When asked, “what do you want to be when you’re older?” I said, “a ballerina of course!” However, that was not the path for me. I do not know who I was trying to kid, but I had two left feet so a career in dancing was thrown out of the window very quickly. From then on I had no idea what I wanted to do. My dream had been crushed. Then, I began to learn the violin.

Now, this was something I loved but my parents hated at the beginning. The sound that I made was definitely not pleasant but when a specific violin instructor entered my life, this all seemed to change. She gave me the push I needed to believe in myself and she was there to pick me up when I fell. Going through the years in school, I gradually gained more and more respect for this woman. I saw how she had to adapt to each individual pupil and put up with our moaning each week as none of us wanted to play that one scale we had already played 30 times and got wrong every time. As I reached the senior years in school I decided I wanted to become Mrs Green. I wanted to go off to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and become a music teacher. This all then changed when I got the chance to go into a primary school and see how an “Aspire Dundee” class was led. It was here that I realised that high school children were not for me.

Seeing the delight on the primary school children’s faces as they picked up an instrument for the first time was really something amazing. The smile that crossed their faces when they managed to play their very first note was something I will never forget. It was here that I realised I wanted to become a primary teacher and be able to experience moments like this every day in the classroom.

After school, I went to college to complete the HNC course where I spent two days a week, every week in a primary school. This experience allowed me to realise that this is the pathway I wanted to take. Through this course, I widened my knowledge of the skills needed to becoming a teacher. Not only do you need the basics such as: commitment, being punctual and being respectful, you also need to have the ability to adapt in a short space of time and be able to evaluate your own practice.

It was after this, that I realised that this is what I want to study and graduate in.