Interview #2

Well I went to my second interview and it went better than the last one. They still didn’t pick me though. The feedback given was more useful than the first though, they said in my lesson I should have given them more varied work, and that in the interview I needed to say more about the role of a form tutor. Apparently they’re a source of monitoring and progress, not just the pastoral stuff. Oh, and my skills in Excel weren’t that strong supposedly.

My god, working out what they find important is like trying to guess the lottery numbers! This school is evidently mad about monitoring the kids, and they use Excel quite a lot. Bit rubbish they placed such emphasis on MS Office since Excel’s not that hard to use and would only take me a few minutes to learn.

Anyway, it’s a handy tip for my future lessons and then some background waffle. Not knowing Excel or not knowing the “proper” role of a form tutor aren’t really the reasons I didn’t get the job, are they? The real thing they must have picked out was the way I did the lesson. Still, when your entire lesson brief is “teach spreadsheet manipulation to year 11s” it’s quite vague and hard to plan for.

It would be a big help if the school actually provided some background knowledge about the students.

I’ll get there. There were two others from my course and someone from Bradford. It really unnerves people when you tell them you’ve had an interview before, and there’s this strange air of “good luck, but not too much… if you get my meaning” as people disappear off to be interviewed.

Such a strange experience.

Tags: Interview, Teaching