Aaron McDaid

On Aug 29th August 2008 I decided to become a teacher. Now, less than two weeks later, I'm settled into a PGCE course at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol, England. It's a pretty big and sudden decision but I feel like it's the right thing and everything so far has gone well. Like of lot of office drones, I had been considering teaching quite often over the years.

I like the other trainee teachers on the course - there is a good variety of ages. There are quite a few people, like me, who are a bit older and have experience of things other than teaching. I'm 28 and was a software developer until last Friday.

Why Bristol? I could tell you that it has fantastic Ofsted reports for its teacher training (it does, apparently the best of the ex-Polys), but it's more likely that I applied to Bristol because the city is recommended by my mate Brendan. People seem to talk of Bristol in the same way Irish people talk of Galway - not too big of a city and fun and interesting.

So many things have worked out well so far. For example, my work contract finished just a few days ago meaning I didn't have to give any notice, my accommodation in Dublin was up at the end of September, I went to just one interview for a PGCE and got it, and so on. I've been fairly lucky that once I made the decision to apply, I could just go for it without have to untangle myself from too many contracts.

I was in Dublin for two years. There are people I'll miss in Dublin, but a year is a short time and I'll be hanging around Ireland during my long holidays so I'll track them down. There's a good chance I'll be teaching in Ireland next year anyway - in particular I'm considering Belfast as I lived there for many years. And Donegal is obviously an option as I grew up there in a town called Letterkenny.

I'll try to blog more often about the course and about life in Bristol generally. Also, I should do a proper blog on why I'm leaving software development as a career. To cut a long story short, I will likely get heavily involved in Open source software (i.e. volunteer my time for free for GNU/Linux based software) as it is the only way to work with more competent people in a genuinely collaborative way on projects that I want to work on.

The PGCE I'm doing will train me to be a secondary school Maths teacher, and that should qualify me to teach anywhere in Ireland, not just in England and Wales. Not too sure about Scotland. I have a maths degree and always loved maths, I really should have done this before. There's about 20 of us, and when you include all the other subjects there are about 200 of us doing secondary school PGCEs.