Twenty-nine reasons to stay, by Hannah Oduya
An original contemporary memoir extract.
In this extract from her memoir, a teacher looks back on her first year in a primary school classroom.
Nobody warned me about the noise. I had done my training, I had a folder of beautifully laminated lesson plans and a pencil case so organised it was almost a cry for help. But on the first morning of my first job, when twenty-nine nine-year-olds came through the door of Class 5 at Rookery Lane Primary, the sound hit me like weather. I remember thinking, very clearly: they will find out I don’t know what I’m doing.
They did, of course. Within a week.
September was survival. I got up at half past five, left school at six, then marked at the kitchen table until my eyes went blurry. I lived on toast and the biscuits in the staffroom. I lost my voice twice. I cried in the car park three times that I can remember and several more that I have, mercifully, forgotten. On one particularly grim Thursday a boy called Brandon spent an entire maths lesson under a table, refusing to come out, and I spent it pretending this was part of the plan.
October was worse, because the novelty had gone. November was the month I began, quietly, to look at other jobs online. I can still list them: a receptionist at a dental practice, a sales assistant in a garden centre, a man who wanted someone to walk his greyhounds. Each one seemed, at eleven o’clock at night, like paradise.
What kept me there was not a single dramatic moment. It was a slow accumulation of small ones. Maisie, who would not speak above a whisper in September, putting her hand up to read aloud in December. The whole class learning to sit in silence for one minute and listen to the rain on the skylight, and then begging to do it again. Patrice, who hated writing, producing a story about a dragon who ran a chip shop that made me laugh so much I had to leave the room.
And Brandon. Brandon, who lived under the table in September, who threw a chair in October, who told me in November that I was ‘the worst teacher in the universe’. In February, Brandon came out from under the table for good. In March he wrote a poem about his grandmother’s hands, six lines long, with three spelling mistakes and one image so precise that I still know it by heart. In May he asked if he could be in my class next year. I told him that was not how it worked. He said it should be.
I would like to say that the exhaustion went away, but it did not. In June I still marked at the kitchen table. I still lived on toast. The difference was that I had stopped looking for other jobs and had started, at eleven at night, planning next week’s science instead.
On the last day, the class gave me a card. Somebody had clearly organised it, because all twenty-nine names were in it, each in a different coloured pen. Brandon had written his in the corner, very small: ‘thanks miss you were alright’. It is the best review I have ever had. It is pinned above my desk now, nineteen years later, and on the hard days, of which there are still plenty, I read it again.
The writer’s first year of teaching is described as exhausting but rewarding. How does the writer try to show this?
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.