Teaching

According to my CV (because I legit can't remember), I started working as a teaching assistant in Cardiff 7 years ago. 7 years! And I was a youth leader and Sunday school teacher at church there for years. My life in Cardiff feels so separate from me now. Why am I thinking about this then?

Well, the past few weeks I've been quite stressed at work. Despite my teaching assistant and Sunday school teacher experience, I am not a natural teacher. In fact, I get pretty frustrated by it. In my years at Vue, I worked on induction training for new starters. I went through a lot of training to make me a better trainer. I've worked hard to cultivate my skills in this area, but that still doesn't make me good.

I am a thorough person, and something I really enjoy doing is making handover and training guides. This isn't something that naturally comes up often, but when an opportunity presents itself, I'm all over it. I've done it in various roles over the years, and the opportunity presented itself again recently.

I've been in an exciting position at work to move laterally to work with the planning team. Granted, the planning team currently comprises of a planning manager and no one else, but it's an exciting opportunity to learn new skills and principles. After diving into Continuous Improvement and gaining a green belt qualification in it in the past couple of years, I was really eager to learn some more new principles and how to apply them.

My role started quite simply, I was in charge of some basic admin tasks. It started off a few hours a week shared with my actual role and slowly stepped up until my other role was removed entirely. The workload has slowly become more complex too - learning new skills on Excel - manipulating and reading data. I really enjoy it - my inner nerd is purring.

It's recently been decided that I am ready for even more complex planning work, but to do that, I need to hand off the admin tasks that have been growing. So I have been in my element creating supporting documentation and foolproof how to guides on how to do the tasks I've had ownership of for almost a year.

It's the first time I've ever created these kind of documents exclusively for someone I know, so it felt like a really good opportunity to flex my skills. I knew the person I was handing over to was not tech savvy, so I went into detail - for example, instead of saying 'unhide the hidden columns', I explained the steps required to unhide columns, thinking they might not know how to do that, and anticipating that unlike myself (if I don't know how to do something and the instructions don't tell me how, I Google it and follow instructions or watch a YouTube video) they might not seek the information elsewhere and just get stuck.

My first handover session went well. I had sought advice from the planning manager - afterall, he had trained me how to do all these things. He gave me one piece of advice - show them how to do it once, ask them to show you how to do it once (expecting lots of questions and to be actively involved), and then ask them to do it without as much support but still be there if they need you.

So I put this plan into action. Showing them was easy - they seemed to be engaged, though without cameras on I was struggling to really know if they were getting it. Personally, my face betrays my feelings more often before my brain has engaged my mouth. The following week I asked them to show me. This is when I realised my training had maybe not been as thorough as I thought it was.

And it all went downhill from there. It has taken every ounce of me to stay patient, and not to sound tired of repeating myself. I know if I sound impatient I'm not a good teacher, so I'm doing everything I can think of to stay positive and encouraging, to maintain engagement. It's hard.

I'm sure many parents can sympathise (and equally tell me I've got it easy compared to them) as they are now home schooling and flexing new muscles to try and keep their kids interested in school, whilst balancing work and space for wellbeing too. It's a tough ask, but necessary to try and keep COVID deaths down.

This experience has made me reflect on another teaching situation I am facing. It's no secret that I have a little bundle of joy (and terror) in the shape of a fluffy little Maltipoo puppy called Dolly. We're currently experiencing about 50% of the time gorgeous, snuggly, playful puppy and 50% demon dog. But part of puppy ownership is training.

We're not doing too well at toilet training. She still doesn't really know when she needs to go, so she'll sometimes just squat and pee right in front of you. It's frustrating (and particularly is driving my dad up the wall) but every time I'm really quick to remind myself that she's a puppy. She's less than 4 months old and she is improving, but it is really slow improvements. It's like 1 step forward and then 6 steps back over and over again, but it is a very slow advancement.

The other thing is teaching her 'tricks'. So far we've got 'sit' and 'lie down' nailed. Sometimes though, I'll command 'Dolly, sit!' and she'll lie down. She did something, but not quite the action I was getting at. But I praise her, try to get her to stand up and then tell her to sit again. Usually on the second go she nails it, but sometimes it'll take her three attempts to sit. But I don't get frustrated, I don't blame my teaching - she just hasn't quite got it right. So I just get her to do it again until she succeeds.

So returning to my initial point, my reflection makess me realise that I do have the capacity to be patient and to encourage gently in the right direction. Yes, Dolly is a puppy - but if I can be patient with her when she repeatedly gets things wrong, why can't I be patient with an adult who isn't as tech savvy as me?

Teaching Dolly is frustrating, but I find it much easier to focus on the positives with her than I ever have with training and teaching before. I need to copy and paste my attitude towards training from her to my other attempts.