I had an old-git health check this afternoon. I’ve got a big birthday coming up in a few weeks and I’m an old git. I’m so much of an old git that I had to have a health questionnaire to see if I’m going to keel over from drinking too much or not exercising enough. A clue reader- I LIVE on my exercise bike and/or my actual bike and I don’t drink a lot when I’m not on hols. I give myself about 6 weeks of hols a year during school breaks cos I work the rest of the time.
My old-git health check was pretty clear and it turns out I’m pretty healthy overall.
Having my old-git health check did make me think though: If I look back at what I was going to have done by the time I was an old git as I was planning during my young git years, I would be an epic failure! I was going to be a chartered engineer, living in France by 10 years ago and I was going to have dual nationality and have done loads of other bits and bobs. That all went very wonky donkey when I realized that engineering was pretty pants for me and I was totally unsuited to it. I started teaching in some pretty demanding schools in South Yorkshire and I was hooked. I loved teaching and properly found what got my goat. Teaching and education is something that I can rant about for hours and something that I manage to keep on fire for. I’ve been really lucky to make a living doing something I love but if I’d followed that original path, I’d have been a right old mess.
I did teaching in a school for a few years and started to think about what I’d do to work my way up the ladder and then I went to South America, which was followed by a PhD. All the time I was doing this, I was working tutoring and then I got a part time job in a small private school. I ended up SENCo there, which was really cool but then I had been bitten by the research bug and missed teaching. So I ended up striking out on my own into business and doing a whole load of bonkers stuff, which is exactly what I was hoping for when I was doing my PhD.
But there are elements of my life thus-far that I have utterly bombed at. I sucked at being an engineer. I didn’t want to be chartered after doing it for not-very-long and I found being a SENCo really, really difficult. It was not an easy time but it was so worth it. Because now I have a pretty wavy, un-linear life and career trajectory, and actually it’s quite blooming cool. There are bits that are tricky and there are bits that need work; there always are. But making it to being an old git and being told by the medical-bods that I’m in fairly good nick is a cool place to be alongside being happy and (hopefully) useful professionally makes this nearly-40-year-old quite chuffed.
