052 - Pit Pony David Myers - Classroom to Student Support Officer at Durham University - Part 1

Former maths teacher David Myers joins us for a gripping two-part conversation about his journey in and out of the classroom - and everything in between.

In this first episode, we follow David from the early days of creative teaching and academic passion, through a toxic shift in school culture, the loss of professional autonomy, and the impact of long COVID on his well-being. From being told that “90% of teaching is marking” to experiencing mandated scripts, meaningless targets, and metacognition gone mad, David opens up about the moments that pushed him out of the profession he once loved.

What shines through is his deep care for students, his passion for real learning, and his refusal to accept factory-model education. There’s resilience here, humour, and insight - and for any teacher questioning what comes next, David’s honesty will hit home.

This is a story about burnout, boundaries, and finally saying “enough.”

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Thank you to our sponsors Little Voices. Are you a teacher with a passion for drama, music and performance, or feeling stuck in the classroom? Little Voices gives you the chance to step into a role where you can truly inspire young minds through the arts. This is a company I know well and admire. 

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Hello and welcome to the Pick Pony podcast with myself Sharon Corley and me Sarah Dawood, in which we talk to teachers from all walks of life who exited the classroom from what they thought was a job for life and thrived on the other side of teaching. Coming up in this episode... I knew what I can remember was suddenly feeling deeply betrayed. I tell you it said I was struggling. 

It was known that the support plan wasn't going so well. I was struggling myself and there I was being accused of lying and finding out the next day that capability was the route that they were now choosing to go down and that was when they told me that the union could be involved. Not at the start of the support plan, where apparently the union could also have been involved, but it was at that point they said that they were obligated to say the union could be involved. 

Hello listeners, another great episode for you today. We've got David Myers with us. David Myers was a maths teacher, seven years in total and his story, like many of our Pick Ponies, it spans that pandemic in like a before and an after and David before the pandemic worked at a UTC that was forward-thinking, creative, felt like a family. 

The ideas that these guys were doing, in David's own words, were researched and encouraged. He was invited to contribute his knowledge from his master's degree in psychology. During the pandemic, in his own words again, the man flourished.

He was teaching remotely and he loved finding creative ways to keep the pupils engaged and then here we go, after the pandemic, things changed and he said to me, being in the classroom was wonderful, being at the mercy of politic, red tape and pseudoscience was hell. Oh, I know Sarah. So, David, David, David, welcome.

Cannot wait to do this episode with you. David Myers, what are you doing today? Hi, I'm super excited to be here and more excited still to say that for the last two and a half years I've been working in student support at Durham University and I've got the particular pleasure of working in the castle. Perfect, we're going to talk about all of that but what I think we need to do, I think with you, we need to go back to the beginning. 

Let's get, let's get the full hit. Tell us about your experience right from the start of entering teaching. No problem at all. 

So, for the first couple of years, actually, I loved teaching. I worked at High Tunstall in Hartlepool. I had a phenomenal experience there. 

On top of that, I was actually studying for my first master's in education, looking at the psychology of problem solving in mathematics and early on, the head teacher there, Mark, spotted that I probably wasn't going to spend my entire life in the teaching industry. He said playfully at my leaving speech that I didn't always mark the books properly. It wasn't uncommon for the head of maths to walk past and go that is definitely not on the curriculum and somebody would pop in to have a word with me and Mark reflected that every time he tried to get me on the right course, I was there talking to a student who was struggling, pointing them in the right direction, just hearing them if they needed to be heard or a student that was being problematic, say, I was talking to them and trying to see, you know, how to help them out. 

I remember him saying to me, you're not going to be a maths teacher forever, which is a real shame. You're great at it. And for a head teacher that could have just run a school, could have told me to stay in line, he was introducing me to education psychologists, a lot like Lana from a few episodes back, if my memory serves me, and I was hooked because she was talking about students that struggle with the curriculum, struggle to engage and how it was her job to sort of, or that career, was to try and get inside their heads, figure out what was going on, figure out how the teaching community could support. 

That really resonated me and Mark was completely right. By the time I was finished with the Masters, I was so fixated on why so many pupils struggle with maths? What was going on? Why is it that so many pupils say they always hated maths? I've never believed that that was the case and I wanted to see if we could unravel it. So Mark was correct, about two years into the career, I went down south to study psychology at Cambridge and do a Masters there.

Wow, and you've touched on something absolutely powerful for me, because guess what I'm about to tell you? I hated maths. I'll share with you, I was the very first year to do GCSE, but I knew I wanted to be a teacher from the get-go and you needed a C in maths to teach. So despite a superb set of GCSE results, and I mean superb, because I'm the first year GCSE, they gave them out like confetti. 

Bullshits, honestly. There's lads I went to school with who can't read and write and they're like, I've still not worked out how I've got to be in English. I'm like, politics is on your side, my friend, about you. 

But I ended up resitting maths. Probably re-sat it through the sixth form, failed, re-sat it again a couple of times privately. And when I was on teaching practice, David, I'd secured my first job when I was having to re-sit maths with the year 11 group that I'd been on teaching practice with. 

So to hear somebody be on a quest to help a learner like me, it's so powerful. So how did that then translate this quest, this almost like pastoral approach as well through your subject? How did that translate into your next school when you went down south? So down south, I did the study and down south, I was just focusing on the master's and I did some private tutoring while I was down there. Cambridge is not a cheap place to live, you might've guessed. 

And I didn't want to tap out of the teaching and sitting with students one-to-one, figuring out what was going on. Why are they there? Why are you with me? Why do you need that tutoring? I was tutoring from youngest age 13 to around about 17, 18, students preparing for their A-level maths and further maths. I almost never found that it was mathematical ability alone. 

