A small room with large windows

A room in which I teach this intake, for just one hour a week, is one of several I worked in regularly five years ago.  The room is much as it was in that time past, decorated with old secondary students’ posters promoting the discipline, along with other images showing slightly awkward graduates leading interesting lives as a result of their studies.  These pictures are starting to date too; the women’s hair seems frizzy and piled unduly high and the male graduates’ haircuts are at odd, flat-toppish sort of angles.  Strange that I should measure the passing of time by the changing of hairstyles, but there it is.

What’s the most different for me, however, is the way the room itself seems to have shrunk.  When we moved there from our previous set of teaching rooms, which could barely hold sixteen students at a time, these rooms were spacious and filled with natural light in comparison.  I hadn’t realised how much my teaching spaces have grown in the subsequent years, and how groups by whom I used to feel dwarfed — perhaps 20 students — I now take in my stride.  My overall feeling is one of having aged, not in the negative way that word is usually bandied about (for women, especially?) but of having acquired something like working experience.  It’s nice to feel, in between challenges, that I’ve grown to fit better the classroom, without realising.

Tagged as: reflection, work