“When you start as a teacher, you are thrown directly into the deep end”

When I entered the room to give my very first lesson, I was terrified. To find yourself, with barely the Capes in your pocket, in front of about thirty students not much younger than me, is really impressive. It was at the start of the last school year, I was starting my year as a trainee teacher in history and geography, with nine hours a week in front of second-grade classes. Like a wink: my desire to teach history was born in me precisely in second, several years earlier. Like many teachers, I had a wonderful teacher who gave me the vocation. I remember a lesson on the French Revolution, where everyone had put down their pen drinking in his words, and where I said to myself: I absolutely want to do this.

In history-geography college, my passion only grew and, after a master’s, I decided to enroll in a year of preparation to pass the aggregation. A very heavy and exhausting year, during which I was preparing for the Capes competition at the same time… And which ended in two failures. The following year, I decided to focus only on Capes: it paid off. But once admitted, I could not stay in my academy in Lyon for the internship year and was assigned to that of Dijon, at Le Creusot. I was worried: this city did not evoke anything very positive for me, in a space in decline marked by problems of violence and misery.

When we start, we are thrown directly into the deep end, and we are afraid of not being armed in the face of teenagers who can accumulate academic or social difficulties. I first hung up, in the preparation of my lessons, on a site of the national education which gives indications on how to implement the first chapters. These are very introductory in second, and I spent some time there at the beginning of the year to better familiarize myself with my position as a teacher. Because there is a very strong impostor syndrome that assails us: from student to teacher in one day, the transition is disturbing.

Respect, both ways

I very quickly laid the foundations of respect with my students, explaining to them that it went both ways. They turned out to be rather average, neither brilliant nor bad. But being a teacher is not just about teaching: you have to think about a multitude of things at the same time, from keeping an eye on everyone’s progress and being attentive to the need to note if you sense a concern. with a student. If something happens right after class time with one of them, we bear some of the blame.

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