This month always feels like a fresh start—not so much with the weather, especially after last weekend’s tempting hint of summer. As I write, we're bracing for frosty mornings and layering up in fleeces for our fishing trips...
For a number of reasons, I am going back to my first love; actual school delivery. I have missed it. The energy and sense of elation that you get through being immersed into schools, students and that quest for knowledge never actually leaves you. Its why I started the thing. Being within a campus, a PRU, anywhere, defines me as a person. It's who I am.
Years ago, we revered teachers – some terrified us - but they were the influences who shaped our beliefs and futures with (mostly) careful, steady, and nurturing actions. This has changed. Society has changed. But that does not diminish the teaching role, it just alters the whole thing, and we change to accommodate the needs of the young minds and the challenges we face.
The excitement of that challenge has never once lessened. That doesn’t mean there are not challenges or barriers, but you face those with the experience of your years. Teaching, whether one likes it or not, is a vocation, a “calling” which you can’t fully ever shrug off. To teach, I still believe, is a rare privilege.
Maybe, one is just born to it. You can learn and study to be a teacher, but that inner light still must be within, and it is that with me that has burned strongly down the years.
Looking around me within Fishing for Schools, the coaches have it too and I am so glad we do what we do. The team of coaches we have now assembled are the very heart of that educational flame. Something to celebrate into this bright new year of Fishing for Schools delivery.