It was confidence and it was creativity that they struggled with. For a small time, I called my career maths coaching because they didn't need me to teach them. They didn't need that. 

They knew the rules and yeah, okay, for five, 10 minutes of a session, I was explaining the rules, but then it was okay, a few examples, let's play with that idea. Gradually as the tutoring went on, I spent less time saying, no, this is the rule. This is just what you need to remember.

I spent so much more time saying, let's play with that idea. Let's run with it. Let's run that to some logical conclusion. 

And the pupil could go, wait, that doesn't make sense. I need to, okay, I need to build up on this. And it went from, here are all the facts that you need to remember, which was not atypical, certainly from a curriculum perspective to let's play with this, let's be creative. 

And that was the part of the classroom that I loved. So I wanted from a psychological perspective, partially to understand what's known as dyscalculia, the numerical equivalent of dyslexia, because that affects roughly speaking, 20% of our adult population. So that was a fairly significant element that I thought we needed to look into.

But I also wanted to understand some of the cognitive effects. Does development have an impact on learning and understanding mathematics, et cetera? The lesson that I came out with is it's pretty complicated. Sarah, I know you're chomping. 

He's singing just music to your ears. What are your thoughts about this brilliant person in front of us? I think what you described in your first two years and how your head teacher at the time described you is everything that teaching should be. Oh, you're off curriculum. 

Okay, good. You're having those conversations with kids. Okay, great. 

And for me, I've just written down and I've gone back to 2013, 14. It's the facts versus intrinsically learning thing, isn't it? And somewhere, probably well before you started teaching, the curriculum went very fact focused. And I reflect that. 

I'm just thinking now some amazing teachers that I had at high school who were absolute, we were absolute masters of taking them off the path. There was always learning in that and it would always come back to whatever the key learning was. And I think that's what's been lost from teaching is that wider stuff that actually, for me anyway, I don't know whether it was just particular to me, but made me want to learn more because it wasn't just about the facts and the figures. 

Mathematics for me has always been, it's always been a creative subject. You need that little bit of creativity. You need some resilience in terms of slowing down, recognizing that you're going to get it wrong. 

You're going to make a mistake. It's then being creative and finding different ways around that. If you say, well, okay, I think this is the right answer. 

Well, how do you know? Let's test it. Let's play with that. Convince me, convince yourself.

And there's that wonderful aha moment when the student says, I get it. I'm playfully reminded of a time when Mark said there was some phone call that I needed to take. So he'd look after my class for a little while and I'd set them a starter. 

It was some sort of puzzle on the board. It was going to build into the lesson, but it was something that they could engage with, play with. If they thought they were going to make it more complex, I think I'd offered them a chocolate bar if they could break my little puzzle. 

Spoiler, they couldn't. For higher level groups, I'd have given them the chocolate bar if they figured out why they couldn't break it. But it was meant to run into the lesson, the usual templates, proof that I've taken them through the learning objectives, et cetera. 

When I got back from the phone call, Mark said, no, keep going. They're engaged. They're happy. 

They're excited. They're working together. He said, that's what I want to see in my school. 

And I'm forever grateful for that memory. But then he espoused that in the culture. I've kept up with him since, and he's been doing a lot of charity work around Hartlepool. 

He's been working with local charities. The most recent one is making sure that every one of the kids has got a fresh mattress. So it's that sort of culture that he's kept in and around the school that I think has kept that school going with the ethos that it has. 

And he is why we say not all head teachers, not all SLT. We know we're in an echo chamber. And when we know that the likes of Mark is out there doing it, that's where what we want to say is, so why can't everybody else be more Mark? Okay. 

That is why in many ways we do this, because we know there's pockets of excellence and compassion and vision within teaching. But sadly, they become fewer and only in our world lens anyway, because of obviously where we sit. But you've done this now. 

You've gone to Cambridge. You go back into the classroom, do you at this point, David? I was sorely tempted to study for a PhD. Had it not been for my supervisor needing to head back to his home country, he wanted to be with his family. 

And the fact that I missed Durham, that beautiful, beautiful city in the North East. My heart was there. There were really close friends there. 

I knew that a PhD would come in time. I was still very excited at the prospect of studying as an education psychologist. So I took my time, but I knew I needed to be back in Durham. 

I thought I'd come back. It was a career that I knew quite well. I applied for a few schools and lo and behold, I found one that said, look, we're really keen on what you've been doing.

I said, are you suggesting that I could continue the research? They said, we'd love for you to continue the research. We'd love if you're thinking about doing a PhD down the line, we'd be happy to support you going part time so long as the research contributes to the learning at the school. That turned out to be inaccurate. 

The day that I landed, not only was there no element of discussion on support for the role, but I realised that the lessons I'd been given, that I was going to teach, not tweak, not touch up, not change. I was just going to teach these lesson styles were pretty typical of the standard rubric that we're seeing in schools now. The starter task, which is usually some reflection from the previous task.

An intro task, write this down, test yourself. Here are three columns of varying difficulty, you are going to start here. Lover, rinse and repeat. 

And not only did we start with that, but the first training session was on cognition. For any of the listeners that, sorry, metacognition. And for any of the listeners that don't know, metacognition is our, I suppose, awareness of our thinking and how we can use that to subtly change our own thinking. 

So judge to my delight when the head of the teaching and learning says, so really what we're talking about is thinking. I wasn't overly impressed. Oh, come on, Sarah.

This used to be my biggest bugbear, and I'm pretty certain it's still happening in schools. And I am going to generalise, because it's my experience. They take something that's rooted in science, and they utterly bastardise it and make it into something that it is not.

