I Left a Legal Career for the Call of the Classroom
Suzanne Ward spent five years preparing for a legal career – but it turned out the call of the classroom was stronger…
- by Suzanne Ward
‘I think I need to teach’. The words slipped out, with a tinge of shame and a whole raft of anticipation. I always swore I wouldn’t do it. For at least five years I’d maintained the pretence that I would be a barrister.
But even during my law degree, I knew that a legal career was a terrible idea. Lawyers don’t get to decorate their offices, use glitter glue, take part in sports day or buy themselves a new pencil case every September.
They also don’t experience those profound moments when a student truly understands something for the first time, they don’t know the immense sense of fulfilment that working with young people can bring, they don’t spend their days with the hilarious, complicated, challenging and fabulous people that are today’s students.
Mixed reactions
When I announced my apparently sudden shift in vocation, people’s reactions ranged from mild amusement to sheer horror. There were also a fair few, ‘I told you so’ comments.
My grandfather (who had previously thought that calling a friend who had read law at Oxford would be enough secure me a place there) was particularly disappointed. When I added that RE was my subject of choice people were even more perplexed. Why would I want to spend my time trying to convince swathes of teenage atheists that the subject matters? Wasn’t RE only relevant if the kids were considering the priesthood? Did I really think that RE provides something useful?
It is amusing to me now that the only time that I have heard these criticisms levied against my subject were during these conversations, never in the classroom. At the time though, the remarks made me nervous. Was I about to ditch a potentially lucrative career for one spent sharpening pencils and defending my existence?
I am a fourth generation educator. My great grandmother was a house mistress at a boys’ borstal, grandmother was a deputy head, mother a teaching assistant and step father a headteacher and now a lecturer. I have what my grandmother calls ‘a lineage’. So my announcement was met by the family with a strange mix of delight and disappointment. They knew what was to come. My grandparents told me that I was much more capable and that I wouldn’t have a social life; that schools these days are increasingly difficult places and that I’d feel intellectually stifled. But once they realised that my need to teach wasn’t going to go away, they were endlessly proud. My own teachers’ reactions were equally paradoxical. Most tried to warn me away, but also greeted my affirmations with wry smiles and knowing nods.
A richer profession
Teaching is not a job that you leave in the workplace. It can be all consuming, it can, in many ways, begin to define you. Teachers know this, and it is both wonderful and terrifying. That’s why now, when young people ask me whether I think they should become teachers, I find myself doing the same. I verbally dissuade and then raise an eyebrow.
Trending
When I play devil’s advocate, they defend the profession, tell me why they find it to be a noble way to spend a life, confirming to themselves that this is indeed what they want to do.
For all of the difficulties, the constant rafts of new initiatives, the marking, planning, evaluating and everything else that is part and parcel of a modern teacher’s life, it remains something I simply need to do. There is no other job I can conceive of that could bring me so much joy.
Where else could I discuss medical ethics, debate the existence of the soul, and craft a persuasive speech by lunchtime? Is there any other setting where I could be a small part of helping a young person to discover their strengths or what really captivates their imaginations? Would life as a lawyer have felt as fulfilling? I’m almost certain that it would not.
And while it might have been a life free of often mundane chores (cutting out laminating anyone?) and more plentiful in cash, I’d have definitely been so much poorer in spirit.
Suzanne is head of RE at a comprehensive school in the Midlands.
