Volunteering

After 35 years of being paid for teaching, I suppose it was inevitable that when I had time to volunteer, my chosen field would be very similar. Currently I have two volunteer positions that I have gone through the application process for and they are both related to the skills I have developed and honed over three decades at the chalk face! I will be starting with a school in the summer term as a reading helper. It is arranged through a charity called Coram Beanstalk who train you in preparation for volunteering in a local school. I will be working one to one with the same students every week for a minimum of a year. The first thing we were told at our first training session was that we were not there to teach the children to read. We are there to give them confidence and encouragement to make reading a positive part of their lives. Yes, there will be the use of teaching ideas and strategies that I have used so many times before, but there are no exams at the end of the year so I can concentrate on the children learning through enjoyment.

The other volunteer position I have taken up is with a website called Write the World. It runs competitions for 13 to 19 year olds across all styles of writing. My job at the moment is to shortlist pieces of writing that then go through to expert judges. The first piece of shortlisting I did was to assess screenwriting. Well, that was a steep learning curve I can tell you. I had never written or read anything in that format before, but I know what is good across a number of different writing disciplines so after a while I was able to look at whether the story being told was one that drew me in and then to look at the specific elements of screenwriting to see how they met the rules of the format. In a few months I hope to move onto reviewing which is a form of the feedback that I enjoyed so much as a teacher when I saw it come to fruition. Now, with this site there are prizes but the focus is on improving writing so once again I can concentrate on developing the students rather than preparing them for exams.

So, teaching turns out to be a job I would do for free! Would I have done it for free in the previous 35 years? You must be joking!!