And the big one for me on that, and I won't dwell on it, was mindset, was growth mindset. Was it Ruth Dweck? Carol Dweck's work on mindset is so well-rooted in psychology, but schools took it and turned it into posters and bloomin' nonsense and completely undermined everything that was right about it. So that's why I rolled my eyes when you said metacognition, not because of metacognition, but because I knew where you were going to take it.

And do you know, I'm going to take it one further. It's then seeing the growth mindset, Bloom's Taxonomy was another one. And not just, not just arguing that this is it, it works as a poster, weaponising it against the kids. 

You're not doing the reasoning, that's not okay. You don't have a growth mindset, that's not okay. You're not, you're not wearing the right thinking hat. 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yes. So we're told, okay, this is metacognition, you're going to use it in your classroom. Well, okay, metacognition's only been recently understood by psychologists for the last 10, 15 years or so. 

That's where the real research has started to bloom. But okay, we're going to now weaponise this somehow and make students do their homework. How are we going to do that? I come to find out it's not just these scripted lesson templates.

It's tests every two weeks, bookmarking every other two weeks. And once the students have responded to your marking, you then have to mark their responses. This was the factory mindset that I'd found myself in.

New quote from my new line manager when I said I really wasn't happy with this style. And it's stenciled on my brain. If you don't accept that 90% of the job is marking, you don't belong in this career.

Oh, I've got words that would get me kicked out of my own Facebook group. It's okay. She was marking my resignation letter the next day.

Beautiful. Oh, now that says something. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. 

You put your boundary in and went, okay, I'm off. Was that just literally an overnight, this isn't going to work? It was, yeah. It wasn't overnight. 

It was in the moment. I was sitting there marking these books when I was told that. And then I thought, no, I was in my mid twenties. 

At the time, I was thinking in 10, 15 years, I want to be a dad. I was working at the school until six, seven o'clock. And I thought, no, I could not start a family in good conscience, working these hours, coming home with this stress. 

I don't mind telling you that there were more nights in the pub than not to help me calm down, to help me get over it. That's why leaving teaching actually became quite easy, which we'll get to, because a lot of money is no longer in the pub. Where it needed to be to help me kind of keep myself in check. 

Oh, a hundred percent. Those self-soothing, bottles of wine, cigarettes, overeating, gym sessions, all of the self-soothing strategies that we use to get them through. Can I ask a question then? And I don't want to preempt.

More often than not with people we've had on the podcast previously, it's been about the environment and the way people interact. It's been bullying, it's been toxic culture, it's been this. I'm listening to you and this is about your ethics as a teacher, your commitment to learning about wanting that to be right for the kids.

Was there stuff that went on around it or was it purely that? It was a combination of the two. I've always, I've said already that teaching should be creative. There should be space for students to get it wrong. 

Fundamentally, I've never believed that progress is linear. I don't think any teacher, I don't think any senior lead teacher believes that either. But linear or anything other than the linear approach doesn't prove progress.

So when Ofsted come in or when an observer comes in, that student hasn't made progress. No, of course not. They're sitting there thinking about it. 

They're debating it with their friends. They're discussing it with their friends. One explanation hasn't worked. 

So they've gone to their mate to figure it out. We know realistically, or I know from my own experience in mathematics, sometimes you need to suffer with it. Go home, forget about it. 

And while you're out playing football, the penny might drop. If you've given it your all and you've really been trying to think about it, that's diffuse thinking. That is cognitive psychology. 

I wanted to allow for an environment where students and pupils knew that that was okay. As long as I see them trying, done. But that's such an important life lesson, isn't it? I just think about how I work and I've actually said to somebody today, that's great. 

You've given me all of this information. I understand it, but I now need to sit and let it percolate for 48 hours. I add a pound for every time she says that to me at work. 

And that's what happens because I am so impatient and I want a solution and a solution and a solution. Sarah's, I can assure you, it doesn't take place on a football pitch. I know, I know exactly when she has what we call those light bulb moments. 

It is at three o'clock in the morning because that environment has opened up, whether it's just the location, the setting, the room, whatever she's in, that's when she goes, now I've got it. So at this point, you've gone back in. How long did you stay at that school, by the way? Less than a year. 

Officially one academic year because I know the difference between resigning in July and resigning at the end of the academic year. Yeah. So I was very careful to put that into the wording. 

I had put my resignation in by early December for the end of the academic year. I gave myself the options. I knew that by doing that, A, I was committed to it.

B, I had got the time to look. Yeah. So it was relatively easy to then saying, okay, I will play your game. 

I'll do what you're suggesting, but I'm on the way out. I'll take my time quite comfortably. And interestingly, here's the one, and thanks for the opportunity for continuing my research and PhD that we talked about in the interview. 

It was clear that you have no intention of doing. So you go, at this point, David, have you lined up another job to go to for that September, that year? No. No. 

So you actually, but by July, have you got something to go to? By July I did. Yes. I think it was late June that I finally found somewhere that I thought I could really thrive.

And do you know what I'll say at this point as well, particularly for maths teachers, in today's day and age, you are holding the deck of cards. You are maths teachers in a world where getting maths teachers are like hen's teeth. So just as a party political broadcast on behalf of the know your worth party to maths teachers, you don't have to put up with it because to be honest, there is work out there for really good skilled maths teachers who can teach GCSE and A level. 

You don't have to put up with it, but you go and you go to, where do you go to next? So this is where I started my journey at the UTC. Okey-doke. What is a UTC for our non-educator listeners? So the UTCs are university technical colleges. 

