Seven weeks ago, on my first day as a trainee maths teacher, a lost 11-year-old in a brand new, oversized blazer approached me. “Miss,” he said, “where’s room 211?”
I had no idea where the room was — or what I was doing standing in a school corridor. I felt as if I had been snatched from my comfortable life as an FT columnist and dropped into the alien territory of Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, east London. I shook my head helplessly and he looked as if he might cry. I felt inclined to join him.
Half a term later I know the answer to his question. I strut around the school wearing my red lanyard that says “staff” on it, and the word no longer feels like a lie. On an open evening in my third week, prospective parents took one look at my grey hair and assumed I had been teaching for decades rather than days. I saw no reason to disabuse them.