Roma Shanmugam

So my name is Roma Shanmugam. I live in Twickenham, which is the home of rugby, and I'm a primary school teacher and also a private tutor.

So I am a maths specialist. The school has employed me specifically to try and help children that are struggling with their maths, and try and identify gaps and then help teach them, teach the children so that they can then move on with their maths learning.

So I start at 8.15 in the morning, that's when the first group of children come in and that's typically around 20 students. They come in and they come in because they need a little bit of extra support with some aspect of maths.

So we've grouped them together to say this group of children would benefit from coming in and having a little bit of extra support. So that starts at 8.15 and goes on for about half an hour.

Then when the class teacher comes in, that's when I start taking children out. They could be individually or in smaller groups of two or three. And again, that just depends on the needs of the students.

So at some point during the week or the week before, I will have gone through some data, looked at things that the children have been doing in class to really pinpoint where the areas are that they need in order to be able to move forward. And that's what I'm trying to address in those little intervention groups.

So that will go from about quarter to nine up until about lunchtime. And then at lunchtime, that's when I finish my job at school. And then I come home, have a couple of hours to myself.

And then my tutoring job then starts in the evening. And that's where I'm tutoring again, maths, but this is from the students can be anywhere from primary school age right up until GCSE.

The people I work most closely with are the students themselves. That's where the majority of my time is spent.

I obviously also spend time with their class teachers because I will often say to the class teachers, I've noticed that the children need this, this and this, perhaps you can address that in class.

Or they might come to me and say, we've noticed this about this certain child, can you address it in your intervention group? So it works as a cycle, as a loop like that.

Sometimes I would say to the children, you're starting to really get the hang of this, would you like a few questions to take home? And then we're hoping that the parents will then get involved and support the children as well as at home.

But I find that the relationship between student, teacher and parent, if that's nice and tight and a nice, open, honest dialogue going on there, that's where you get the best outcomes.

The best thing about the job is genuinely seeing the children empowered and really believing that they can do it.

So often with the groups that I take out, there are children that are struggling and bit by bit by bit by bit, they start to realise that they can do it. They do understand it. There's just little gaps and little bits that are preventing them from understanding it.

So once you've filled those gaps, they really start to see that they are making progress. And when they see progress, then they start to have self-belief. And when they have self-belief, there is more progress and it's a proper snowballing effect.

I mean, it happens every week. Every week somebody that comes, or more than one person will come in and we'll start to really get it.

The number of children that have come to me this week and have said, Miss, Miss, this is what I've done today. Miss, Miss, this is what I've achieved in this, for example, a test or something they've done in the whole class situation where they've really got it.

They're proud of themselves. When they get it, they're proud of themselves.

So I'd say the hardest part of the job isn't actually that hard. It's you have to put yourself in the shoes of the children and understand that each child is different.

Once you understand that and it's not your agenda, of course you have an agenda as a teacher that you want your children to achieve, but once you realise that that is different for each child, the pressure is off.

As long as you know that you're taking the children as far as they can get, then it's actually not that difficult.

You're dealing with each child and trying to understand each different child, but if you genuinely see it from their point of view, I generally don't think it's that difficult.

So I've had quite a convoluted journey. So I qualified as a chartered accountant and had a job in finance. I then took a career break when I had my children.

And after that career break, I decided on a career change. So teaching has always been part of my family. My parents were both teachers. So I decided I'd try my hand at teaching.

So then I retrained, I did a one and a half year PGCE course, I did it part time because by then I had my own children and that was the way that I went into teaching. So it's been a second career for me.

So in a number of ways, I'd say the first and most obvious way is that obviously being a maths specialist, I need to have some maths knowledge. So that's obviously a standard one.

But then I think when you're at school and then you work at school, there are things that stick in your mind that you experience as a child that you would either love to be repeated or you would say that I don't want that to happen to anybody else.

I think having school experience and then going in as a teacher, you can draw on all of those things to help you have empathy with the students.

So obviously, then we have the PGCE obviously teaches you how to teach and teaches you educational theories so that you're not just learning how to teach, you're learning the reasons of why you're teaching in that method.

So you realise along the way, as you become more experienced, certain things work, certain things work better than others. And with the PGCE, you've got that theory to fall back on to understand why it's working or why things are working better than others.

So this is the reason why I'm doing part-time teaching and I'm also doing a tutoring job so that I can balance the two roles with my broader life.

So I walk to work, so that's my exercise. I walk to work, I walk back home again and so I incorporate that part of exercise into my day that way.

When I come home, I have a couple of hours in between. That's where I do my healthy cooking, make sure that I eat well in the evenings and then my evening job then starts again about half past three or four o'clock.

But then by the time I finish my evening job, everything's done, the cooking is done, I've done my exercise and I've also done my job, my two jobs.

So when I was a full-time teacher, I do remember we did a science lesson about the digestive system.

So we mimicked how a digestive system worked, and that was from ingestion through the mouth, all the way to feces being excreted at the end. It was a great lesson. The children loved it.

A few felt a little bit ill by the end of it, but on the whole, they learned so much and they loved mimicking it, you know, adding in water, that's the saliva, adding in some coffee for breakfast, and then mixing all up, scrunching it along.

We fed it through a pair of tights and we were squishing it along as though was, you know, the muscles in the intestines working, cut a hole at the end and out it all came at the end. Very memorable lesson.

It would be to focus on your actions and don't worry too much about the results.

So I think a lot of times in life we think, I wish I'd done this, I wish I'd done that, or this didn't go right, or that didn't go right.

Whereas in reality, if you're focusing on doing the right things to the best of your ability or making maybe the harder decisions, then you've really done the bit that you're in control of.

The rest of it, there's so much in life that you're not in control of and yet we take it upon ourselves that it didn't go right for me or I could have done something more or I could have done, should have you know, I've done all of this and yet it still hasn't worked.

Whereas I think really the reality is if, for example, as a teacher, if I'm trying to get someone through their GCSEs and they get through their GCSEs, it's very easy for me to say, yeah, that was all down to me. It's not all down to me. There were parents involved, there were students involved, there was experiences that the children had along the way that helped them succeed. I was part of it and I played my part but it wasn't wholly me.

But equally, if they don't get through it, it's not wholly me either.

And I think it just gives you a much more balanced approach to life and a much more mentally healthier way to live.

You do your best, whatever that best is, the rest will be what it will be.