So I'm posting today because I'm having a bit of a "what the hell am I doing?" moment. Admittedly, the last two years have been full of those but this one has been festering for some time and is mostly career related.
Back in January, I had a meeting with my boss and somewhat gleefully handed in my notice to say I was leaving the school and in fact the teaching profession, for good. It was gleeful because I was just about to go off for 4 weeks to have round 2 of treatment and so I knew I'd only have to actually teach my classes for 2 weeks after that before I finished, wahey! In reality, I actually chose to stay on until May to help Year 11 get through their exam prep and coursework deadlines, which was really lovely and a nice way to wind down my career.
I'd already been working for the music service part-time alongside my Wood Green teaching hours in the last academic year, and by January I was actually teaching full-time again between the two posts after taking on some maternity cover work for the County Music Service. It felt great to have enough energy to do so much for the first time in ages, but doing the two types of teaching alongside eachother made me start to realise that I'd well and truly lost my love for classroom teaching.
I think it's safe to say that as a classroom teacher, once you realise that you don't have the enthusiasm or motivation to make whizzy, exciting lesson plans that motivate and inspire young people - it's time to move on. The teachers that are respected by the students are the ones that demonstrate their love for their subject as much as they can. I'd gone from spending my entire weekends coming up with new ways to teach various topics, staying after school so long that my friend Mark would send me a text telling me to go home and wanting to be part of every extra-curricular ensemble going, to doing frankly the bare minimum. Some of which wasn't through choice, certainly losing all my extra-curricular ensembles at once hit me really hard and was a bitter pill to swallow. But seeing someone else with more energy and enthusiasm than me, come in and instantly fall in love with the students and to continue to push them to do their best and sound just fab, well that helped a lot.
I also remember feeling incredibly guilty because so many of my amazing colleagues were working full-time and working their absolute socks off, and there I was barely working 3 days a week as a classroom teacher and still incapable of finding the joy in it. Admittedly teaching a subject that isn't your own didn't help - I still can't quite believe I managed to convince 3 classes of year 7s that I was an IT teacher AND teach them some basic computer programming! Priceless.
So many pros/cons lists later, I chose to leave WG and classroom teaching itself after 7 short years and to take my very part-time Woodwind repair business forward as my main job, and to continue working freelance for the music service as an orchestra manager for their touring orchestra OSSO and as a peripatetic woodwind teacher again.
I worked my absolute socks off this summer to stop myself from feeling a bit odd about not having the usual lengthy summer holiday - which felt amazing. It was such a joy to have WHOLE DAYS worth of woodwind repair rather than a few snatched hours in the evenings and the weekends, I felt so productive!
But fast forward to now, when colleagues have gone back to work and it's the second week of September and I'm feeling totally lost. I'm not missing the job, (sorry lovely Wood Green colleagues!) I'm not particularly missing the kids, although every time I see my tutor group out and about my heart leaps, I miss my little family and I'm mainly missing the feeling of actually contributing to the community.
I am still actually teaching a fair bit, working for 4hrs in a local Primary school teaching whole class clarinet (yup that's a class of thirty 7 year old students, all "playing" the clarinet at once!), working with the second youth Orchestra "OSSO" for the county music service and doing about 7 hours of private clarinet/sax/flute/GCSE tuition.
But it's not being responsible for hundreds of kids on a weekly basis, helping them to make the right choices, being there for them if they don't, supporting staff and being part of a big community.
Don't get me wrong, I am happy, MUCH less stressed, healthier and I have far more time to work on the garden etc. Being self-employed really suits my lifestyle, but it's such a big change and I'm just feeling a bit lost. I live to serve other people, and I honestly don't feel that I'm doing that right now.
I know the repair work does help others, it's great to be able to reassure the parent who thinks he's damaged his daughter's clarinet beyond repair that it's okay and not the worst I've seen! And yes I can fix it! But it's not serving the community on the same scale as teaching once was, it feels like a big piece of me is missing, and I guess I need to work on filling that gap.
The other thing I didn't expect to be hit by is the change in respect from others. It's really surprised me by how differently you are regarded when you become self-employed. This week alone I've been asked if it's just a hobby, what I do all day and if it pays the bills! Those who know me well will fall about laughing at the idea of me sitting at home doing very little. Being a workaholic who enjoys being stressed is probably what gave me MS in the first place!
Why is it so hard to believe that I'm able to make ends meet by working for myself and that I'm not sat watching Netflix all day?
The answer to my little identity crisis is perhaps to push myself and the business to get to the point where I can rent some business premises. I would dearly love to have a big enough space to run a workshop, a shop front selling secondhand instruments and a bunch of practice rooms I could hire out to private teachers/students/local ensembles. Maybe, just maybe, being more visual would earn me a bit more respect AND help to serve the community. Who knows, time to go and make a cuppa, fix another saxophone and ponder how I can feel like I'm being 'useful'.
C x
