Esteem

We're not even halfway through the summer holidays, but already I feel them slipping out of my reach and am starting to panic about how little time is left.

I don't even know if / when I will next be teaching. I'm registered with a supply agency but I haven't heard anything yet.

There are so many levels of uncertainty:

Will I get long-term supply work? If I spend a whole term in the same school, then it will count towards my NQT year. I also have this faint hope that when schools do the NQT rigmarole with supply teachers, they're really not that bothered, and just rubber-stamp you through.

As the above paragraph implies, I have little faith in my ability to pass the NQT stuff, hence hoping for schools that are looking in the other direction. My confidence in my teaching ability was already low, but has got worse since I made such a cock-up of that last job interview. I was really REALLY bad. Will I even be able to teach? Will I walk into a classroom, last five minutes and then run away screaming? The closer the Autumn term gets, the more the doubts creep in: Should I just give up now? Am I really cut out for this?

Can I cope with short term supply? I was theoretically registered for this last term. For a few weeks, I jumped whenever the phone rang. I had to be ready for work at 7.30 every day, just in case. I was constantly terrified that I was about to be summoned to a terrible school full of terrifying kids hell bent on ruining the supply teacher's day. One morning I got a call at 10.30am, asking me to go to a well-known Scary School. I told them it would take me an hour and a half to get there. That was no use to them, thank God. But after that I was even more nervous. I had thought that by 10.30am you must surely know you're safe for the day.

I'm not sure I can teach in stable environment where I teach the same kids every day and build up relationships with them. I'm even less certain about my ability to walk into a room full of strange kids, in the role of Fall Guy, and somehow magically tame them. If this is what I end up having to do, it may finish me off. Of course, if I could stick it out then it would be great experience and would force me to learn tons of classroom management skills really fast... but I'd really rather not. If it's all the same to you.

I have this feeling that if only I could get all my resources in order, so that I could find everything I've ever done and every piece of advice anyone's ever given me, for any age group / ability level / mathematical topic... at a moment's notice... then maybe I'd be OK. But I have (my own) children to look after full time during the summer hols, and it's unlikely I'll get this done.

Also...

I've been given so much advice. I've tried so many different strategies. But right now, my overriding feeling is BUT NOTHING EVER WORKS. All the stuff I'm supposed to have learnt has fled my brain, and whenever I try and dredge it up, the little hate-myself voice just pipes up saying stuff like "There's no point, cos nothing you try ever works". I feel overwhelmed with strategies and advice, and unable to pick anything and try it.

It's not about the stuff you do. It's how you do it. If I could pick something and (a) try it with confidence, and (b) keep using it consistently... it would most likely work. But the lack of confidence feeds into the consistency, so that I try something with no self-belief, which means it doesn't work and I give up on it immediately, thereby removing its last chance of ever working.

From somewhere, I have to get some self belief. If you don't believe you can do it, then neither do the kids and that's you, washed up before you've even begun.

But I don't know where I'll be working, whether I'll be working, how I'll be working. And meanwhile the summer melts away and I fail to prepare for... um... what?

Gah.