We asked in-house teacher and marketing guru Bridget Higham, to tell us about her time in the classroom. What she loved, what was has changed and ways to keep that work-life balance in check.
For me, it was at the tender age of four. I had a blackboard in the backyard and my two-year-old neighbour, Nicky, was the solo student. Great student to teacher ratio, passionate staff, ideal natural environment and, perhaps most important of all, no after-hours schoolwork was needed.
I was HOOKED. It was a job that was going to give me leisurely weekends, lots of holidays and the social interaction I thrived on.
When I started teaching, I was still quite naive. To write my first set of reports, for 128 students, I set aside one afternoon. That. Was. A. Mistake. Then, when planning lessons, I would work late into the night designing resources and end up tired the next day. The lessons that I had put so much effort into fizzled because I didn’t have the energy to pull them off. I had to stop reinventing the wheel.
The problem is, what was once quite a sparse webscape with limited quality resources available, has now become inundated with options. A simple internet search for a lesson can yield numerous results. Then you circle back to either designing your own or tweaking other resources. It’s a slippery slope and before you know it, the work-life balance is completely out of whack and you don’t know how to fix it.
Teachables can fix it. The resources are:
- Professionally designed
- Engaging
- Written for New Zealand and Australian teachers by quality educators
- Have a huge variety of learning activities, games and lessons
- Singular resources are SUPER cheap.
With Teachables, you can return to the reasons you became a teacher. Okay, I might not have the 1:1 teacher/student ratio from 1988, but at least evenings and weekends will not be spent agonising over lessons and the support material. My time will once again be my time.
