Learning never ends - Writing Wednesday
Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,
In 2020, on the day that my class left year 11 due to Covid-19, my biology teacher, Miss McCullagh, gave us all a green card with a thoughtful message from her written on it to wish us all the best of luck for our futures. It is a card that I still treasure to this day, 2 years later, not only because it reminds me of what a great teacher she was and what a fantastic school it was that I went to, despite its abrupt ending, but also because it has a really profound message written on it that I've perhaps grown to understand more as the years have gone by. "Learning never ends" is what my biology teacher wrote and this is a quote that couldn't be more true in life. After I'd finished my GCSEs I wasn't necessarily under the impression that I would stop learning because I knew I was going into sixth form, a place where I would be able to advance in my education. But when I got into sixth form, I began to realise that there was still so much that I didn't know about the subjects I was studying and had studied before, and that I was very ignorant about just how much I didn't know. Now I've left sixth form and I'm getting a small taste of the working world, I'm coming to that realisation again. I was so excited to leave sixth form partly because I thought to myself, thank God I'll never have to be in a classroom again! But after starting at Scudamore's Punting Company, I have realised that life is like a classroom, just without the tables, chairs, and teachers of course! You still make a lot of mistakes but that is how you learn your most valuable lessons. Recently I have been doing river tours to real customers, ever since I was able to pass my river tour guide exam a couple of weeks ago. However, just because I passed the exam, it didn't mean I was the best river tour guide out there! In the beginning, I was struggling to project my voice on the tour, to the point where I asked this couple a good few times, who were seated at the back of the boat, where they were visiting from that day, and I was met with the most awkward of silences anyone had ever seen on each occasion. On my first real life touting experience, I also managed to scare away some customers after I bluntly delivered the price of the tour to them and they responded with "oh no, that's way too expensive, we're not coming here." I am also forever bumping into novice punters who have decided to hire their own boats for the day and when the wind picks up, I am bumping into them, whilst travelling backwards counterproductively at the same time! It turns out, I am forever making mistakes but I am also forever learning new lessons. I'm slowly learning how to project my voice more, I'm learning how to be softer and more welcoming to new customers, and hopefully I am gaining some strength in my arms and getting stronger in navigating my punting as a result. Maybe others can't see the improvements but I can see that some things are beginning to take shape. For me, working life will always be better than sitting at a desk and listening to teachers all day but just because you leave secondary school, or sixth form, or your previous job, doesn't mean you stop learning new things. There is always something out there you have not yet discovered. So be prepared to take risks and to fail, and most importantly always be willing to learn new things.
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