I’m becoming a teacher at 58 – this is why you should too | Lucy Kellaway | TEDxLondonBusinessSchool

I have the best job in the world. I'm a columnist for the Financial Times and every week I write about what I like, which is usually the idiocy of corporate life. I have a real title, but I like to think my real title is FTS Chief Correspondent, as there is so much going on in the business world that means I never run out of things to write about, but I've also interviewed famous people. and they invite me to give my opinion. vacations in fancy exotic places and everything is so comfortable and fun which explains why I've been doing it for 32 years, it's the same as the embarrassing truth, but I mean, really, if I think that, compared to that amount of fun Next September what I'm going to do is show up at an inner-city comprehensive school before 7:00 every morning and teach math.

I think every

teacher

I know tells me that at the beginning, when I'm training, otherwise the day doesn't end and I'm full of tears. I'm going to do very well, but I've also changed. You know, I've been a journalist for so long. I'm actually quite old and in my new life. I'm going to start again from the bottom, but not just me. I have persuaded 40 people, about my age, that is, I am 57 years old and some are a little older, some a little younger, to give up anything ostentatious. jobs they've been doing and start over as

teacher

s, so when we tell people

this

is what they're doing, they all say the same thing, they all say oh, that's really brave in that tone of voice, that means It's completely crazy and sometimes I think it's completely crazy, and

this

question of why is something that I keep asking myself and the first reason is that I'm not getting better at what I do.

I'm writing no better than I used to be and, in fact, at 3:00 in the afternoon. In the morning I often think I'm getting worse and the reason I admit it so openly is because I don't think it's anything unusual. I mean, Business School students love the learning curve and in most professions after 20 years you've really stopped learning. something new if you're honest and after 30 most of us are about to scream so there are all these people who have been doing their job for too long but the way we think about our job is wrong and when i I was little people used to tell me what you want to be when you grow up as if the answer to that question was just one thing but in reality and that can make sense if we work for 40 years but increasingly we are going to work for 50 or 60 years, so that's crazy.

I just typed my data into a life expectancy calculator and it reliably informed me that I'll live to 94, so if I'm retired for, say, 20 years or something, that still means Even at my age I have another portion of 20 years to have another career, that explains why I need a new career, but it doesn't explain why the hell it's something as painful as teaching, so then you think about your motivations. to work when we started I wanted to be a journalist I thought it was glamorous now I am totally opposed to glamor so that no longer particularly amuses me anyway I am that lucky generation I have my own house so I earn a lot money is not so important I am in the position.

Fortunately, I don't care what people think of me, so I'm free of all of these things, which puts me right at the top of Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs and types. in the meaning stage, so my search for meaning I thought: you know, I want to do something that is useful and that cuts through the pomposity of corporate life, it is useful in a way, but only in a way, and it hasn't really achieved the success. corporate life is less pompous, so I don't really think I've accomplished much. I want to do something concrete and useful.

My search didn't take me very far, it took me straight to my mother, who was a teacher in At the school I attended in the 1970s, we all know now that clichés about teachers change lives, but we actually remember our Favorite teachers forever and whenever I meet people who were with me at Camden Girls' School in the 1970s, they are never particularly pleased. to see me, but they always talk about the lessons my mother gave 40 years ago. My search led me to my daughter who left university at 22 and became a teacher straight away in a very very poor part of Leeds and at first she was crying at the end of the day but then at the end of her freshman year, she showed me this little card that had been written to her by a kid who was one of the most difficult impossible nightmare kids that she had ever taught and it just said You're amazing, miss, and as I look at this card, I know that this is something that I

should

n't admit, but I felt jealous of my own daughter.

I thought I actually wanted some of that too, so she teaches my mother history in English. but I thought I was going to teach math, which might seem strange after you've spent a lifetime and words, but you can get tired of words after a while, I mean, they're kind of ambiguous and slippery, and I've had so many opinions, I don't want to have any more opinions, I just want numbers, I want the beautiful simplicity of numbers and in fact I'm also angry at all these people I know in this country who keep saying oh no. good at math like he was kind of a cute little, you know, a little quirk that is quite proud that no one

should

be useless at math and I really think as excited as this I set out this was a little over a year ago to be a teacher and I was immediately put off if you look at the government websites they are all pretty good just smiling 25 year olds and then if you apply you complete EU Castform aimed at 18 year olds but it was the volume I have to present their GCSE certificates now that I am too old to have even sat GCSEs and as for the whereabouts of my own level certificates, which is what I did, I mean they are in a lost attic far away somewhere I don't know.

I know where they are so I would have given up, but at that point my dad died and there's something about death that stops you completely and makes you think I'm doing what I really want to do and I thought no. No, I really want to be a math teacher and at the same time every time you look at the news there is another story about the teacher crisis, all the numbers are going in the wrong direction, by 2025 there will be half a million more. children in British secondary schools the number of teachers is being reduced the government is still pumping money into recruiting teachers but still, especially in maths and physics, it is 20% below its targets, so it's a really bleak picture , but there is a statistic in this that is my absolute favorite last year 35,000 people began their training as teachers all of those 73 were over 55 years old now think about it those of you who are not very good at mathematics I can tell you that that is a fifth of one percentage point yes I hope my calculations are correct in that umm, that even those who cannot calculate anything will realize that it is nothing.

I thought about this scheme that was actually first taught by my daughter and was created 15 years ago to encourage bright graduates coming out of university.

becoming

professors was cooler than working at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or whatever and has been brilliantly successful; is the country's largest employer of graduates, but where was the opposite scheme? Where were the other planning skills or the people who were fed? I started working at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs and now I would like to be a teacher. What was the plan for them? So I met with Katie Waldegrave, who was one of the first teachers to teach early and was a social entrepreneur, and we agreed that we would work at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs.

