I’m becoming a teacher at 58 – this is why you should too | Lucy Kellaway | TEDxLondonBusinessSchool

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I've got the best job in the world I'm a columnist on the FT and every week I write about whatever I like which is normally the idiocy z' of corporate life I've got a I've got a real title but I like to think that my actual title is the FTS chief correspondent as there's so much in the corporate world it means that I never run out of things to write about but as well as that I've interviewed famous people and I get invited to review holidays in swanky exotic locations and the whole thing is so cushy and such fun it explains why I've been doing it actually for 32 years is the same as the shameful truth but I mean really if I think that compared to that amount of fun by next September what I am going to be doing is turning up at an inner-city comprehensive school before 7:00 every morning and teaching maths I do think Y every teacher I know tells me that at the beginning when I'm training if I don't end the day and floods of tears I'm gonna be doing very well but also I've swapped I'm you know I've been a journalist for so long I'm really quite senior and in my new life I'm gonna do starting again at the very bottom but not just me I've persuaded 40 people all roughly my age which is to say give or to I mean I'm 57 and some a bit older some a bit younger to give up whatever swanky jobs they've been doing and start again as teachers - so when we tell people that this is what they're doing everyone says the same thing they all say oh that's really brave in that tone of voice that means that's completely nuts and sometimes I think it's completely nuts - and this question why is something I keep asking myself and the first reason is that I'm not getting better at what I do am i writing is no better than it used to be and actually at 3:00 in the morning I often think that I'm getting worse and the reason I admit that so openly is I don't think that's at all unusual I mean Business School students love the learning curve and in most professions after 20 years you've really stopped learning anything new if you're honest and after 30 most of us are at complete screaming point so out there are all these people who have been doing their jobs for too long but how we think about our jobs is wrong and when I was little people used to say to me what do you want to be when you grow up as if the answer to that question was just one thing but actually and that may make sense if our if we work for 40 years but increasingly we're gonna work for 50 or 60 years so that's completely mad now I've just typed in my details into a life expectancy calculator and it reliably informed me I'm going to live till I'm 94 so if I am retired for say 20 years or something that still means even at my age I've got another slice of 20 years in which to have another career so that explains why I need a new career but it doesn't explain why on earth it's something as bruising as teaching so then you think about your motivations for work when we started out I wanted to be a journalist I thought it was glamorous I'm totally opposed glamour now so that doesn't amuse me anymore particularly equally I'm that lucky generation I own my own house so earning a lot of money isn't so important I'm post status I really blissfully don't actually care what people think of me so I'm freed of all of these things it puts me right at the top of Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs and kind of at the meaning stage so my search for meaning I thought you know I want to do something that is useful and pricking pins into the pomposity of corporate life it's kind of useful in a way but only in a way and actually it hasn't made the corporate life any less pompous so I really don't think I've necessarily achieved that much I want to do something concrete and useful my search for that didn't take me very far it took me straight to my mum who was a teacher at the school that I went to in the 1970s now we all know that cliches about teachers change lives but actually we remember our favorite teachers forever and whenever I meet people who were at Camden school for girls with me in the 1970s they're never particularly pleased to see me but they always go on about the lessons my mum gave 40 years ago equally my search took me to my daughter who left she left University at 22 and became a teacher right away and a really really poor part of Leeds and at first she was crying at the end of the day but then at the end of her first year she showed me this little card that had been written to her by a kid who was one of the most difficult nightmarish impossible kids who she had taught and it just said you're awesome miss and looking at this card I know this is again something that I shouldn't admit to but I felt jealous of my own daughter I thought actually I want some of that too and so she actually teaches history of my mum English but I thought I'm going to teach maths which you might think is weird after having spent a whole life and words but you can get tired of words after a while I mean they're so sort of ambiguous and slippery and I've had so many opinions I don't want to have any more opinions I just want numbers I want the beautiful simplicity of numbers and I'm also actually enraged by all of these people who I meet in this country who keep saying oh I'm no good at maths as if it was a sort of cute little you know nice little quirk that quite proud of nobody should be useless at maths and I really really believe that so fired up like this I set out this was a bit over a year ago to be a teacher and I was put off immediately if you look at the government's websites they're all sort of good just sort of grinning 25 year olds and then if you apply you fill in EU Castform aimed at 18 year olds but was the vol you have to produce your GCSE certificates now i'm way too old to have even sat GCSEs and as to the whereabouts of my own level certificates which is what i did so i mean they're in some long distant lost attic somewhere i don't know where they are so i would have given up but about that time my father died and there's something about a death it absolutely stops you in your tracks and it makes you think am i doing what i actually want to do and I thought no I'm not I really do want to be a maths teacher and at the same time every time you look in the news is another story about the teacher crisis all the numbers are going in the wrong way by 2025 has going to be an extra half a million kids in British secondary schools the number of teachers is shrinking the government keeps pumping money into teacher recruitment but even so especially in maths and physics it's 20% below its targets so I mean it's a really really grim picture but there's one statistic in this that is my absolute favorite one last year 35,000 people started their training as teachers all those 73 were over 55 now just think about it those of you who aren't very good at maths I can tell you that that is one-fifth of one percentage point yes I hope my math is right on that umm which even those who are completely innumerate will realize is prat nothing I thought of this scheme which actually my daughter did teach first which was set up 15 years ago to encourage the bright breat graduates coming out of university to become teachers that that was cooler than going to work at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or whatever and it's been brilliantly successful it's the biggest graduate employer in the country but where was the opposite scheme where was the other skills to scheme or those people who were fed up with working at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs and it would now like to be teachers where was the scheme for them so I got together