Steve Fields

Good afternoon, my name is Steve Fields and I am a maths and sports teacher, working at a school in Norfolk.

So my job is really split into three key roles.

One is as a form tutor. So I have 12 pupils who I look after, who see me every single morning and evening, and I'm a sort of first point of contact for them.

My second main role is I'm head of maths at the school where I work. So I teach children aged between 11 and 13 maths.

And my third part is I'm a sports coach, so I have the pleasure of coaching rugby, hockey and cricket throughout the year.

So a typical day, I mean one of the lovely things about teaching is that no two days are ever quite the same.

But in terms of timings, a typical day would see me arrive at school at about half past seven in the morning, which allows 30 minutes to get ready for the day ahead.

And at eight o'clock, my tutor group come flooding through the door, full of energy and excitement for the day ahead. And then from eight thirty, the teaching begins. And typically I'll be teaching maths from eight thirty until about one o'clock.

And then after lunch we'll have sport sessions and then the day will finish with more time with my tutor group, often an activity and at about six o'clock in the evening it all wraps up.

So we are a team of approximately 40 staff of all ages and experiences. So I work particularly closely with nine colleagues in the maths department and the eight or nine other sports coaches.

So I spend most of my time with those and we work together a lot sharing ideas, watching each other coach and teach but actually the whole staff of 40 are a pretty close-knit team and work well together and there's always the opportunity for humour and laughter throughout the day.

So the best thing for me about teaching... working with young people is in itself incredibly rewarding. It's completely unpredictable, which is lovely. You get a real genuine response from young people. Just working with the age group that I work with is fantastic.

But probably the best part of my job is the sport coaching. I think growing up I always dreamt of being a professional sportsman and quickly realised I was nowhere near good enough at any sports. So if you can't play sport to a level then coaching sport is the next best thing.

The hardest part of teaching... so things like marking and planning are things teachers complain about, but they're actually just part and parcel of the job.

I think the hardest thing about teaching is actually switching off at the end of the day. I know in some walks of life at five o'clock you can close the door and go home. With teaching, it's very, very difficult to switch off.

In my situation where my wife also works at the same school, our home time tends to be completely dominated by work talk even when we're at home.

So the school I work at, I actually attended as a pupil myself. So I left that school in 1992, went off to York University to do a degree in maths and economics.

And the summer that I actually finished at York, I was contacted by the headmaster of the prep school where I'd been who said there was a maths and physics job coming up in that September and did I want to come and do it for a term and see if I liked it, which I did and 30 years later I'm still here.

I think because it was the school that I'd attended, I was very aware of the environment I was going into.

I was very aware that it was a everyone in it together type mentality for the teachers, all the teachers that taught me in the classroom, coached me on the sports field, had a major impact on the pastoral side.

So I knew exactly that is what the school was going to be like and that was the real attraction for me.

Yes, with teaching you're working very closely with young people and you're hoping in a very small way to help prepare them for the next stage of their life.

Where I live it's a very small community so you tend to see lots of people that you've taught come back and say hello.

As I said, the main hope is that you've given them a really good starting point ready for when they step out into the big wide world outside of Norfolk.

So it's very, very difficult to pinpoint one. I did get married in the school chapel so I need to mention that just to have that officially on record.

But one of the lovely, one of the real perks that I've found teaching at this at the school I'm at was that my own children were educated through the school and it's such a perk as a teacher to be able to see your children in action in school, as a fly on the wall.

And I think a moment I'll never forget is when my daughter joined the prep school aged seven and that first assembly where she walked into the hall as a very nervous timid little girl looking for me and saw me sat around the side and gave me a big smile and a wave and I think that was just wonderful. I can still picture it now.

So when I started teaching, I was very lucky because I had a lot of very experienced, brilliant school masters who were very, very good at advising me along the way. So actually when school started, I was in really safe hands.

I think looking back, if I had my time again, the advice I'd like to give them would just be to have a tiny gap between finishing at university and going into teaching.

Having a year where possibly I travelled or just try to gain other experiences because the nature of teaching is that once you get started, the terms that tend to roll from one onto another and before you know it, a year's gone and another, and I don't regret anything at all.

But I think looking back, just having a year after university before starting to gain experience would have been good advice.