I started such a plan and I decided that the best title would be Teach Lost because you know everyone understands what it means why I feel a little insulted that you're laughing because I thought that was an absolutely brilliant idea um other people said that's actually a name useless, it sounds like it's the crematorium, next stop, so we chose a very bland name, now we teach, the idea is made, now we teach, so we decided to do a pilot the first year. We would work in London, only we joined Arc, which is an educational charity that runs a lot of schools and we were going particularly into those shortage issues.

We didn't have much of a marketing budget, so I thought, I'll write about it on the FTL stream a little bit and see what happens. Katie and I had agreed that as long as we could say eight would be a good first year, that would be fine, but we didn't know what to expect. As soon as I wrote my first column in the FT and started talking about it on the radio, because of the applications we were inundated with, we've had a total of a thousand applications and I can't tell you that all of them are brilliant and suitable and will work. making wonderful teachers actually one of my favorites that came first in the first few hours was from someone who was a CEO and had a wonderful CV and I thought, God, this is great, but the next day he sent me a very shy message. email saying that he had told his wife at dinner that he had applied to be a teacher and she had pointed out that he didn't like children very much, in fact it was better that he didn't even like his own, so he very timidly responded and withdrew his application, but we've had all those people, all those people from McKinsey, Goldman B Byrne, the bankers, the corporate lawyers, all those people who have worked in corporate life, they've all applied, but what's really interesting for I am the actors. musicians, doctors, you know, even some priests have applied, it seems that twenty or thirty years doing one thing is enough, we have all had enough and we all want to be useful, so that has been the case. so encouraging and so completely surprising, but in a word, that proves the first point, but unfortunately it does not prove, now it teaches a success, the next, the next question is: will the schools like us well at first?

You know Katie and me. We were going to visit the principals and I remember one looked at me and said that if you are a fifty-eight year old teacher you won't have the energy, this job is exhausting, so I tried to persuade him otherwise. and I went home, where all the 20-year-olds who live in my house had gotten up at noon and plopped down on the couch and I thought it wasn't me who had no energy, so I felt pretty upset about that. that, but fortunately their response was the minority that most principals get along with, they are basically desperate to find teachers, but they seem to look at us kindly, they think it must be true, that all the experience we have of whatever whatever, we have it.

What I've been doing has to be used for them in the classroom, but there are also some things if you've been around a little like I have. I have contacts and the kids in these inner city schools that we're working on don't. I have some contact so it has to be useful, it has to be useful too and then as a point of diversity, which really amuses me, the typical teacher is very young and female, the people I take are actually mainly men and quite old . so they are what passes for the diversity ticket in schools, which is a funny thing, a funny thing, these people that you know, who have been in the ascendancy, have been the ruling class for so long, will suddenly find themselves as a minority possibly persecuted.

So III, yes, that amuses me. Overall, yes, schools love us, but that leaves a really more worrying point: Will we be good at it now? The honest answer is that I don't have one. the first clue, but I'll let you know in a couple of years. I mean, I suspect it will be as younger teachers, some of us will be great just like some younger teachers are great and some and some will be less, but I feel like what I have going for me is not just the additional experience that I bring, so if you've been around for a long time you're more resilient, you've had some bumps and bruises and I think resilience will come in handy.

I know how to manage my time and particularly as a newspaper columnist. I don't think any of those skills in particular are useful in the classroom, but I'm very used to being told I'm rubbish if you go online. and look at whatever foot column I've written below there will be a lot of people saying: I can't believe you're getting paid to write this. I guess the thick skin I've had to grow has to come in handy in the classroom when there are a bunch of 30 teenagers, um, implying the same thing that I'm complete trash, so I hope that helps, but you might be thinking that I sound a little complacent, well, I'm not complacent, I'm so worried about this, I'm very worried and my anxieties didn't improve at all when a few weeks ago I received an email from a journalist, also a journalist, at the age of 45 she resigned and trained as a teacher, two years later she said thatI quit.

She had practically had a nervous breakdown the kids were rioting the bureaucracy was horrible it was awful and she told me I'm being a pied piper I'm leading the bankers to certain slaughter in the classroom well I'm glad you think it's funny, I mean, I didn't think it was funny at all, but she's not the only one sending blood. We've had 25 documentary filmmakers contact us saying, can you do the reality TV show now taught, but because of course, they think it'll be really funny to humiliate the derivatives trader, etc., actually. , I was quite in favor of the TV series, but unfortunately everyone has discouraged me from doing it, but anyway, I sent an email to the journalists saying yes, completely.

I understand that we are trying to mitigate the risk in several ways and that we are forcing all these thousands of people who have applied to go and spend a week in a school to really know what it is like to know that teachers don't do it. they actually have time to go to the bathroom and only once they have solved it and if they are still interested, then we will consider them in the same way, we are not working with schools where children riot, but with well-run schools and We are making them our teachers go through the same hoops as 22-year-olds to see if they are a good fit.

This woman was only partially appeased and said, Well, you know, let's see, let's see how you get along, let me know. Well, I'll let you know. I'm going to let everyone know that I'm going to publicize this and keep doing it, but how does that make me feel good? It terrifies me because I have to make this work. but every time I think I'm publicly making the mistake of my life, I think about this math teacher whose lesson I attended and all these kids were in front of him and listening to his every word as he explained what the missing angle was.

I was in a hexagon and I looked at it and I thought I know what I want to be now that I'm an adult. I want to be a math teacher like you, that's all.