The Perfect Job? By Georgie Tennant

One of the things I’m enjoying most in my job at the moment is teaching Shakespeare to the younger students. I have to say, whilst many bemoan Shakespeare and question why students have to “suffer,” his works in this modern age, being in a classroom with these wonderful 11, 12 and 13 year olds is a reminder that there is still much joy to be had in experiencing a Shakespeare play.

Take Year 7, for example. The scene: it’s Wednesday Period 4. This is just before lunch. They’re a bit jiggly because they’re hungry (lunch is 1:15 where I work). We’re reading A Midsummer Night's Dream, looking at Oberon and Titania, rowing over the changling boy, analysing a particular passage. “Miss,” one student pipes up. “When it says “I hath forsworn his bed and his company,” does it mean she won’t sleep with him?!” I confirm her suspicions, to the delight of the class. “He’s sleeping on the couch!” another calls out. We all laugh, myself included.

Now its Period 5 and Year 8 are piling in. The Tempest is on the menu for them. After we’ve managed to recap who is who and separated our Alonsos from our Antonios (why DID Shakespeare give his characters such similar sounding names?!), we embark on Act 1, Scene 2 - the first meeting of Ferdinand and Miranda. After a minor kerfuffle over who is going to be who and checking that those reading Ferdinand and Miranda wouldn’t find it too mortifying to fall in love with each other, the reading commences. They execute it brilliantly. 13 year olds, handling Shakespeare with delight. Again, much mirth that one of them had to read the word “virgin,” followed by an outraged discussion that Ferdinand thought it appropriate to claim Miranda immediately as his, providing she fitted that category!

Doesn’t my job sound amazing? The best job in the world? And it is, truly, in so many ways. But those are simply highlights. The Instagrammable, Tweet-able moments. If we zoom out a little, take a wider angle view on my week, there are plenty of moments that aren’t like that. The sometimes crippling anxiety of feeling under-prepared when someone is coming to observe your lesson. The devastating blow to your day when the one hour’s free period you had to do four hours’ worth of work is swiped away with the news that you’re covering another colleague’s lesson. The bits where students aren’t so engaged. The exhaustion of keeping tougher classes on track. The pressure from the government to get shiny results.

It can be like this with our writing too. We slog away, feeling like we’re getting nowhere. We spend days editing then still find major issues with our beloved Work in Progress. We pitch to publishers with no result. Or we struggle to write at all, overwhelmed with the exhaustion of life’s demands.

Then we look on Facebook and see announcements about book launches, publishing contracts and competition wins. And we mourn our own inadequacies in comparison. But, like my description of my teaching day, the highlights on social media, aren’t the full reality. We would do well to remember that. Those people who are achieving those things have also had, and continue to have, many, many days, scrabbling in the dust for ideas, battling crippling doubt, plugging away at the mundane and wondering if it’s all worth it. The snapshots of success should be, instead of a discouragement, a great encouragement that those days in the mundane middle can and do lead to greater things.

So enjoy the buzz moments. Celebrate them with all you have when they come. And don’t forget to thank the One from whom they come. But learn to accept the mundane and the plodding ones; they, too, hold treasures of great worth.

Georgie Tennant is a secondary school English teacher in a Norfolk Comprehensive. She is married, with two sons, aged 15 and 13 who keep her exceptionally busy. She writes for the ACW ‘Christian Writer’ magazine occasionally, and is a contributor to the ACW-Published ‘New Life: Reflections for Lent,’ and ‘Merry Christmas, Everyone.' She has written 8 books in a phonics series, published by BookLife and was a freelance writer for King's Lynn Magazine for a while. She writes the ‘Thought for the Week’ for the local newspaper from time to time and also muses about life and loss on her blog: www.somepoemsbygeorgie.blogspot.co.uk. She was recently the winner of a BRF devotional competition. Her first devotional book, "The God Who Sees You," was published by Kevin Mayhew in March. https://www.kevinmayhew.com/products/the-god-who-sees-you