Hi my name is Abed Ahmed and I am a PGCE Secondary Mathematics with Qualified Teacher Status graduate.
I teach secondary school maths at Holte School in Birmingham, an achievement made all the more impressive by the fact that I have had a stammer since the age of four.
Despite the fact that teaching requires a lot of speaking, I've overcome my difficulties and also set up my own stammer support sessions in the school, to help young people in the same position.
The teaching I received at Birmingham City University was extremely helpful. The academics taught us a lot about improving our techniques and managing stress, and the message was always that teaching itself was the most important thing and not to get side-lined by anything else. For me, that meant that I stopped worrying too much about my stammer – I knew that, if I focused on the teaching, everything else would be fine.
Use what I learned at University a lot, as the academics gave us lots of resources and techniques that we could take with us into the classroom. Also, there’s things like how to make the most of our time – we learned that there’s so much to do as a teacher, we can’t always reinvent the wheel; sometimes it’s best to stick with what we’ve got and make small changes.
Maths is a difficult subject for some people and the recent curriculum changes have made it more so. What I always try to do is make maths as relevant as possible and I try to bring in examples of how we use maths in real life, which helps more people to understand what maths is all about and why we need it.
Now that I am a teacher, I want to one day become a head teacher. I want to make a massive difference in the world of teaching and I want teaching to be a desirable career again. I hope I can make this happen.
