Miss

Hello everybody. Here is the news.

*shuffles paper, looks to camera*

So, I decided to bite the bullet and apply to do a PGCE in September. The application went off on Monday and now I must wait, breath baited, for an interview. I'm hoping to get in at the Institute of Education in Holborn (close to the Brunswick Centre, Lucy! Eeee!), but it's a really good college and I think my chances are quite low because I've left it so late to apply. My second choice is the Met University, which is still pretty good and conveniently situated down the road from my house, so I wouldn't be crying if I got in there instead. And if I did it would be hilarious because that is where Trilby is doing his PGCE and we would be students together in some sort of weird North London version of "Peggy Sue Got Married".

In preparation for this huge, life-changing decision, and to reassure myself that I wasn't making a hideous mistake, I arranged to spend a day at a Hackney primary school sitting in on my friend's Year Two class. Come the day I was apprehensive for three very good reasons:
(1) I was going to be spending a day with a room full of seven-year-olds;
(2) I was going to be spending a day with a room full of seven-year-olds in Hackney;
(3) I had to get to the school for 8:15am.

I think of all of the above, it was number 3 that horrified me most. 8:15am? That's the time I normally get out of bed. To get to Hackney for 8:15am meant getting up at 6:30am. Worryingly, my friend the teacher seemed to think that getting up at 6:30am constituted a lie-in.

However, once I'd got to the school and drunk three cups of coffee and a cup of tea in quick succession, I felt ready and able to face the kids. Now, I don't know many children. Obviously, I was a child a long time ago, but that doesn't really count. As a result, my mental image of your average seven-year-old was of some huge, hulking, spitting monster, only interested in happy-slapping grannies and talking in txtspk.

It turns out, seven-year-olds are CUTE. Mind-bendingly, heart-wrenchingly cute. Even the naughty ones are cute. They want to hold your hand and accidentally call you "mummy" (one little girl, Andrea, called me "mummy" so many times that her friend asked her if I actually was her mummy, to which she replied "Yes". A-DOR-A-BLE).

So I spent the day helping the kids out with numeracy and literacy. The latter was more fun (I've always hated maths), and in my eagerness to promote the joys of reading I used some frankly rather underhand tactics.

Mrs Robinson:     So do you all enjoy reading?

Cute children:     Yes!

Small boy:           No!

Mrs Robinson:      You don't like reading?

Small boy:            I like football.

Mrs Robinson:      Do you? Do you like Thierry Henry?

Small boy:            Yes.

Mrs Robinson:      Well, Thierry Henry LOVES reading.

Small boy:            Does he?

Mrs Robinson:      Oh yes. He's a big reader.

Small boy:            I like Christiano Ronaldo more.

I finished the day tired but very happy, and convinced that the great Become A Teacher Plan is not une idee chimerique but actually something that I would really enjoy. I hope I haven't left it too late to get a place on a PGCE course this year, because I want to do this NOW. So it's fingers crossed time, folks.