Catherine Williams

Name: Catherine Williams
Subject: Physics
Location: Holy Rood RC High School, Edinburgh
Teaching Experience: five years

The idea of teaching was in the back of my mind for ten years before I finally decided to try it. The seed was sown in my gap year when I helped in an international school in India and discovered that I enjoyed explaining things, relished the challenge of winning over 'difficult' pupils and enjoyed the pastoral side of school life.

I considered going into teaching after completing my Physics degree at Cambridge University but was uncertain at that stage whether it would be right for me and decided instead to explore a career in Medical Physics. After five years in Aberdeen, with an MSc and PhD completed, I had no regrets about my decision and felt satisfied with the contribution (albeit tiny!) that I had made to the scientific world.

However, although I had enjoyed the intellectual challenge of research and had, at times, found it exciting and rewarding, I still wondered whether teaching might perhaps be a career which I would find truly fulfilling and which would allow me to say 'I love my job'. Part of me thought it was a crazy idea since I had a promising career in research ahead of me, yet might be a hopeless teacher and get eaten alive by the pupils! However, the thought wouldn't go away and I decided in 1998 to give it a go.

I trained in Edinburgh, completing a one-year PGCE course in both Physics and Maths at Moray House. The course included lectures and tutorials on a wide range of general teaching topics, such as behaviour management, the structure of the school curriculum and teaching and learning styles.

We also had subject specific tutorials, in which we shared ideas for teaching particular topics, practised experiments, learned how to mark exams and much more. These tutorials were invaluable preparation for our three school placements, each of about six weeks duration. Though terrifying at the start and certainly challenging, these placements provided a taste of the excitement and fulfilment of teaching and offered an excellent opportunity to practise new skills, safe in the knowledge that the real class teacher would be able to pick up the pieces if it all went horribly wrong!

Since completing the PGCE five years ago, I have been a Physics teacher at Holy Rood RC High School in Edinburgh and I can truly say that I love my job! Holy Rood has over 1,000 pupils from a very wide variety of backgrounds. This makes it an exciting and rewarding place to work, since different classes provide entirely different challenges to the teacher, whether it is to respond to the boundless enthusiasm of excited first years, to motivate and manage a group of disaffected third years or to find a way of explaining a concept to a Higher Physics student.

I am also involved in other areas of school life, organising hill-walking and camping trips, helping on residential training weekends for the Sixth Year Committee and taking pupils to Tanzania on a pupil exchange. All in all, I use a huge range of skills, both personal and intellectual and am never bored. I have never once looked back on my decision to go into teaching – it's an incredibly fulfilling job.