They often will specialise in one particular subject that might branch out. So you may have say a medical UTC that looks at biology, looks at mathematics and subjects relating to that. Mine particularly was an engineering college.

So the main subject is engineering with mathematics, physics, the sciences, of course, computer science surrounding that and its core elements. It's aimed at students, typically speaking, going into year 10. It can be marketed for students who know that engineering or an engineering based subject is where they want to go, whether that's straight into industry or to universities to study in the traditional sense of the word.

It aims to gear students up to the career straight away, whether that's through an apprenticeship or to continue their studies, but by understanding the subjects that they are learning largely through projects, largely through project based learning. The aim is once the schools are established to set up several say projects that use a lot of GCSE and A level material that they're learning. Just for context for Sharon, there's one near us in Media City. 

Yes. Yeah. Where all the BBC and ITV are based. 

There's one in Warrington. Yeah. There's one in Winnick. 

Yeah. There's a few and you can imagine an engineering college where maths is used and maths is harnessed. This was gold dust. 

This was gold dust. And during the interview, I was really quite excited. Certainly when the colleges are new, there's a very interesting demographic in the students. 

It's a combination of students that know exactly what they want to do, whether that's going through university or going through an apprenticeship. It's also an opportunity for students that feel a little bit let down by the current educational system, of which there are a few. And what I found right at the start was that I was excited as they were.

It really did help that the first session that didn't focus on metacognition, but focused on cognitive psychology. The vice principal said, I want an hour with you to discuss it, to understand it. Within two hours of being in the door, I felt so welcome. 

I felt like my knowledge base really could be used. I was valued. He had laid out a map of how we were going to work together to see if we could use psychology. 

Not that we were going to, not that we were going to create some novel system. Could we use it? Could we use any tools or ideas that might just shift the way students are learning? And if it doesn't work, fine. Did you get some Mark vibes off him? Did you feel as though he was the type of leader that was going to, yeah. 

Did you get that Sarah? Did you get be more like, be more Mark vibes or be more Mark? Yeah. Sitting down going, what have I got here? How can I bring this guy's knowledge? It wasn't lip service. And do you know what I liked about him? And this is what reminds me of my friend, Lady Dunwood. 

Didn't make a promise they couldn't keep. I'm not saying we can use you. I'm not saying we will, but I want to work. 

Managing your expectations. You didn't leave that meeting going, oh my God, it's amazing. We're going to do this project. 

I'm going to be running this. There's real honesty and integrity within the leadership about managing those expectations. Do you know the only thing I would say is, in a sense, I wouldn't say I was being used in that regard, but I was in a professional sense, being used for my mind. 

And I was happy with that. I was happy to be tested. I was happy to be told this might not work, but let's see what we can do with it. 

That really rang out to me. And moreover, again, I think along with the Mark vibes, I was sitting down, I was planning a lesson. In came the vice principal and similarly the principal at a different stage. 

And both of them said, what are you doing in here? I say, well, look, I'm planning a lesson. Jokingly, with a smile, both of them saying, you've got no experience with engineering. Get into the engineering hall. 

See what they're doing. Join the students. We've got a place for you. 

Learn what the students are doing. As you learn the engineering with them, you will see the maths that they're doing. You will see the IT that they're playing with and how they use that sense of coordinates. 

That's what we want you integrating into your lessons. Fine. I was allowed to fall back if say a subject like trigonometry wasn't immediately obvious to the project that we're doing. 

Fine. I could roll that in as a standard lesson. If some creative idea came to mind, fantastic. 

But for a long time, certainly up until around about Christmas of 2019, that's what I was doing. I was balancing my time in the classroom. Certainly if they were coming from the engineering hall to me, if I had to scrap that trigonometry lesson and say, here's what you've done, here's the maths in the background, I could pull the lesson, teach them that and say, the next time you go into the engineering hall, tell me how this is going to work for you. 

And you know what word came into my head then? Tutoring. Tutoring. That's what tutoring is about. 

I am not going to sit in front of a group of children and teach what I planned six weeks beforehand because they will walk in, having left me last week and go, yeah, more on Macbeth next week, kids. All right. See you try. 

Sharon, it's an inspector calls on Thursday. They've sprung an assessment. Yeah, not a problem. 

We'll do an inspector calls. I'm meeting you at the point of need. And that's the lithe and flex nature of the world of tutoring. 

There isn't a fixed order of a curriculum. There is a fixed curriculum. The stuff we have to get through. 

But it's having the skill and the ability. And this is where really brilliant tutors should never have planned a session. They should have prepared for the inevitability of different sessions. 

But you don't need to write it down. You know, like breathing, how to teach that particular subject or that particular facet of the subject. I'm right, aren't I, Lady Dunwood? Yeah. 

Stop calling me Lady Dunwood. I'm feeling right old. I'm doing it to wind you up. 

I know you are. I know I am. You've got the devil in you. 

I know she knows I have. The really interesting thing for me is that this is the bit I miss about teaching is learning is seeing learning happening. And when you're in an environment where where that's allowed to happen in the way that you're describing, how much more impact does that have on the kids that they come from one thing and go to the other and it's intrinsically connected? That's massively impacts on learning massively without them necessarily realising how clever that is. 

But it makes a big difference. Yeah. Well, it's like it's like, oh, doesn't you start? You start.

You're Bob on. And with that, what really helps, what really added was we spoke earlier about modelling that growth mindset, those soft skills. Well, I'm in the engineering hall messing it up because I don't know which side of a hammer is which.

And somebody's walking past going, what's going on? David set fire to the machinery again. Oops. OK, help me out, kids. 

