Samira Ahmed in the classroom for Teach First

I’d been paired with Olivia Hills, into her second year, teaching English language and literature at Lambeth Academy in south London.

Of all the things we discussed – lesson planning, the range of ability in the class, what they’d already studied – I forgot to ask one thing: what to wear?

This one didn’t hit me till the morning of my planned lesson. Memories of my own teachers in a mixture of 70s knitted tank tops or 80s Lady Di-style frilly blouses and dirndl skirts were not helpful. I decide to stick with what I wear to work.

I went for a smart trouser suit, but then couldn’t resist adding a jumper underneath because of the cold. Channelling a bit of 70s geography teacher, possibly, but definitely no corduroy elbow patches. Plus a pair of hoops (what one student in a previous class had helpfully labelled my “rude girl” earrings).

First assignment
I set the class an assignment to do a piece of literary criticism on TV news. I’d taken a DVD with two different versions of the same story that ran on two different news programmes the same day.

It was about a gang of Albanian sex traffickers who forced Eastern European women as young as 16 into prostitution. The students really engaged.

I ask them to think about the choices of pictures and interviews, and individual words and phrases in the script. How the police provide mugshots and their own video footage of crime scenes. Why to say the girls were forced to “entertain up to 20 clients a day” normalises the language of the sex industry, rather than “forced to have sex with” which is simpler and more responsible. What it adds when the reporter does a piece to camera outside the house used as a brothel. Why it engages the audience when he tells you the house is in a “respectable neighbourhood”.

We notice that the piece that tells you the most facts about the sentencing – naming all six defendants and their sentences – isn’t actually as good a piece of journalism as the report that names only one trafficker, but shows photos of him posing with “his” women, and tells you the human story about the Romanian girl who escaped out of a window to alert the police and uses clips of prosecutors and detectives warning other traffickers that the their assets here and abroad will be seized.

I’d worried that talking about prostitution might be uncomfortable or intimidating in a mixed class; but boys and girls seem to take the idea of analysing the news with enthusiasm and seriousness. There are a lot of bright faces and hands in the air.

People have occasionally fallen asleep in Channel 4 News meetings, so I have to confess I’m not actually worried when I noticed one boy apparently “resting his eyes”, but before I had to make a decision on whether to do anything about it, the teacher discreetly nudges his elbow and deals with it for me.

As part of a broader discussion we talk about how different outlets handle stories for their audience. I’m interested to hear what they have to say about the suicide of the talented and much loved children’s presenter Mark Speight a couple of years ago.

Partly because I was struck at the time at how quickly his presence was airbrushed by adults off children’s TV. Only Newsround actually gave children an outlet to mourn, and talk about how much he meant to them.

I tell them they should watch news and read the papers critically like they’ve been taught to analyse any other piece of English – and not assume it’s always “right”.

I realise I haven’t timed things quite right, even with time allowed for Q and A. There’s still some time to go, and I feel they are being very polite, but eyes of even the keenest are starting to glaze over, and I spot the odd stifled yawn.

One student asks what my best report is and Ms Hills comes to the rescue by suggesting we watch it. I wonder if a seven minute film on “corrective rape” in South Africa might be piling on the gloom a bit, but afterwards one of the academy’s other teachers tells me older students appreciate not being talked down to.

In the last half hour I can step to the back, exhausted and slightly dazed, and enjoy watching them write and read out elegies.

Looking back
Despite having airily told Teach First I’d done talks in classrooms before, the reality of running my own class for one hour – not just giving a talk about journalism – has impressed on me the amount of preparation and structuring teachers put into every one. And that’s without worrying about every single student being engaged and participating.

My whole experience was also somewhat tempered by memories of one of my own inspiring teachers, who died at the weekend.

Dr Bruce Mitchell was a fellow and tutor at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and a world authority on Anglo Saxon literature. It was more than 20 years since he’d taught me, but I often found myself remembering with pleasure, so many aspects of his tutorials.

You might think it was rather different teaching the kind of new students who appeared in his rooms every year from 1955 to 1987 for the compulsory module of Anglo Saxon set texts. But the reality was, as he knew, that he had to try and hold the interest of a load of teenagers being forced to grapple with a subject they thought (initially anyway) was irrelevant when they’d rather be having a wild time having got away from home for the first time. Over they years they included future children’s author Kevin Crossley-Holland, Python Terry Jones and (in my year) comedian Stewart Lee.

I remember he was always smiling, but I also remember feeling the iron guilt of letting him down if work was not completed or up to scratch.

My ability all these years later, to quote bits of “Aelfric’s Life of St Edmund” in Anglo-Saxon is more than a party piece. It’s a reminder of how great teaching can inspire and change lives.

And for one hour I got a just an inkling of the effort and energy that goes into that work.