Looking back on your life, what was the “worst job” you ever had that ironically helped prepare you to one day become an educator?

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Hands down, the worst job I ever held down was cleaning a school. I was on family leave and needed a job that meant the kids could be looked after by their school teacher father, whose day would finish as mine began. It was hot, it was tedious, it was boring and it was hard. I had to drag around a vacuum cleaner, mops, buckets and rags. The hours were short for the amount of cleaning that had to be done, and during the summer, the portable classrooms were like ovens by 3.30pm.

The thing that still stands out most clearly to me, is the repetitiveness of the job. When I left the classrooms each night, they were brand spanking shiny but each night I returned, it was exactly the same mess that I had spent my time cleaning the day before. Talk about Ground Hog Day. It was immensely frustrating.

How did it prepare me to become an educator? Well, I am so aware of the miserable conditions and tedious, thankless work that the cleaners do, that when I leave a classroom at the end of each day now as a teacher, it is as clean as it can be without a vacuum cleaner. I make sure the students pick up all rubbish from the floor, close the windows and put the chairs up. I also make sure that any chalk that may be on the chalkboard ledge, is removed. I do this because I remember having to pick up that icky, dusty chalk from the ledge to run a wet cloth over it. Another reason to celebrate the introduction of smartboards and whiteboards hey! NO dusty chalky fingers:)

I always tell the students when they grizzle about picking up papers and rubbish from the floor (and grizzle they do) that it’s not fair on Heather (our cleaner). When the students say “it’s not our mess” I just remind them that it’s also not Heather’s mess either. So hopefully, whilst this isn’t academic, it is absolutely educational in terms of learning to respect the important and difficult role of the cleaners within the school.

I tag jessm, jeffk and virginia.
and Sue Wyatt