How do I get over this? Seeing that chance to go, yeah, I've made a mistake, but I got it wrong. That's a cross somewhere on my assessment. OK, how do I make sure I don't do that again? Having that conversation with the students normalised it the other way. 

If they knew they got it wrong in the classroom, David wasn't going to get angry. He wasn't angry half an hour ago, and the students weren't angry with me. We could share in that learning process.

And you start, and we're about to, because I'm getting my timings right in my head. You're in this great environment, this halcyon period of your teaching career, and we are about to go into lockdown. So you would think all of that was going to change for you because you were going to then be restricted behind a screen, online learning. 

But lockdown didn't take the joy out of teaching, all the creativity for you did it. Am I right in thinking? You're absolutely right in thinking that. If anything, it's enhanced it. 

Don't get me wrong. The first few weeks were really quite scary. I don't know if you've noticed, but I might define myself to be somewhat extroverted.

So suddenly locked in the corner, like everybody else, and no contacts. It was a tough couple of weeks, and we were finding our strength. We were finding out how best we were going to communicate with the students, how we were going to deliver lessons, me being relatively creative. 

I knew that it was going to be something like a huge Teams meeting. And it started with just checking in with everybody and by saying, right, we're going to go back to what we did last week. I'm going to send out some worksheets. 

Yes, it's a little dull. I'm really sorry. I want you to be creative and find out the easiest way to show me that you've done some work and that you know the answers.

It started off pretty jarring. How are we keeping in touch with parents? How are we keeping in touch with the students? How are we delivering this, applying this, et cetera? And once that calmed down, something quite fun dawned on me. How are all the students accessing my lessons through laptops and the internet? What is a key resource that teachers wish they had more of in the classroom? It's the laptops and the internet. 

Suddenly, I was transported to all of the quote-unquote fun lessons where they were looking at the applets on, say, Jojibre. Jojibre is a free resource. It's available to everybody and you can interact with it. 

You can play. You can see how all these mathematical concepts change in front of you. Dr. Frost Maths, who also releases all of his material online, it's free for every school, all of his lessons were there as well.

The answers were revealed. He had his own YouTube videos and I was saying to my pupils, if you don't like the way I'm explaining it, look at this guy. Then come back to me and we'll figure it out. 

If I've explained it and you don't get it, you've watched a Dr. Frost Maths video, you've played with the Jojibre app. We really need to have a chat because that is not your fault. Brief interlude, dear listener. 

A couple of questions. Are you a tutor or even a pit pony considering tutoring? And do you fancy getting in the room with myself and Sarah Dunwood, learning about the wonderful world of tuition? Then why not join us at the National Tutors Conference, hosted by Conexus Tuition, on the 29th of July, 2025. It's at Chesford Grange, Kenilworth. 

Links to the tickets are in the show notes below and we will both see you on the other side. So they were playing with these different apps. They were having a go. 

They were being creative. I was absolutely living the dream. I was really playing around with different ideas, taking a few students that had clearly finished and said, oh, look, here's next lesson. 

I want you to have a look at a few of them and tell me which one makes the most sense to you, which one's exciting, which one's interesting. Sending them off into break rooms, having a play with all of that, seeing if it made sense, recording and chopping some of the lessons and putting them on YouTube. I'm not dropping any YouTube links because I had a lockdown haircut and they will not be seen by anybody after 2020. 

So it was a really, really exciting time. What also happened in the background was this really took storm. The students were engaged.

They were interested. I could set them off, know that they would work with each other. So I started to notice where students weren't engaging in the same way. 

The really eccentric students from the classroom have suddenly gone quite quiet. Some students are being a little bit more disagreeable. So once again, I'm starting to go, look, can we have a five minute talk, please? And again, I'm saying, let's have a chat. 

Let's see what's going on. Do I need to point you towards the right support? You can imagine I really got on with the student support team in the college at that time. Echoes of, again, what I was experiencing in High Tunstall and noticing that that felt really quite fulfilling. 

That same fulfillment I got when giving students the confidence, helping them to recognize that they were okay. They will be okay. They might need that support really started to resonate with me. 

And that was where it slowly started to dawn on me that the maths had got very little to do with it as far as I was concerned from a vocation perspective. So at this point, we've all got this kind of like, but you didn't announce at the start of this podcast that it's David Meyer's maths teacher. You've left this classroom. 

Yeah. Okay. So we go through lockdown. 

Yep. You come back. Yeah. 

And I remember the first chat with my head of department, who was also quite excited, who'd seen some of these ideas and ran with them. He was a keen runner and he said he'd been using a lot of his data from running and encourage students to do the same. So in his A-level stats, they were comparing models, looking for anomalies. 

He'd been similarly very excited. And we came back and said, what can we do? How can we take all of this into the classroom? Yes, there are some limitations. Not all the students are bringing the laptops in, obviously, but what have we learned? How can we take this forward? We're going to get back into the engineering hall. 

We're going to use some of the things we've learned. This is just going to take to next level plus. Higher up, somebody else had evidently hit a switch and it wasn't that switch.

It was let's get the kids back used to being back in the classroom. They need the basics and the basics were sitting in the classroom, sitting in their uniform with their textbooks, remembering how to go through the slides. I knew then there was something was a little bit wrong.

And actually, David, what I will say to you is that mirrored exactly what went on across the nation. We'd done two years with no GCSEs. We'd done teacher assessments and the world hadn't spun off its axis. 

We'd got hybrid models where actually children flourished. And those children who didn't like being in the classroom were rammed back in again. So actually, as a nation, education was not allowed to take any learnings from that time and say, do we really need a terminal exam? Do we really need to be testing at the end of year 11? Do we really need every child back in the classroom? Have we not got more opportunities here for flexible working from home for teachers? What can we take that worked really well? Because we've done it for two years. 

