How did my gender affect me as a child? That’s a difficult question to answer because it feels like a lifetime ago. The more that I think about it, gender didn’t affect me at all at school as far as I can remember. The only thing that I remember about gender roles was when we did sports day. The girls would be separated from the boys and the boys did different races from the girls. I remember quite clearly a boy in my class saying to me “it’s because the boys are faster than the girls!” when I had questioned it to my teacher. I also can remember the teacher explaining to me that it would be fairer if the girls did separate races from the boys. I couldn’t understand this because I knew that I was just as fast as the boys in these races and that I could beat them fair and square. In the playground at break and lunch time, the girls would play with the girls and the boys would play with the boys. Which, at the time, I didn’t question because that’s just what we did. I would now question as to why we did that. Working in a primary school for two years I can now see a change in all of these things. Girls and boys play together and the sports days are mixed with boys and girls races. It seems that since I was at school things are progressing with gender and how it shouldn’t affect a child’s learning and opportunities

I was given the opportunity to work in a Primary school office in 2013. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me and I couldn’t believe how quickly I fitted in and started to feel as I was “part of the family.” When I was working in the office I was also at college studying accounting, which I soon discovered wasn’t for me. In fact, I hated it. After a year of working in the school I was asked if I would help out in the classroom working with children with additional support needs. I’d never thought about doing this before but I thought that it would be a good opportunity to work more closely with the children. I would take small groups of children to do writing and numbers and I thought that this was going to be challenging and I was definitely right but it was more challenging than I thought. Once I got to know the group of children more, I could start to see their strengths and weaknesses. They worked hard as they wanted to achieve their best and when they would understand a concept or get an answer right you could see their faces light up. This was extremely rewarding for me as I felt that I was actually helping them to learn something new every day.

I was then asked if I would like to take over some after school clubs within the school and now that I had the experience working with the children I jumped at the opportunity. So I took on a girls Boxing Club and a P2 Science Club. This experience was brilliant as I got to take children for different subjects rather than just numeracy and literacy. In the Boxing club we began each session with a circuit and each week the children would take part in the circuit and it helped me to see how much they progressing with their fitness as every time they would be able to do more than the previous week. Which again was really rewarding as you could see that they were achieving.

These are the main reasons as to why I want to be a teacher as I want to be able to help children learn as it is extremely rewarding. When the teachers at the school found out I was leaving to become a teacher they all had the same response, “are you mad?” and I think I must be. But I can’t wait to get started.

So now the question is, what kind of teacher do I want to be? Which I feel is an extremely difficult question to answer. As I have worked with many different teachers who all have completely different teaching styles. I want to be able to different elements of their teaching styles and work them into what I will be doing. However, I think over the course of the 4 years at university I think I will discover what kind of teacher I want to be and that I will become.