Life and times

The journalist on retraining to be a maths teacher at 58, and then learning how to switch off

Writer and teacher Lucy Kellaway

‘PENS DOWN AND LISTENING in silence!’ I bellow. ‘In five… four... three... two... and one!’

Thirty 14-year-olds pay no heed. My attempt to explain how to rearrange a formula is going so poorly that one girl has volunteered to take over, suggesting she’d do a better job.

For this cheek, I add her name to the long list on the board of pupils who have most egregiously ignored my orders. At the end of the lesson, I’d intended to transfer these into the school’s detention system, but when my back was turned a student deftly wiped the board clean on her way out.

My mentor, who is both 32 years my junior and a towering authority on the teaching of maths, put a sympathetic hand on my sweating back. ‘I bet you wish you hadn’t left journalism,’ he said. On that, he was wrong. True, that particular 60 minutes had been excruciatingly unenjoyable, yet I still don’t regret it. What I regret is being so feeble, and as a result am forcing myself to become less so. Not all my lessons are bad, sometimes I manage to give a good one.

One comfort is that I’m not doing this alone. Eighteen months ago, I left my job at the FT and co-founded Now Teach, a charity to encourage professionals of a certain age to retrain as teachers. About 45 started last September, one of whom was given this excellent piece of advice early on from her mentor: ‘Buy a jacket you hate, because you will sweat so much it’ll never recover.’

Despite the brutality of the experience, the vast majority are sticking at it. Two terms in, only six have quit, the remaining 39 claim to be more uplifted by the experience than downtrodden. On my own scorecard there are a couple of things I’m particularly proud of. First, I have not cried once. Second, I seem to be rather good at remembering names, which – given that I often take three attempts before correctly identifying any of my own four children – feels like an achievement. If all else fails, becoming a teacher at 58 must be reducing my chances of getting Alzheimer’s.

I’M SITTING ON A plastic chair in a sports hall. I haven’t had lunch, so I’m on my third mini-packet of chocolate chip cookies. It is careers day at a Hackney school and I’ve volunteered to talk to Year 10s about journalism. The hall is filled with stalls of other professions: law, medicine, IT, etc. They are all doing a brisk trade; only no one comes to see me. I don’t mind feeling unpopular, but it is a shame – journalism is almost entirely white; these kids are mainly non-white and they don’t seem interested. By the end of the afternoon, a few stragglers have stopped by, some of whom brightened when I said I’d interviewed Alan Sugar and Russell Brand. ‘So why are you a teacher now, Miss?’ one asked. I said I wanted to do something useful. Her jaw went slack in disbelief.

SURVIVAL IN THIS NEW profession means finding good ways of switching off. The thing that works best for me is something I’ve never tried before: solitude. I have taken to going to the cinema alone, which instead of making me feel sad, makes me feel independent. At half-term, I spent a week alone in our house in Cornwall, where I delighted in speaking to no one, except for a man who came to chop down a tree. I am writing this on a Saturday night. I have lit a fire, poured a glass of wine, and put Leonard Cohen on Spotify. My friends wonder what has become of me, but there is a man who, had he lived another 350 years, would have got it entirely. ‘All men’s miseries,’ wrote the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, ‘derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.’ nowteach.org.uk

If all else fails, becoming a teacher at 58 must be reducing my chances of Alzheimer’s