My PgCE pre-course and just how intense this next year may well be

I have had quite a busy week between last Sunday and this one just gone, basically it was travel to Lancaster, attend pre-course, graduate, attend pre-course, attend pre-course, travel home, go to school for the end-of-year show and the last day (spent mostly eating junk food and signing the children’s shirts and autograph books), up to the Yorkshire Dales (via Lancaster would you believe) for the staff weekend away cut off from the world, go on walks and through a cave, come back home, and finally relax.

This post will of course be focusing on my pre-course which basically was a subject knowledge enhancement course (or SKE) in secondary mathematics, and it served mainly to get us ready for the PgCE, get our knowledge up to scratch, and get us thinking of ways we'd explain a concept to a child who doesn't understand the first time, which demands an incredibly deep subject knowledge well beyond merely knowing one method how to do something like solve a formula or work out an area, and this was reflected in the intensity of the course! I was lucky enough to get a break on the Tuesday though for something which I guess isn't that important, just graduating from Lancaster with a 2:2 in Spanish Studies and Mathematics, I was actually disappointed with that grade at first until everyone's reaction was "wow, so you did maths and Spanish? That must've been hard!" So the general consensus has been 'well done on surviving', which I won't lie, at times it felt like that was what I was just about doing. And it means I'm basically the only one on the PgCE (of non-foreign heritage at least) that can boast multilingualism, as all of the MFL PgCE students are based on the campus in London!

Wednesday and Thursday saw a return to the workload although it was at the same time very stimulating and informative, the main thing I took away from one of the days is just what the QTS that I will gain at the end of my PgCE entitles me to do, which is to teach any subject that isn't swimming in any secondary school in the EU, I don't even officially need any language qualifications for that country! I could in theory teach art and design in a secondary school in the Czech Republic - not that I plan to.

All in all the week has given me a lot to think about and a whole range of ideas to prepare for when I first start the course and my placements in the schools.

My fourth placement over and done with - and the surprisingly big difference between primary and secondary education

So I've now done 4 school placements in total - and all in the space of a couple of years. The first three were in secondary schools (two English, one Catalan) and obviously before I started this blog so I can't really write about them here, although a blog about my life and work in the Catalan school can be found at Two and a Half Spaniards. This last one however has been in a primary school (the one I used to attend, in fact) and boy has it been different. I decided to publish this post after the end of the placement and the staff weekend away at the end of it to give me time to collect my thoughts and experiences into a concise, coherent passage.

Now I don't know if you the reader have ever been back to your primary (or elementary) school after leaving as a fresh-faced 11-year-old, but the main thing you notice is how everything used to be a lot bigger, including the number of kids in your class - although this may be just me - I remember when I was in year 6 (5th grade) there were about 30 of us, I spent most of my time working with that class that now has 18 and they were struggling for room! For the life in me I cannot fathom how 30 of us managed to fit in there, although the current year 6 teacher is quite creative and likes to build things out of cardboard, so a whole corner of the room has been dedicated to it.

Onto my actual work though, and it has sort of been split into two parts: the first part I did for two weeks during my own Easter holidays (we get 4 weeks at university as opposed to the standard 2) and it was very much focused on SATs and the numeracy and literacy involved, that's another thing that's changed in that when I was their age we also had a KS2 SAT in science. This gave me a chance to really practice my maths teaching by taking a few of the children through to the library and working through a mock SAT arithmetic paper. The closeness of being with a group of just 4 - much like in Catalunya - meant I was really able to get inside their thought processes on the questions and make sure they understood what was being asked, even if they were a little embarrassed at first to tell me what they'd done as it turned out to be wrong. Of course on some questions though, this part was easy, on one of them they had to circle the decimal equivalent of 1/5 out of a choice of 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5, it was easy to deduce what had happened inside the minds of those who circled 0.5.

I also briefly went into the year 1 class as they were doing a project on Spain, and I was just itching to get in some Spanish teaching, this however was a lot more difficult as they first of all had to get round just how I actually knew Spanish - how do you know Spanish if you're not Spanish? Why did you live there? - Just so many questions before I could even get onto all the 'my name is...', 'I am ... years old' etc. I couldn't really do any Spanish in year 6 as language-wise they were all focused on building up their French portfolios for secondary school, and je ne parle pas français yet.

The second part involved coming back after I had done my own exams (or big SATs as the children dubbed them) and after they they had done theirs which meant education-wise there was, well, nothing to do, except a few transitional numeracy exercises. So they filled the time mostly with preparing for their end-of-year show, church service and Summer Fayre and PE, all of which I got heavily involved in, there was allsorts to build for the show and it needed quite a lot of expertise! All in all it was a fun few weeks with very little actual teaching involved, in fact I think the ones who learnt the most were myself and the other volunteers!

At the end of the last day of school I was made to promise some of the children I'd go back to my old highschool as a teacher so I could teach them maths, and I haven't ruled it out! I have been advised to stay in England for at least the first year after completing my PgCE (which would have been the plan anyway) and then who knows!

A Little About Me Then

I suppose the most unique fact about me is my degree, which is in Spanish Studies and Mathematics which I achieved in July 2013 (or at the time of posting this, next Tuesday) from the University of Lancaster. This has given me a much broader range of skills and experiences than if I had taken on simply a Spanish or mathematics degree, unfortunately the mandatory year abroad of a language degree didn't give me any experience in teaching mathematics in a foreign language - I was an English Language Assistant in a secondary school in Catalunya - although it has given me experience in dealing with children whose first language is not my own - something which I have faced head-on in the Summer of 2013 upon volunteering at my old junior school where a Thai student has joined.

My PgCE at the University of Cumbria (Lancaster's campus, so really not a big move for me) will focus very much on the teaching of mathematics however I also plan to keep up my languages, in particular Spanish (which I have been studying for 11 years) and Catalan/Valencian (3 years), in my first year I also minored in Italian and I plan to learn French, German and Polish in my spare time (but believe me, I have taken on board all assurances as to how difficult this may well be to manage!)

Moving into the more personal area, I was born and have lived almost all my life in Huddersfield, that is, up until my village became part of Holmfirth, I attended Holmfirth High School, gaining a broad range of GCSEs including an A in maths in year 9 - still a crowning achievement - and a further A in statistics in year 10. These are among grades from A* in electronics and Spanish to, well, an F in art. From there I went to Greenhead College to study my A-Levels, achieving As in maths, further maths and Spanish along with a B in physics and a B at AS-Level in computing. From there I went straight to Lancaster to take on my degree including a year as an ELA in a secondary school in Amposta - almost equidistant between Barcelona and Valencia. Highly recommended if you find yourself in Spain with nothing to do for a few days, as you do.

Outside academia I have my Bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award and am hoping to achieve the Silver and Gold awards, and I am also a qualified football referee, a career path which I hope to pursue to the very top (but I can't play the sport to save my life!) I'll also use this as an excuse to learn so many languages - imagine an international level referee with 7 languages under his belt!

So...why start a blog?

I decided to start this blog to reflect on my year studying a PgCE so that hopefully I can look back on it during my (hopefully numerous and successful) years as a teacher and so that future teaching trainees can hopefully gain an insight as to what the year is like and - for potential applicants - whether it is for them.

That's really all there is to put in this first post I suppose, a bit of my own background will follow in the next post and some actual styles and formatting will be applied in time.