problem (the problem being selfish and extreme capitalism and the sort of people who engage in nefarious, dishonest practices. Like all my previous employers). Not only that, I’d get a decent salary (decent in the sense that it’s far higher than anything I’d got before), and have enough spare time in the holidays to keep writing. To be frank I doubt that I’ll ever manage to fit in at most commercial organisations. Making somebody else rich was never a particularly strong motivating factor for me to work. I’m not even that bothered about being rich my self. Just comfortable. Sure I’d like my own house (and, with house prices being what they are you kind of do need to be rich to own one.) and a nice car (I keep mentioning cars and driving. They’ll be something more specific on all that later), but I’ve never really had much enthusiasm for accruing wealth just to put a few more zero’s on my bank balance. Honestly, being happy and doing something that I think is worthwhile is far more important to me.

Of course I’m quite scarred about the idea of teaching. I’d initially discounted it because I thought I’d make a lousy teacher. Admittedly this was based entirely on my inability to teach my mum how to use a computer so that wasn’t exactly a firm basis for saying that I’d be awful. But, when it comes down to it, I’d really love the opportunity to impart knowledge to people. To educate them and shape their minds. All that stuff. I decided that I’d probably make a pretty good teacher. But what to teach. I certainly wouldn’t want to do primary school. I really couldn’t stand being around kids who know absolutely nothing. No, far better to teach secondary school and be around a bunch of kids who think they know absolutely everything. I’ve decided that I’d like to teach English. I ended up regretting not doing English at university. Doing history was a bit of a mistake and, I think in retrospect, I let my Dad influence me in my choice of degree too much. I’d actually justified my choice of a History degree in a purely logical way. I did well at A-Level and GCSE, so I was bound to get a good degree. Sure, I liked history, and I got pretty good grades for GCSE and A-Level (both As’ in case you’re wondering), but I get the impression that my interest and motivation to do well was influenced by my desire to please my dad. Once he died, and I went to university to read (as they persistently say on University Challenge) History, I lost all motivation. I just wasn’t that interested. Oddly enough I’ve realised that I would have been much better off doing a degree in something that I got Bs in, like English. After all, to get a B for English I didn’t even have to bother trying. How well could I have done if I’d put a bit of effort into it? In fact the more and more I heard about English degrees in my third year (I was going out with a girl who, along with some of her friends’, studied English) the more and more I realised that I’d chosen the wrong subject. Of course by then it was far too late. I only had a couple of months before my degree was over.

Of course to redress the balance (and stay at university for another year with my younger girlfriend), I decided to do my MA in Film Screenwriting. I somehow cajoled my way onto the course and all was well in the world. Until the girl dumped me. And then, when I finished the course I still didn’t feel like I’d made up for doing so badly ion my first degree. Clearly doing so badly at my History degree is going to haunt me forever. I felt as though I wasn’t good enough, and, perhaps, that’s caused more difficulties in getting a job than the actual result of my degree. In fact I thought that having an MA would imply to employers that I’d actually done well in my first degree. I found out the other day, at an interview with a recruitment consultant that it worked. She really thought that I’d got a 2.1 (at least that’s what she wrote in her notes, and I wasn’t going to correct her). I’ve actually got more to say about the recruitment consultant, but that’s for another section.

Anyway, perhaps doing this teaching course is simply another vein attempt to make up for my bad degree. But even if that’s the case at least it should help me to get many of the things that I’ve wanted for the past few years since I left university. I’ll hopefully have a worthwhile job, a good salary, plenty of holiday time and the means to buy my own place. Surely it’s worth the risk. It’s not even a particularly great risk since I’ll be paid to do the course. Not only that, I think, I’ll probably move into halls whilst I do it, so I’ll be able to get out of Harrow for a while. Then, at the end of it, I’ll have another qualification. It really is Win, Win, Win.

Now, I just have to get around to figuring out where I want to go (My first choice is definitely Reading. I’m not entirely sure why, though they were my original insurance choice for my first degree). Basically I have to make my choices based on where I want to go and where I’m most likely to get in. I think that fact that I have such a bad degree in History may harm my chances of getting on to an English course, so I have to be a little pragmatic and include a few ex-polytechnics in with my choices.

I’m pretty sure that this is the right course of action for me. Besides, it’ll be nice to be a student again. I wonder if students still get a 10% discount at HMV.