A letter to my 22 year old self

Delyth writes to herself with two pieces of advice that she wishes she would have known before her first job in a boarding school…

Dear Delyth

Well done on getting your first job teaching Biology being a residential tutor in the junior girls boarding house. There will be nothing like it and your first year will be a total adrenaline rush of excitement and new experiences. Nothing – nothing – will ever come close to the sense of satisfaction and pride that you will feel when you have made a difference to a young person and know that in some small way, you have shaped their life. But, two pieces of advice, if I may…..

1. Don’t forget that you must get up by 6am every day in order to ensure that you have hot water for your shower. 6.02am and you will have lost that unique moment of opportunity to bathe in anything other than a trickle of tepid water. As for a bath – forget it – it will take the best part of the whole day to fill and when you do have enough water to cover 1cm of your body, it will be cold anyway.
2. Remember that you will need to be an expert in areas that your prior education has not covered. This will include advising girls how to dye their hair back to brown when their attempts to go blonde turned green; fine tuning your sense of smell to parfum d’alcohol, particularly on the weekend and learning to be flexible and adaptable: knowing that the night you set aside to write your year 10 end of term reports may well be interrupted by the fire alarm going off because the girls had decided to see if they could bake cookie dough in the toaster and set it – and the nearby curtains – on fire.

You will laugh, you will cry and you will be afforded memories that will last a life time.

Smile, be patient, listen and believe; the young people you work with will give you energy and great joy.

Have fun,

Delyth

PS – don’t go shopping when you have been awake all night in A+E with a student who has appendicitis. You may forget where you parked your car and have to call the police.