🦞 Why Educating Lobsters? 🦞

Back in 2016, I dreamt of setting up an educational blog and a website. I dreamt of being able to learn from exploring my ideas through writing and gaining feedback by sharing it. Unfortunately, the fast-paced and loud nature of wonderful London meant that it took me moving halfway around the world to realise this dream.

Now I am sat on my balcony in humid Singapore, listening to the sound of tropical birds, whilst writing my 5th post for my blog site Educating Lobsters.

Since starting this blog in May 2019 I've been asked a few times "why lobsters?" and "why are you educating them?" so I thought I would write a mini-blog post to explain.

I have always taken my role as an educator so very seriously. From the moment I walked into a school for the first time as a volunteer at age 20, I knew that being a teacher was an incredibly vital and influential role.

Every Tuesday morning during my final year of university I volunteered in a local school to help during Maths lessons.

I can vividly remember sitting in the back of a few classrooms during this time volunteering thinking "WOW - what you do in this room, how you interact with these pupils, and how you hold yourself as a teacher can have such a lasting impact".

I saw a few lessons during this year where you could feel the disconnection in the room and where pupils were completely disengaged. This fuelled the fire behind my new goal - I want to become a Maths teacher and I want to strive for that connection by ensuring my pupils know that I care about them and their learning every second of every day!

This led me early on, even before starting my teacher training, to commit to the idea that every single second I am in that classroom counts! This idea then evolved over my teaching years into me putting a huge emphasis on everything I do in school and in my preparation out of school as having to be perfect as they too have a huge impact on these young humans lives. As with many teachers, I was triggering my own perfectionism and I started trying to do 200 things really well every day and setting unreasonable expectations of myself!

I remember vividly one Friday after school in my 6th year of teaching I received some pretty hard to swallow feedback about one of my lessons that had been observed and I spiralled into the thinking - "I am failing all of my pupils, I am a hideous Maths teacher, I am just not ever going to be good enough".

This level of perfectionism continued until I was lucky enough to meet a Maths colleague who reminded me so quickly after joining the school that the best and MOST IMPORTANT part of being an educator is the relationships!

He showed me time and time again that taking learning seriously but having a huge amount of fun in the classroom were not mutually exclusive. Through his school presence, he inspired me to rediscover my balance between upholding high expectations whilst building meaningful connections by being myself.

During my time working with this colleague, I started to regain that fun side that I know had always been there before I started going full perfectionist. I remember one lesson a pupil hadn't done their homework and adhering strict behaviour policies I had to put in place a consequence. This pupil was incredibly upset and I remember saying to him - "it's absolutely ok that you forgot your homework, let's work on a way to avoid this happening again and learn from the mistake". And then out of nowhere, I said "if you forget next time though it won't be detention it will be death by lobsters" and straight away this pupil chuckled!

Being able to let go bit, let the real silly weird me out, has also meant that my relationships with pupils have gone from strength to strength. This pupil learnt at that moment that I really cared about him stepping up and ensuring he improved his organisation but at the same time that a mistake will never mean that I stop caring about them as an individual!

It then took me moving to Singapore, stepping down from being Head of Department for a bit, and focusing on just being back in the classroom to fully realise -

What I do as an educator is vital, it is influential and my impact should always be considered. But being an educator isn't always just about taking education so seriously. Some of the best learning and growth happens when we are lost in silliness and the flow of just being your real self as an educator!

So the name Educating Lobsters is a a big reminder of that for me. Lobsters represent the silliness! It reminds me to have fun, play with the learning and not take education so seriously all the time.