Theft and the happy teacher

In order to make ends meet when I was a lowly paralegal I used to tutor A level sociology and law students. It has probably been the most valuable learning experience I have ever had, both in my subject area and also in pedagogy.

I charged a small but reasonable sum for my time and my services became quite popular, I was getting so many referrals that the decision to leave the law and pursue teaching was almost out of my hands, either the law or the teaching had to give and I hated the law side and love the teaching so it was very simple.

I figured out how to plan a lesson almost on my own and I look back on these plans and they're pretty basic. Students must have noticed a huge difference between what they did with me in our sessions and lessons they had at college and I'm sure the main reason why they got a lot out of it was because it was one to one.

The one thing I didn't understand or realise was that resources are not going to be original. I discovered websites like TES resources and Resourcd pretty early on, but I always thought that I had to hide the fact that I was using these things. I used to make great chunks of notes from the textbooks to make it look like I'd come up with it all and, granted it reinforced my own subject knowledge, but it was not a productive use of my time. It would take me as long to prepare for a session as it did to actually teach it,

Its taken me a long time to realise that taking a ready made resource, whether it's a worksheet, an activity or a presentation, is not cheating, it's common sense. As long as I am carefully checking the resources, tailoring them to my students and removing any other college's proprietary branding then I would be mad not to when the thing that I need already exists.

My message is mainly for new teachers, you have more things to do that you have hours in the day, you'll need to find as many short cuts as you possibly can and using someone else's resources in your lesson is somewhere that you can legitimately do this. It's not cheating and its not wrong. You're freeing up your time to do more important things like giving brilliant personalised feedback when marking student work, creating innovative differentiation strategies and maybe, just maybe, doing something for yourself like going home on time or having a lie in.