Knowing what you want to do and why my mum is awesome.

It’s one of the things I’ve never understood. How are you supposed to know what you want to do when you’re 18 and going to uni? If only because you don’t know what a job is really like until you do it day in and day out, until you live and breathe it, when you do it when you’re feeling good and how you cope with it when you want the world to leave you alone.

I can’t offer a better alternative really, just the thought that when you’re still growing up the first thing you do might not necessarily be the thing that is just right for you.

I kind of fell into teaching accidentally but I remember the exact moment when I started to realise that I, actually, really rather liked teaching. Up to that point, my experience had been limited truthfully. Most of what I thought wasn’t really based on experience. (I’m still working out whether it’s truely right for me though.) I was on my first placement in a year 1 class and I’d set them all off on a task and I paused and looked around the room, the small chairs, the displays all around the walls, the fact that the work is constant the entire time you’re with the children and thought I like this.

It’s also one of the, many, many, reasons I think my mum is awesome. She’s done all sorts of different jobs – mostly do-gooder stuff like nursing and teaching but she’s always been doing different things. Which to my mind is the right way to do it, makes your experiences of what the world has to offer all the broader.