So all of those reasons where we go, well, that would never work. Well, it bloody would because we've just done it. No, business as usual. 

And in fact, exactly what happened, we didn't go back to business as usual. We moved even further backwards into this comfort zone of more testing, catch up. What are they missing out on? So what was going on is like a microcosm within your school was happening nationally. 

So am I right in thinking you go back? Is there a change in leadership at this point in the school or there's been some movement and you're now going, whoa, hang on a minute. This is not the school, the UTC I left behind. So certainly that vice principal by that point had gone and he'd moved back into his own business.

And fair enough. He was really excited for that. There was a change in the leadership. 

There was a new learning and teaching manager who brought in something that I really resented, which I'll come back to. But you were absolutely spot on. These students were two years out of being examined.

They've been examined in different ways. I would say they were behind developmentally and socially as a part of being locked in the house. We as adults felt the strain from two years in.

Imagine what's happening to that developmental brain for two years being locked in with no social aspect. So these students were not ready for tests as we found out when we brought them straight back into the classroom and gave them tests. I felt really hurt that as a result of one class doing really quite poorly that I was given a support plan. 

But I thought, okay, this is from people that I know and I like. And maybe this is just their way of digging in and making sure that they do right by me. That was, I was gutted, but I thought, okay, I'll trust it and I will go with it until I find out that there are about a quarter of the teachers in the school on a support plan. 

And several of them were not feeling as assured as I was. Or magnanimous as you were. Thank you. 

Jeepers. Wow. A quarter of the staff.

Yeah. Now this new element brought in from the learning and teaching manager was what she called teaching protocol. So I'll give you a for instance of teaching protocol. 

It's built around presentations. So the students will, student A, say, will have five minutes to present an idea. Student B then has say two minutes to say what they like, to which pupil A or student A has got one minute to respond. 

Student two, and this is the rubric that they have to follow. The teacher is there to stand out and say, this is what you will say and how you will say it. But it was okay because there were loads of different types you could choose from. 

Is it that student A has got two minutes to talk? Student B has a minute to ask this question. And this was the same rubric that was used following lesson observations. I remember the head of science, if my memory serves, saying that I had two minutes to say what I thought went well about the lesson. 

He had a minute to respond and say what he liked, et cetera. I don't know about your good selves, but I am really not keen on mandated speech. Right. 

Sarah and me mute when you're talking, right? So I don't know if you saw that on screen, our fingers just went bang off the, what the actual, it's like somebody's, sorry, you've only got a minute to say this, please. And I'll respond with two minutes. How do you have, I mean, I think about the amount of time that Sharon and I talk, which is probably about 18 hours a day to each other. 

The best conversations, the most productive conversations come from it being natural. We are not robots. We are not AI. 

I mean, I love AI, but we're not AI. And so somebody's at their two minutes and telling you something wonderful. Does the clock switch off and they shut up? That's your two minutes. 

Hand over to the other person. And you know what? Do you know why that wouldn't work for me? Because I couldn't listen. Because the only thing I'd be working out is how long I'd be focused on the time, not what was being said. 

So I wouldn't be actively listening to what was being said anyway. Well, I don't mind admitting I've got a very, very dear mentor who's since pointed out this, what she calls my undiagnosed ADHD. And I've got a lot of sympathy for that idea.

My brain will happily scatter if someone gives me a seed. As I'm talking to you now, I'm thinking, keep it to the story, David, keep it to the story. Different parts of my mind are going, tell him that, that's really exciting. 

Or I will tell the ending of the story, having completely forgotten the stats. And I'm the type that will go, oh, did I not tell you I was in the car at the time? That's probably important. So telling me to keep it to this time or saying, right, okay, I now need to listen to you for three minutes. 

Similarly, I've lost interest in the content because there's this timer ticking as I go, I need to prepare my response for three minutes. And this is the guy who told us that he was using things, play with it. It'll come to you when you're on the football field.

But he worked for a head teacher. He said, don't move off that puzzle. They're all engaged.

You've almost swung to completely, the opposite end of everything that you, who left at one point on a point of principle, being told it was 90% marking and out. Now you've got two minutes, you've got one minute. This is how we're teaching it.

This is the format. How is this impacting you at this time? Fairly heavy, but I thought, look, this is temporary. This is rebuilding.

I don't necessarily like it. I'm struggling with the idea. I can see that the pupils are struggling, but again, I remembered the way I started. 

I remember the creative freedoms I was given. And I thought, hold on, David, we can rebuild. We will get there. 

This isn't pleasant, but I do trust the people who are in charge. They have more experience than me. I was six, seven years in, I thought, trust them, go with it. 

And I trusted them right up until I came down with COVID. And it was a strange one for me. For the first week, I didn't have a clue where I was. 

It was only friends saying, you've been out of this for however long, however long, however. And it was about a week where I started getting traction on the days. So after the 10 day limit, I can come back in. 

I'm testing absolutely fine. I get back into the classroom and I'm saying, okay, kids, so today we're working on the area of I'm pointing at the board and the students go, rectangle, sir. Yeah, that, rectangle, brain fog by any other name. 

And I was okay. But to anyone who knew me, I was evidently quite slow. And it was not easy to get any traction. 

I knew there was a really serious problem. I knew, I knew leadership were concerned about me because yes, I was forgetting details. There were some low level tasks that were going wrong and that support plan was ongoing in the background. 

So these were being noticed by the way. What help do you need? Actually, what help I probably needed. And I can't remember how long they said brain fog lasted, but I seem to remember it was some months. 

