Education, Teaching and Learning Support· Beginner level

The classroom is the visible part. The job also includes planning, marking, reports, parent conversations, and covering for absent colleagues.

Education roles include primary teacher, subject teacher in secondary school, early childhood educator, special education or resource teacher, educational assistant, tutor, technical and vocational instructor, school librarian, guidance or counselling staff, curriculum developer, and education officer at an NGO or ministry.

In Ghana, most teachers work in basic and senior high schools, many of them public, and posting can send you to a district you did not choose. Class sizes can be large.

In Canada, teachers are employed by school boards, and most new teachers start by covering other people's classes on a day-to-day basis before getting their own.

Pick three roles and find out who they spend the day with: five-year-olds, teenagers, adults, or mostly other staff.

This is the single most useful thing on this page.

In Ghana you can enter teacher training directly after senior high school. Colleges of Education run a four-year Bachelor of Education, affiliated to a university, and universities such as the University of Education, Winneba and the University of Cape Coast run education degrees. Entry normally requires WASSCE credits in the core subjects plus relevant electives, and the exact combination depends on what you intend to teach. After qualifying, teachers are licensed by the National Teaching Council, which includes a licensing examination, and the Ghana Education Service is the main employer.

In Canada you normally cannot study teaching first. You complete a bachelor's degree in ordinary subjects, then a Bachelor of Education, and only then are you certified by the provincial regulator, which in Ontario is the Ontario College of Teachers. That means your undergraduate subject choices decide what you will be allowed to teach later.

So in Ghana the decision point is now. In Canada the decision point is which degree subjects you take at university, and the teaching degree comes after.

You will learn more from ten minutes of teaching than from a month of thinking about teaching.

Pick one small thing you understand well: long division, how to tie a knot, one grammar rule, one football rule, how to read a bus timetable. Choose one learner, usually a younger sibling, cousin or classmate.

Plan it: what should they be able to do at the end, how you will explain it, one activity, and how you will check whether it worked. Ten minutes, no longer.

Teach it. Then write down what actually happened. Where did they get confused? What did you say that did not land? What would you cut?

Safeguarding matters even here. Get a guardian's permission, teach where an adult is present or nearby, do not arrange private sessions with a child on your own, and never move the conversation to a private chat.

Ask a mentor what happens when a lesson fails halfway through. Ask how they handle a class that will not settle. Ask how long marking takes on a normal week. Ask what they were not warned about.

Then ask route questions: which qualification they hold, whether it still exists in the same form, and what they would choose now.

Keep it safe. Do not name or describe any child you have taught or helped. Do not share your school, your address or your timetable. If you are 12 to 18, agree the plan with a guardian first.

Choose the age group you want to test, and build the month around it.

A realistic month: teach three short lessons to the same learner and keep a log, read the entry requirements for one real programme in full, find out what the licensing step is in your country, and speak to one working teacher.

Date all four and tell someone what you have committed to.