Gorilla Masks: The Teacher Training Year

Are you thinking of becoming a teacher? Have you been told by friends and family that you would make a good teacher? What are your views on what schools and teaching are about? What are your real reasons for going into teaching? What would you be prepared to do to ensure your students make progress and achieve? Is teaching for you purely to share academic knowledge with your students or would you be expected to cater for their emotional needs? Would you as a teacher command automatic respect from students in your classroom or would you have to earn it? Would you be held responsible for students in your classroom that comprehensibly refuse to learn? Faced with a whole class rebellion, would you as a teacher be a able to send the class out or be able to walk out yourself? Faced with sexual advances from a student, how would you react? Do you think you will matter to the students you will teach? Is it important for you to be liked by those that you want to teach and what would you do if they all hated you? These are the amongst the many questions that confront a trainee Liahem, as he is placed in different inner London schools as part of his teacher training year. His perceptions and expectations are challenged to the extent he begins to query the wisdom of leaving his relatively satisfactory position in a law firm to embark on a teaching career. At some point he decides to fully embrace the idea of regularly reflecting on his teaching practices, and in doing so begins to draw from his childhood experiences as a student. The question is would it be enough to get him through his teacher training year?