"Let's eat Grandma!" vs "Let's eat, Grandma!" : Grammar saves lives.

Being a finalist I have LOADS of work to do this Christmas, gone are the days of second year where I would wait until a week before the deadline before even picking an essay question, with utterences of YOLO serving as a justification. No, this year i'm being very grown up and getting my work done, although I don't really have much choice, 15000 words to write and 20 books to read doesn't really give me much time to procrastinate!

Just one of the twenty books to read!!

You'd have thought that me being a final year literature student essay writing would be a doddle by now? Well it is certainly easier than it was, although expectations have also risen. Believe it or not, my biggest problem is grammar and punctuation! Feedback on one of my essays in second year said "Unable to award a higher class due to poor use of English" "You need to sort out your problem with apostrophes" ... awkward. Well since then I have been working hard on my English grammar - my time in Germany teaching it to other people certainly helped, explaining grammar points that I had never seriously considered before helped to clarify them in my own mind, and now, as I sit here monotonously typing day after day I am certainly much more aware of my use of commas, colons and apostrophes.

As part of the 'becoming a teacher' process we have to pass standard numeracy and literacy tests, grammar and punctuation being key topics - I passed these tests a few months ago, no problems at all, so it can't be all that bad? Can it?

I have been recommended a good book on grammar called 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss, so will give that a good read, and hopefully by the time I am stood at the front of the classroom next year I will be the comma queen :) Until fairly recently, my major concern has been memorising German grammar tables, adjective endings and conjugations of verbs; it seems I have somewhat neglected my English! Time to change that!


"It's easy to remember when to use an apostrophe; its use is relatively straight forward."

Right. Back to the essay writing. 

Welcome to the West Midlands!

On Friday it finally happened. After a day of constantly refreshing my email, and getting absolutely no work done, that long-awaited email landed in my inbox. The subject: 'Welcome to the West Midlands'.  First thoughts were a mixture of 'oh, it's not London' ' thank god it's not Yorkshire and the Humber' (Still not entirely sure what the Humber is!) 'and yes! finally I know where i'll be living and teaching for the next 2 years'!

If you've spoken to me at all in the last 6 months you will no doubt have heard that I have been accepted onto the Teach First Leadership Development Programme (LDP for us coolcats)! Maybe you haven't heard of it? Most people I speak to know someone who did Teach First, and they always comment on how they had the best 2 years of their lives! The people you speak to who participated themselves, whilst confirming the amazing-ness of the programme, speak of it as the hardest, most challenging 2 years of their lives which was not without its fair share of tears! I know it's going to be a tough few years, but whoever I speak to, everyone confirms that it is worth it more than 100 times over!

For those of you that don't know, Teach First is a charity organisation with a mission to erradicate educational disadvantage across the UK. For a school to be eligible for partnership with Teach First, at least 50% of pupils must come from the lowest 30% of the IDACI (Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index), prioritising those schools with higher levels of deprivation. Educational disadvantage is a complex, multi-faceted problem but at its heart lies a simple truth: a child born into a less-affluent family is statistically less likely to do well at school. That sad fact will, in turn, mean that their choices and future will be limited in ways that are deep, lasting and unjust.

 I could shower you with statistics about educational disadvantage, here are just a couple for good measure:

• Just 16% of young people eligible for free school meals progress to university, compared with 96% of those from independent schools. 
• 1 in 6 young people leave school not being able to read or write properly. 
• Just 24% of pupils receiving free school meals achieved the benchmark 5 A*-C grades at GCSE, less than half the average rate.

I cringe at newspaper articles which report on Teach First 'parachuting in young teachers to tackle Britain's toughest schools' - Yes we arrive with a mission, and an aim for change, but I'm under no delusion that I know everything about teaching; yes I have had some snippets of experience, but in the grand scale of things that counts for very little. These 2 years will be a steep learning curve for me - and hopefully in return I can make a difference to the lives of the children I teach.

The application process has been a long one, and quite rightly so, but now I have a region and a Teach First hoody I really feel part of the TF Community and am eager to get going! All that is left to do is make sure I get that pesky 2:1, we then have an intensive 6 week course next summer and as of September 2013 I will be a real life actual grown up teacher in a Primary School somewhere in the West Midlands!

So I guess it is here that Miss Richards is born! How exciting and incredibly daunting!!