Why I decided to become a Teacher

Why would any (sane) young person leave a career in which they are getting paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a year? Add to that some great clients (who became close friends), and a lifestyle of eating and drinking at the finest restaurants in London for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Indeed, when I chat to ex-colleagues and friends they think I’ve gone mad. Why have you traded your reasonable hours, interesting work and Virgin Active membership? For a 90% pay-cut, a pencil case and a sandwich? It feels like I’ve perhaps entered a mis-priced trade.

Yet, my truth is a bit deeper than that. 

Rewind about 16 years, and you have my schooling experience. I went to a non-selective state comprehensive school in Bradford. You would be right to interpret that as: ‘in all probability not very good’. Although called Thornton Grammar School, in practice it was about to lose this status. The school had over the years become a sports college. Even today it’s Ofsted status is “Requires Improvement”, one notch above “Inadequate”.  What that translates as is staff shortages [I didn’t have an A-level Physics teacher], kids from abusive families, teenage pregnancies, poor behaviour and poor attendance. The works.

Boy, 15, stabbed at Beckfoot Thornton School in Bradford.

However, I did have a few great teachers that batted for me. I mean, really batted for me, and everyone else. One teacher in particular kept me behind on Tuesdays and Thursdays as I started to feel demotivated and was often in detention. Mrs Comber went above and beyond the call of duty to raise my self-belief, guiding me in the direction of books to read, study techniques to try and most importantly – two ears to hear me out. She may or may not know the power a subtle intervention can have at such a tender age. I worked damn hard and got into a great university. Thus, I always felt a huge indebtedness to her, as well as the Maths and Economics teachers. They are also nothing shy of superheroes without capes. 

So, I guess I always held a sense of wanting to give back. It was always “some day”, perhaps after another brucie bonus, a nice big house or another holiday. Only after years of immersion in the spiritual scene did I begin to realise that it’s never enough. So I decided to skip a decade of accumulation, for a decade of service. 

Now whilst that’s all very poetic, I had to work out if I actually wanted to work with children. I figured that given the attitude of some of the ‘adults’ in my industry, that it couldn’t be that different (“oh with this bonus I can barely afford the basement cinema/villa in the Maldives” etc). I digress. I partnered with Future Frontiers and assembled a team of 19 amazing colleagues. We delivered weekly career coaching to 30 kids from a local under-privileged school. Over the entire school term, we would show these kids how the subjects they learnt at school applied in a real-life business. We explored the things that they found interesting, and how they could turn that into a career. I mentored two 13 year old boys, Akim and Nico, and I listened as they told me all about investing in crypto, their favourite YouTubers and how pointless Maths is. I laughed along but had to switch gears at some point to stress that there were no shortcuts to long term success. I demonstrated how I use Maths every day in my job (building systematic strategies and trading derivatives), and how the YouTube algorithms rely on complex math to serve you the right video at the right time. I drew diagrams of my simplified understanding of the Bitcoin white-paper and the economics behind it, as well as my own experience of making and losing money. We also discussed how you would calculate the growth rate of your YouTube subscriber base, and what different graphs of this would look like. They had never thought of it like this because classroom’s today are ripe with teaching you things like factorising quadratics, devoid of real context. It was these moments of impromptu creativity that I thought, heck, I LOVE THIS. 

So that’s the second reason – working with Year 9’s and watching them smile, learn and grow. 

But I’m a cautious cat, and I often have my analytical hat on, so I had to be triple sure. Thankfully the UK Government make it super easy to arrange school experience for potential teachers. I arranged to spend some time at 3 very different schools (An inner-city London comprehensive through to a posh grammar school). I can’t describe how nervous I was stepping back into a school environment after all these years. As I waited at the reception, my heartbeat was racing and my eyes scanned the information-packed walls. I had so many flashbacks to my own experience and then…“Hi, Mr Mistry, I’m Matt, come this way”. No handshake. This would be the person that would show me around and give me my timetable. There were none of the pleasantries I had become accustomed to from meetings in the city. E.g. discussing the new art in the lobby, or how the view from the 37th floor is so much better than the 25th, blah blah blah. Instead, it was a beeline to the Maths department, past hundreds of teenagers. Each of whom I felt has a killer instinct for scoping out if somebody is a supply teacher, parent, Ofsted or a lost banker looking for the meaning of life.

Maybe applying and pursuing this route is a mistake? Would I be better off diving into a startup idea I have? I could raise some money and give myself 18 months of runway. Even though I’m not that passionate about the underlying problem, I could become rich! That night I came home exhausted. I took off my tie, opened a beer and went rummaging through a stack of papers to find solace in the Lean Startup book. As I did, I found this card I had picked up the week before at an event. I took out my pen from the pencil case.