Realistically, I needed that time off sick, looking back. And I rarely say if I could go back and do it again, what I probably would say is be off sick. I was not very much help to the kids. 

I've really admit that I could just about get through the teaching. What I had was notes of where I was failing the kids. We don't often give enough time and space to talk about what was called long COVID. 

My daughter, she lost her sense of taste. I can't remember what the medical term is, but she felt sick at the smell of certain foods. She couldn't eat. 

She had no taste. Her fatigue, the long COVID was something that we never factored into schools. And it sounds like that was a symptom of your long COVID.

So that was where things got the most serious. I, to this day, can't remember what I said. But again, student who had been struggling, suddenly remembered they needed to be in a meeting with a senior member of staff. 

And they started to panic because they were struggling with their timing anyway. For them, he was more evidence. We'd been talking about strategies for timing. 

I seem to remember that. Now I do not remember to this day, whether I said, tell them you were with me or tell them you were in a meeting with me. And a few conversations later where I'm saying, I can't remember, I was accused of lying.

I don't believe you can't remember whether you've said, tell them you're with me, tell them you're in a meeting with me. I think you know what you said and that you're lying to me. What was the implication of either or of those? If you'd have said, tell them you were in a meeting with me or tell them you were with me. 

I don't understand. What was the problem there that that kid was with you or in a meeting with you? I don't know. I know that I was sat with the head at the time. 

I was sat with second in charge of department, the vice principal. And they had said, you need to come in now. You need to understand this. 

Member of staff says, I know I heard you say that, whichever one it was. And I said, I believe you. I can't remember. 

Were they getting at the fact that you'd given a lie to the child to allow the child to, or was it just something really spurious? And this is really hard for you because you can't remember, can you? No. I knew what I can remember was suddenly feeling deeply betrayed. So you said I was struggling. 

It was known that the support plan wasn't going so well. I was struggling myself and there I was being accused of lying and finding out the next day that capability was the route that they were now choosing to go down. And that was when they told me that the union could be involved. 

Not at the start of the support plan, where apparently the union could also have been involved, but it was at that point, they said that they were obligated to say the union could be involved. So what do you do? Actually, at the time I'm speaking to the doctor who said, you're not okay. And he was, he was right. 

I was so far from okay. I was stunned with everything that was going on. And spark individual that I remembered was being told that I needed to be on Sertraline, which for any listeners that aren't aware is Ugandan variety antidepressant. 

Hearing that really shocked me and told me what law I'd found myself at from a few months ago, creative, living the dream, making mistakes to support plan are potentially about to be fired. And anything about my charism and energy had gone to such an extent that the doctor said, you need antidepressants. Wow. 

And wow. And unlike when a doctor says you're in physical pain, here's the medicine that will help you with that. Cause I, I had almost six years to the day. 

That was the same conversation I had with my doctor and to be told you need it for your mind. You have a very visceral response to that because you feel like you've failed in some way. That's how I felt. 

I felt I'd failed because I've now got to be put on medicine to stop my brain from feeling this way. So if they'd have said, you need these painkillers for your inflate for your weak knee. Oh, all right. 

Yeah. I'll take them every morning. But the minute they say you need this for your mental health, you automatically sit in shame. 

Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Absolutely. Completely. It's the feeling is not, not only a sense of being a failure, I failed my, my mind was my greatest resource at the time. 

My, I always thought that if there was something I could offer people, it was my mind. I could help. I could see and conceptualize the mathematics. 

I could explain it to people. I could empathize with what they were going through and find the words that all came from the mind. It was my best resource. 

And suddenly that resource was impaired. I was a failure. I'd made the wrong decisions. 

I was the one that had led myself to a place where I'd completely let go of my own mental health. The people that I knew and trusted at work. Well, they were experienced. 

They were doing everything right. I'm the one that's wrong. I'm the disgrace. 

I'm the letdown. And I've brought myself to this level. Wow. 

It really, really saddens me because I still keep going back to, you told him to shove it after saying 90% the marking. And I do think it might've been the imperfect storm of COVID, the impact of where you were physically trying to make your way back into the classroom. That's where you needed the bloody support. 

So what did you do? Did you go off with work-related stress? What? There's a Yorkshireman in me that wouldn't go down without a fight. Okay. It snapped initially when there was the first meeting where targets had been agreed and points for capability were discussed against the teaching and learning standards.

The union rep, a phenomenal bloke, let them talk and they explained it. And they said, so we've done this and we've got that prepared. And this is what we're prepared to do in support.

And the union rep said, this is crap. And that was when my eyes kind of slowly came up and went, what? He said, none of these are smart targets. None of these are easily measurable. 

None of them make sense. The, what was it? Something about professionalism because I'd quote unquote lied to somebody. He said, the target for David is it will be assumed that he's passed, assuming nothing else happens. 

He said, you can scratch that right now. And he came with this fire. I'm sitting there looking at him going, oh, oh, I'm not the complete, wait, hang on. 

Right. This isn't okay. This is not okay. 

These people who I thought were friends and mentors, actually, there's something else in the background here. This is awful. It's like that feeling when you go into fight for your kids and they look at you and go, yeah, I mean, mum's there now, argue with her because she knows what she's talking about.

And you can sit back almost childlike and go, oh my God, I needed somebody else to say this was not okay. Because we'll do get into that emperor's new clothes type scenario where we're looking around going, does nobody else see the injustice? Does nobody else see the unfairness? And it takes, and that's where I've always said, the unions are the best of us and the worst of us. You get a good one. 

You are what you are. That's the hill you'll die on. But it is potluck with a union. 

