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Lucy Kellaway 22 November 2018 1:00pm GMT It’s 6pm and a few dozen middle-aged professionals have gathered after work in an office building in Holborn. Until recently they had one thing in
common: they were all good at their jobs - in banking, law, journalism, the diplomatic service, IT, or garden design. Since September they have started new lives training to be secondary
teachers in deprived schools. Now, they are all out of their depth. One man who used to be an executive in an FTSE100 company groans: “I completely lost control of my year 8’s and my
mentor (who is 25) had to keep coming in to stop the riot - but as soon as they left it started up again.” The others, who have gathered for moral support, nod in sympathy. I listen with a
mixture of pride and horror - each of them has turned their careers inside out partly because of a idea I had a couple of years ago. Back then I was a columnist on the Financial Times, but
after three decades of doing the same thing I was fantasising about breaking free. I had a hunch that there were others like me who had had enough of what they were doing and longed to do
something more useful. I set out to find them. Now Teach, which I co-founded with the social entrepreneur Katie Waldegrave, is now exactly two years old and has been more successful than
I dared hope. In our first year we found 45 people - me included - who started training in challenging schools in London; this September a further 75 started. We are now recruiting for
2019 looking for well over 100 teachers in London, Hastings, East Anglia and the West Midlands. But every time I hear about at the privations suffered by our aging trainees I blench. When I
first discussed my idea I was accused of being a pied piper leading bankers to their certain death in the classroom. I laughed it off, but in truth I was entirely unprepared for the baptism
of fire that awaited us all in the classroom. And reading the recent headline “Bored Bankers Sought For Maths Teacher Shortage”, I got a weird sense of deja vu. This new initiative has been
dreamt up by Teach First (one of our training providers) and which since 2002 has been recruiting the brightest of the country’s graduates and putting them to work in the country’s toughest
schools. Its new scheme, Time to Teach, is aimed at getting younger professionals to retrain as maths and science teachers in rural areas where the shortage of teachers is most acute. It’s
a great idea, and I hope it works. However, as I’m sure Teach First knows, the fact that you are bored as a banker does not mean you are going to be any good as a teacher. One senior
consultant who started the training last year dropped out midway complaining that it wasn’t much fun. I made a mental note to make our recruitment material even clearer: Teaching can be
deeply rewarding. And exhausting and humiliating. But “fun” doesn’t begin to cover it. Another city high flier who had had a stellar career in private equity texted me after his first day.
“I hate this. Get me out. Now.” He didn’t last either. Yet what amazes is me is not how many have quit, but how few. Maybe the relatively advanced age of the Now Teach trainees (in my year
the range was 42 to 72) works in our favour: “Older people have grit and resilience which is carrying us through” said one new trainee, who used to work for JP Morgan. “We regularly talk to
each other. Without that we wouldn’t survive,” says Zeynep Holmes who started training as a maths teacher in September. In a previous life she was a managing director at the ratings agency
Standard and Poors. “I’ve done jobs I thought were difficult, but with hindsight my life at S & P was easy.” She describes the trauma of learning something new live in front of a hostile
audience of 32. “I was an executive and so I delegated, but you can’t switch off for even one second when you teach.” There was a particularly horrific moment when she forgot how to solve a
problem. “Thirty two lively teenagers in front of you, laughing at you. I tried everything, punishment and praise - but it was like giving CPR on a corpse.” For most professionals, used to
hard work, the hours of teaching aren’t a shock, but the emotional exhaustion is - as well as being too busy to even go to the loo. Other surprising things have got them down, including
the careless waste of paper, rigid hierarchies, pointless data and the endless spoon feeding. Yet for Zeynep, like for most of the Now Teach trainees there is an odd sort of pleasure in the
pain. “Sometimes it feels like masochism. But I’m glad I’m doing it. In my old life you got a high working on a transaction that made money. But being surrounded by young people with their
lives ahead of them, I often feel 17 myself. And when I child can do something you’ve explained to them - that’s gold.” The great thing is that those golden moments come along more often the
more teaching you do. I wince at how bad I was this time last year. Now, teaching business studies and economics at a school in Hackney, I can control my class and I’m loving it. Earlier
this week I introduced a class of 13 year olds to the slang of the stockmarket and every student in my class can now decipher sentences as arcane as “Nasdaq dives as investors dump tech
stock”. Never in three decades as a financial journalist have I felt quite so engaged or quite so useful.