with Katie Waldegrave who was one of the first teach first teachers and have been a social entrepreneur and we agreed that we would start such a scheme and I decided that the best title would be teach lost because you know everyone understands what it means why I'm slightly insulted that you're laughing because I thought I thought it was a absolutely brilliant idea um other people said actually that's a useless name it makes it sound as if it's the crematorium the next stop so we've we've gone for a very bland name now now teach the idea is done that now teach so we decided we would do a pilot first year we would work in London only we joined up with arc which is an educational charity and runs lots of schools and we would go particularly for those shortage subjects we had no much marketing budget at all and so I thought well I'll write about it in the FTL do a bit of broadcasting and we'll see what happens Katie and I had agreed between us so long as we could be say eight would make a first good first year that would sort of be okay but we didn't know what to expect no sooner had I written my first column in the FT and started talking about it on radio for the applications flooded in we've had a total of a thousand applications and I can't tell you that all of them are brilliant and suitable and will make marvelous teachers actually one of my favorite that came in really in the first in the first few hours was from somebody who being a CEO and had a marvelous marvelous CV and I thought god this is great only the next day he sent me a very sheepish email saying that he had told his wife over supper that he had applied to be a teacher and she had pointed out that he didn't like children very much actually it was better than that he didn't even like his own so very sheepishly he withdrew his application but but we've had all of those people all of those McKinsey people the Goldman B Byrne the bankers the corporate lawyers all of those people who have done corporate life they've all applied but what's really interesting to me is the actors the musicians the doctors the pretty much you know even a few priests have applied it seems this thing that twenty to thirty years doing one thing is just enough we've all had enough and we all want to be useful so that has just been that's been so heartening and so completely amazing but so that that in a word that proves the first point but it does not alas prove that now teaches a success that the next that the next question is will the schools want us well at first you know Katie and I were going round to visit head teachers and I remember one sort of looked at me and he sort of said what fifty eight year olds being teachers you won't have the energy it's exhausting this job and so I sort of so tried to persuade him otherwise and went home where all the 20 year-olds who live in my house having got up at midday were then sort of flopped on the sofa and I thought it's not me who doesn't have the energy so I sort of really felt quite annoyed about that but luckily his response was the minority most headteachers are get with a bit basically they're desperate for any teachers but they seem to look on us kindly they think which has to be true that all the experience we have from whatever it is we've been doing has got to be used for them classroom but there's some things too if you've been around a bit as I have I've got contacts and the kids in these inner-city schools that we are working in they don't have any contacts so that's got to be useful that's got to be useful as well and then as a diversity point that really amuses me the typical teacher is very young and female the people who were I'm bringing along are actually mainly male and quite old so they are what passes for the diversity ticket in schools which is sort of hilarious um sort of hilarious these people you know who have been in ascendency they've been the ruling class for so long will suddenly find themselves a possibly persecuted minority it's kind of so III that that yeah so that amuses me so they're on the whole yes the schools want us but that leaves a really more troubling point which is will we be any good at it now the honest answer to that is I haven't got the first clue but I will let you know in a couple of years time I mean I suspect though that it will be like younger teachers some of us will be great just as some younger teachers are great and some and and some will be less so but I feel I feel what I've got going for me is not only the extra experience I bring it so if you've lived for quite a while you just are more resilient you've had a few knocks and bruises and I think that resilience will come in handy I know how to manage my time and particularly as a newspaper columnist I don't think that any of those particular skills will be useful in the classroom but I am really used to being told I'm rubbish if you go online and look at any ft column that I've ever written underneath will be lots of people saying I can't believe you get paid to write this I think that the thick skin that I've had to grow that's got to come in handy in the classroom when a whole lot of 30 teenagers are um implying the same thing that I'm complete rubbish so I'm hopeful that will help but you may be thinking that I sound a bit complacent well I'm not complacent I'm so worried about this I'm really really worried and my my anxieties were not at all helped when a few weeks ago I got an email from a journalist also a journalist at 45 she quit and she trained as a teacher two years later she said she quit she had pretty much had a nervous breakdown the kids were rioting the red tape was awful it was hideous and she said to me that I am being a Pied Piper I'm leading bankers to certain slaughter in the classroom well I'm glad you think it's funny I mean I didn't think it's funny at all but she isn't the only one to send blood we have had 25 documentary filmmakers have all been in touch with us saying can they make the now teach reality TV program but because of course they think it's gonna be so hilarious the humbling of the derivatives trader etc etc actually I quite was in favor of the TV series but everyone sadly has talked me out of it but anyway back to the journalists I emailed her back saying yes I completely understand we're trying to mitigate the risk in various ways and we are forcing all of these thousands of people who have applied to go and actually spend a week in a school so they really really know what it's like they know that teachers don't actually have time to go to the loo and only once they've worked that out and if they're still keen then we'll look at them equally we are not working with schools where the kids are rioting but with well-managed schools and we're making our teachers jump through the same hoops as 22 year olds to see if they're suitable this woman was sort of only partly mollified and she said well you know let's just see let's see how you how you get on let me know well I will let her know I'm going to let everyone know I'm going to publicize the hell out of this and go on publicizing it but how does that make me feel well it makes me feel terrified because I have to make this work but whenever I think I'm making public mistake of my life I think of this maths teacher whose lesson I sat in on and he all of these kids were in front of him they were listening to his every word as he explained what that missing angle on a hexagon was and I watched him and I thought I know what I want to be now that I am a grown-up I want to be a maths teacher just like you that's it [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 153,278

Rating: 4.8505974 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Education, Social Change

Id: LilaqTaQ6ss

Length: 18min 18sec (1098 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2017