I will always say that. So you sat there and you've got somebody at that. How did they respond when Alpha Scargill's come in and shown them how it's now? It's funny you mention, actually, I grew up on the same estates that Alpha Scargill lived on down at Barnsley.

Dad's here. It was a character. So that was a real turning point. 

And at that point, actually, I'd had a couple of views to say the very least of the how to leave teaching when you're dependent on the teacher's salary video. And for any listeners who have not listened to that and are worried about finances at all, for God's sake, get onto it. That was the video that at least made me realise the scale of the community out there. 

That, yeah, I was pushing £40,000 at the time, and I was sitting there thinking, well, it's pretty obvious now that I'm done. How do I do it? How do I get out? So what I didn't do, and I'm sorry, ladies Dunwood and Cawley, I did not listen to either of you. I did not find the time to come up with a strategy, but a little bit of that old spark kicked in, and I started looking. 

And after that union meeting, and about a week or so later, I don't remember what was said, another little spark came back, and I just said, I'm done. Around about March time, I think, I'd looked at a few different videos at your suggestions. I was looking up websites, what do people do after they leave teaching? And I just snapped and said, I'm done. 

I've had enough. I thought, well, I'm pretty good at tutoring. I noticed your tutoring had gone quite well. 

I thought, well, what's the worst that can happen? I can be a supply teacher, build up a few TTs over time. I'll figure out the finances. If I get to the summer holidays and I need to do some bar shifts, whatever, see what's out there. 

So at that point, I handed in my resignation, and another light bulb clicked on. For the last few months of my full-time teaching career, I could say no. You'd handed in your resignation, and I say this to pit ponies all the time.

If you know you're going, and you are waiting to hand your resignation in, or if you've handed it in, change. Then start with your work to rule. No, I'm not doing it. 

Let that attitudinal change happen whilst you're in the classroom, because you will start to heal sooner. One of our very early podcasts was with a woman called Hannah, who ended up head of prison service in England and Wales. She was the treatment in the classroom of Hannah. 

If you have not listened to that episode, to me, it is one of the most powerful stories you will ever, ever hear. And despite going through what she went through, and handing in her resignation, and being so poorly she was off, she still contemplated going back in for the last couple of weeks to tie up loose ends and do this. It is okay in an employee and an employee relationship to go, we're done. 

I dare you. I dare you. Go on, come at me, because I'm not here till six o'clock at night. 

Criticise me for this. Go on, what are you going to do about it? Because I've taken the power away from you. The only real power you have over me is you employ me. 

Well, you're not going to be in a couple of months. That's so important to do that. If you can empower yourself from within, knowing that you're going is a really, really great... the rebuilding of your character that they had slowly eroded over that period of time. 

Yeah, and it was refreshing to feel it coming back in drips and drabs. I remember it was something to do with a poster or whatever I had on my desk, a big coffee flask, because I thought, well, coffee gives me energy. So let's have 1.2 litres of that a day. 

Not the most professional, I'm perfectly happy to admit, but I liked my coffee and we know what staff rooms are like. So in comes a member of staff saying, I'm going to need you to get rid of that. Oh, okay. 

So I ignored them. Because true enough, about two days later, look, I asked you to get rid of that. Oh, okay. 

Now I'm telling you to get rid of it. To which I turned around and said, then you were never asking, were you? And this was the, you know, it might not have been the perfect, it wasn't diplomatic, it wasn't necessarily professional. I fully accept that. 

What it was, was me starting to stand my ground and starting to try and recognise what was going on. I should have said no the first time and recognised what was going on, but I thought, well, if I'm going out, I'm going to do it. Oh, if I'm going down, I'm taking 12 of them with me and you're going to have to drag me out and I am going to be awkward. 

Because you get to that point, don't you? You think, where would that work in? Where could I do that in any other walk of life where I could walk into any professional environment and use that passive aggressive nonsense? I'm going to need you to do that. The wording of that makes me want to punch somebody in the face to begin with. No. 

Would it be okay? I'm sorry to have to do this, but I have been asked to go around and give a justification. For health and safety reasons, we can't have hot liquid in the rooms. I'm saying it to everybody.

Please, I understand if there's anything I can do at break time to make sure you've got a coffee and I am so sorry to have to ask this. Would it be possible for you not to drink coffee in the classroom? Yeah, no problem at all. You've met me and I will mirror the way in which you've come at me. 

If you come at me with some nonsense of, I'm going to need you to do this. Oh, I'm going to play with you. Yeah. 

And I'm going to need to say no, unfortunately, at this stage. So we're going to get into an argument over coffee. Yep. 

And this, oh, the escalation from this sitting with the principal and he was very good at having that conversation usually. And there was that time for chats. We were at the end of the year, we were quite exhausted. 

And I seem to remember him saying something like, look, when you move on, I think it's worth remembering just as friendly advice. If a senior member of staff tells you to do something, you should probably do it. To which I turned around and said, I've got my mind back. 

If a senior member of staff tells me to do something, I will discuss it with them. And if there's that respect and there's that time for conversation, sure. Then I will obey and say we can discuss it later. 

If the answers are vehement no, then a boss that I know and love and trust will at least give me that time to have that talk. And I can learn at the very least that I will not obey blindly. Because I am, you know, you've entered into this, you've entered into this profession and all you wanted to do was support kids. 

The psychology that sits behind were those pain points in learning. Well, I obeyed blindly and look where that got me. 100%. 

I'm assuming we bring the seven years to a close at this point, am I right? And you walk, you walk out of the classroom. So what I'm going to do now is I am going to draw part one to a conclusion. I'm going to thank you for staying with us so far.

And I cannot wait to bring you back for part two of David's story.