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Teacher Laura Barton satirizes her job on Instagram as @fraubartonne
The start of working life is exciting, exhausting - and often completely different than planned. In the series "My first year on the job", young professionals tell how they experienced this time. This time: Laura Barton, 26, elementary school teacher from Cologne.
“I must have been about ten years old when my younger sister got terribly upset with a teacher over lunch.
He had summoned her to the school administration because of a belch - and had let a classmate get away with it without any trouble, even though he had made a stupid Hitler remark.
This injustice upset me too.
I thought to myself: I'll do it better one day!
And from then on wrote 'teacher' as a career aspiration in the friendship books.
After graduating from high school, I first studied mathematics to become a grammar school teacher, and I held my first trial lesson in front of a senior class.
It somehow felt wrong teaching people my age.
Then I failed two exams - and decided to switch to primary school teaching.
Today I am very happy about that.
I graduated from university in July 2020, in the middle of the corona pandemic.
Actually, I wanted to travel to France on the Atlantic coast afterwards.
Instead, I took a job as a substitute teacher at a primary school in Cologne and stayed there for my clerkship, which I finished this school year.
I am now a civil servant, and I will continue to work at the elementary school in the future, teaching German, math and general studies.
My salary increases with the years of work, I am currently in salary group A12 and earn 3800 euros gross per month.
Shaky beginning
Despite the distance teaching, it was not difficult for me to start my career. On the contrary: the sudden switch to digital teaching was an advantage for me as a young teacher.
When 150 new iPads arrived at the school and the staff didn't know how to use them, I was able to help.
My colleagues even appointed me media officer.
I held my first lesson - still in attendance - in front of a fourth grader.
I was shaking and a student asked me if I was okay.
'Yeah, yeah, I'm just super nervous,' I said.
We talked for the whole hour, introducing ourselves and sharing our favorite hobbies.
I think it's important to meet the students at eye level and not have them solve arithmetic problems right away.
At the moment we are waiting every day for refugee children from Ukraine to come to us.
But we shouldn't just look at these children.
I also teach war refugees from Syria who ask me why they weren't welcomed like that a few years ago, or who have to leave the classroom because the images from Ukraine evoke their memories again.
Children with Russian roots also come up to me with questions: ›Why do adults say that the Russians are to blame for the war?‹ Or: ›Who starts a war?‹.
So I've covered the subject in class many times and I'm always amazed at how much smarter children are than grown-ups.
A girl recently explained: 'It doesn't really matter where you come from.
That's why you shouldn't argue.'
The individual fates of some children often weigh on me.
When they tell me what's going on at home in the family, sometimes all I want to do after work is sit in my car and cry.
But then I say to myself: I'll do my best every day, get the child out of its environment for at least five hours and make sure that it has a good time in which it learns a lot of useful things.
I can't do more for the moment.
To deal with difficult situations, the exchange with my colleagues helps me.
And my Instagram account also distracts me.
As @fraubartonne, I satirize the everyday situations of a teacher there, meanwhile I have more than 40,000 followers.
When the ideas bear fruit
I experienced the best moment of my career so far before my second state examination.
A student lent me his most valuable Pokémon card for good luck.
That means something.
And she actually brought me luck.
As a teacher, I don't have big career goals.
Except never forgetting why I'm doing this job.
I want to support children to learn independently, to make them strong for their future, to get them to be innovative.
I can already see how my ideas are bearing fruit.
A year ago, I discussed a topic with my elementary school students that was actually intended for ninth or tenth graders: the 17 sustainability goals of the UN.
Recently, a student spoke to me about it again, it was about discarded canteen food and he said something like: 'But we don't want any more hunger in the world'.
To see that the goals have stuck in their minds and that the students are carrying them further into the world, that's great.«
Have you just started your career yourself and would like to tell us about it? Then write to us at SPIEGEL-Start@spiegel.de.