What Inspired You To Change Careers And Be A Teacher? - By Hayley

I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left school after my A levels, so I got a job and I spent 14 years in the customer service industry within retail banking. After about 5 years I realised that I wanted to teach because I enjoyed speaking to young people and helping them to understand their finances. My favourite conversations were around mortgages and helping young people understand how they work with compound interest and therefore how to pay off early and therefore how much this would save them in interest over their term.

I realised that the other reason I enjoyed these conversations was because I felt like I was making a difference. The young people that I was talking to had no clue where to start with getting on the property ladder, and I really enjoyed going through all the different aspects. It was then that I realised I wanted to teach because of how much I enjoyed making a difference in those peoples lives, but by helping them to do it themselves. I also realised that I enjoyed breaking down a massive minefield into easy to understand chunks and sections, helped them to understand what steps they needed to take and what research they needed to do. When I realised that I wanted to teach, my colleague asked me at work if I would consider tutoring. Her daughter was really struggling with her Maths A Level, and she asked me if I would consider working with her. After working with her for 6 months I knew that I wanted to teach, I kept tutoring her for over year and was amazed with the progress she made.

I started researching routes into teaching but I didn’t have a degree so I decided to get a degree through the OU which took me just over 6 years as I was also raising a family. I decided halfway through my maths degree to change my degree to a mathematics and its learning degree, which meant I took some mathematics education modules as part of my degree. I loved these modules, they fueled my fire for wanting to teach even more and I started to tutor another student off the back of this. These modules have given me such a head start in terms of understanding breaking down topics into small steps. It’s also meant that I had a basic understanding of how learning can be facilitated, specifically in geometry and algebra. The biggest advantage that these modules gave me, I feel, was understanding how to represent topics in different ways and using different methods. The different methods used can determine and guide the students as to what mathematical structures to pay attention to and it made me realise how important representation is. 

By Hayley

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