Eighteen years — all of them teaching.

Youth work, South Africa

I started with young people, not with a syllabus — character education, mentorship, small groups. My first lessons were planned on the back of a chair and delivered to teenagers who could have got up and left at any point. Nothing teaches you to hold a room faster.

Taught: how to plan for attention you have to earn. Led: the older teens who ran the groups after me.

Junior camp counsellor and teacher

Two residential camps every year, cohorts from six to eighteen. I planned the programme, taught the sessions, and led the young leaders who delivered them. A camp is a school with the volume turned up — you plan a week, watch half of it not survive contact with the children, and rebuild it by Wednesday.

Taught: mixed-age rooms, differentiation on the fly, behaviour without a bell to rescue you. Led: a team of young leaders I had to train before I could rely on them.

BA in Theology, Helderberg College

Three years of being taught, closely, how to explain a difficult idea to someone who didn't start where I started — which turns out to be most of the job.

Taught: the discipline behind a lesson — read it properly, then say it plainly.

District pastor

Two districts, at two separate times, three congregations each. Different towns, different histories, different problems — the second district taught me almost nothing the first one had, which is its own kind of education.

The leading part was boards, budgets, volunteers, and the conversations nobody wants to have. Nobody had to turn up; they did.

But the week's real work was teaching. An original lesson researched, written and delivered every week, to an audience who chose to be there — a public deadline that never moved, for seven years. Around it: counselling and life lessons, and mentoring juniors, teenagers and adults one at a time, on the things people actually get stuck on.

Taught: weekly planning under a real deadline, teaching adults and children in the same week, pastoral care as the precondition for anything else. Led: three congregations at a time, twice over.

Beijing — into the classroom full-time

English teaching first, then PYP homeroom, then Toddle Coordinator across the school. Now Grade 3 — and this is where I went and got the paper to match the practice.

Taught: primary, full-time, and at last as the whole job rather than the part I fitted around it. Led: a whole faculty through the platform that carries their planning, portfolios and reporting.