Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog and today’s blog will be on my continued work life as a Teaching Assistant (TA) going from volunteering twice a week in reception to working full time as a so called student teaching assistant along with the benefits on being a teaching assistant and the drawbacks on working as a teaching assistant, so grab a snack ? and get comfortable, because this blog is going to be a long one.
As I continued to volunteer at a primary school and was doing as I was told to do by the deputy headmistress, deep inside of me, I felt a bit disappointed that I couldn’t challenge myself with a higher age group and being capable enough to move forward being thought to her mind that it would be too hard for me to handle it and at the same time, so I was pretty left with no choice, but to help around with the children in reception, but at least it’s something to work with and the staff in reception are good with it as well ?.
When I first started working in reception, I was nervous ? on what I got myself into especially with the children, they never see a new face coming over to them and helping them out. After bringing the children into the classroom and settling down, it was time for the teacher to introduce me to the children and had a mixed reaction from the children. Despite the fact that they’ve never seen a new person coming into the classroom for the first time and some of them were happy to see me and some of them were confused or even excited to see me in reception helping them out in the classroom.
Normally in year 2, they have a routine on what is going to happen on certain days of the week and even on when to have breaks and even give out homework to the children to complete over the weekend. However with the reception, once they have done their session, they go and play with the activities being provided by the teachers and it gets hectic most of the time ? and even the teachers try to attempt the children and gave them encouragement to put them away and for some of the teaching assistants have to put them away and clear everything away and then come back into helping the children out.
On how I received my full-time payment from a company is by the aspire scheme and what they do though is basically to help those who are actually trying to get into work who have actually got learning difficulties or disabilities. The only downside on this is that it will only last up to 9 months, however on the plus side you get the feeling of what it’s like to work full time and if you do well on your nine month work placement, you’ll be guaranteed a full-time job. Unfortunately I didn’t get the full-time job and when I questioned the deputy headmistress on where I went wrong and how I can improve on it for the next time, the man from the aspire scheme next to me said “there isn’t going to be a next time because you didn’t get the job in the first place” ? instead of helping me to improve on myself they actually gave me other options that are below my career aspirations and I felt really sad and angry about this experience and I was really passionate on improving myself better but instead I was pretty much going backwards on finding a job instead of going forward ?.
I started working full time in a primary school in March 2010 and finished working in that very same primary school till December 2010. During my new adventure on helping out with the children in reception, there have been some ups and downs when it comes to helping out in reception including helping a child with multiplication and the teacher didn’t have the guts to tell me not to teach them multiplying. If he told me not to teach them about it, I would have been fine with it, but instead he didn’t say anything about it until I mentioned it to him and when I told him about it, he told me not to teach them multiplication and the reason for it is because that they will not understand how multiplication works anyway ?.
Along the way of my journey some of the teaching assistants decided to bully me based on my appearance including one time when I scratch my head and format that is based on sweat in my scalp and when I told her that my head was itchy because of sweat, she still denied it and was still convened that was nits. From that point on I was angry that she didn’t acknowledge the fact that I was sweating from my kickboxing session that I had from the previous day ?. The same pacific teaching assistant thought I had nits and was talking negative things about me behind my back, who still managed to get away with murder and clearly doesn’t deserve to work in a school at all.
Another incident occurred when the supply to teaching assistant and the other teacher were having a conversation about the children and the staff all together and to make things worser than ever before, the so-called supply teaching assistant considered me as acting like one of the kids, literally the same place as the other teaching assistant has said about me and that is right behind my back ?. I was so angry that she said that about me and I really wanted to speak up about this, but the problem with that is if I tried to speak up about it, they will give me dirty looks, they would never trust me again and even worse they will consider me as a snitch.
Despite all the negative things that happened to me, there have been some positive experiences that happened to me in my life for example I managed to gain some experience working in a lower year groups meeting new children, getting to know the new staff especially the new ones and meeting the parents and asking for my opinion on how that child have done and I gave them my honest opinion I know you told them to expect to go speak to the main teacher because they are the ones that deal with them the most and I’ve got some thank you gifts from the parents which was so sweet and grateful that I’ve actually managed to help out on some the children out and I really felt appreciated with the amount of experience on working in a school ☺️.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my continued work life as a Teaching Assistant (TA) blog and I’m so sorry for being so long. Please stay tuned for the next post which will be other work experiences and don’t forget to leave a comment below on my blog post and spread the word out about my blog too. ???