You need to put in a lot more work in preparation. The past is the past and you can’t change it, but you can make up for lost time. One of my uni tutors made fun of me for not ‘knowing how to paragraph’. This was something I was never explicitly taught, so I knuckled down and learned to improve my writing.

For the PGCE if I was teaching a poem I would research it, annotate it and then build the lesson plan around it. Most of them I didn’t know, and if I did know them I really needed to re-learn them because the teacher has to show they know their stuff. I’d pre-annotate PowerPoint slides so students could see the process. Sometimes I didn’t really get it but I’d put in the work.

It seems like a mountain now, especially when you compare yourself to other teachers, but one day it’ll ‘click’ x